This transcript was generated from the episode’s YouTube captions and lightly edited for readability: filler words and the mid-show announcements have been removed. It may still contain transcription errors.

When are discussions about abortion? Not about abortion happens a lot. We’re going to talk about it on this edition of The Case for Life podcast. Thank you for joining us today. If you haven’t already liked us or shared our content on social media, please consider doing so. We would appreciate the assist. I don’t know what it is, but since the November 5th election there has been a rehash of a sound bite that was quite popular in the 1980s. In the early 1980s in college, I remember more than once hearing a professor say in response to me making a truth claim: oh well, you’re just an absolutist.

You’re an absolutist who thinks you’ve got a corner on everything. And the term absolutist was not being said kindly, it was a pejorative phrase used to dismiss your argument instead of refuting an argument. What would happen is you’d get labeled as an absolutist and then your case could just be ignored. And this is sort of coming back again and I’ve noticed it with people trying to defend abortion or else trying to question whether Christians ought to be making quote absolute truth claims.

So I want to look at that today and kind of just unpack that informally with you. So I got a quote here, pardon me, while I go to my reading spectacles. I got a quote here from a, an author, and I’m just going to read it to you. He writes: a mature Christian believes in absolute truth, all the while realizing they are absolutely too broken to fully understand it on one’s own. A fundamentalist believes there’s absolute truth and that I’m the one who fully comprehends it.

End quote. Okay, there’s a lot to unpack there, but let’s start with a couple of things. Calling an argument fundamentalist or absolutist is not a reputation. It is, as we have said many times on this podcast, a dismissal. Arguments are valid or invalid, sound or unsound. Calling an argument a name like absolutist or fundamentalist or inflexible, intolerant, narrow-minded, does not defeat the argument. It’s an attempt to avoid the hard work of actually refuting the argument. So there’s that to consider. But beyond that, let’s look at this for moment.

What do we mean by fundamentalists? Now here, I pardon me for being a little bit base here, but the best definition of fundamentalist I ever heard comes from theologian philosopher Alvin PLA, and here’s what pla said. He said: in the secular culture today primarily the secular left and I guess we could say the religious left a fundamentalist is the first some to the right of you. In other words, it’s someone that you just despise because they claim to be right and they’re not even worthy of a reputation.

Let’s just dismiss them with a name notice the southern name, which is meant to convey unlearned someone that is not very with it intellectually. And I think today that’s what’s being done with calling people fundamentalist or absolutist. It’s a way to say, hey, they’re really not intellectually nuanced, they haven’t thought deeply, they’re just kind of trailer trash out there, and that is not a reputation of a pro-life argument, a conservative, theological argument or any other argument that’s out there. You got to do the hard work of actually refuting it.

But there’s more here. I think we can look at the. The argument here is the idea that, hey, only a fundamentalist claims to know everything and make universal truth claims. Someone that’s more nuanced realizes they are too broken to understand truth fully and therefore they’ll be more humble in their approach. But I think you can see right away this is self-refuting. If we are all too broken to see truth and see reality as it really is, then how did this author Escape, how did he escape the Trap of being, you know, caught behind his own perceptions of life to get out and tell the rest of us how the world really is.

And I think you would be within your rights to ask him: is that claim you just made absolutely true or is that just your personal view, from your own warped perspective as a broken person? This is not real humility. There’s this idea out there that humility means I never claim to be right with certainty. That’s not humility. Humility is to say: hey look, I think I have good reasons for believing the way that I do. I’ll humbly submit my reasons for you to look at and evaluate and if I’m wrong, I’ll change my view.

That’s humility. It is not humility to say nobody has the truth. How dare you claim to have it? Because when you make that claim that nobody has the truth, first of all, how do you know that? Have you surveyed everybody? How do you know that nobody has the truth? Secondly, you’re making a statement you believe is true and you know if you’re a critic hearing this, you’d be within your rights to say: well, wait a minute, is that true or just your personal opinion?

So there’s a real element here of self-refutation. I think Tim Keller put it real well in the reason for God when he wrote that what a lot of people love to do is say no one can know objective truth because we’re all trapped behind our own sense, perceptions, our own perspectives, and if we claim that we know the truth, we’re being arrogant. And of course, the question is: how did the observer in that case get outside of his own trapping to tell us what the world is really like?

He just denied truth could be known and yet he’s making a claim, a truth claim that he believes that he knows. So I think you can see the problem with, self-refutation there. But I want to go a little further and put this out there: most pro-life Christians are not arguing that everything comes under the label of absolute truth. I think there are some things that are absolutely wrong: rape and murder would be one, torturing toddlers for fun, spousal abuse I could name a few things, but not everything is absolutely true or a moral principle that we would call absolutely wrong.

Some things are more contingently so, and I think a more accurate way to look at this is to make a distinction between objective truths and those that are more contingent, based on circumstances. For example, is it an objective truth that we ought not lie? Yes, it is. But if it’s an absolute truth that we shouldn’t lie, that means that rule can never be set aside for a greater moral principle that might come into play. To give you an example, suppose you lived in 1940 and there’s a knock at your door and it’s the gestapo and they want to know: are you hiding Jews in your house?

Now, suppose you are. Do you owe the Nazis the truth? Well, there’s an objective principle: we ought to be truthful. But notice, right now we have a collision. If you tell the truth, innocent Jews will die. So what is the greater moral principle when two objective truths Collide? Well, the answer is: in this case, the greater moral principle would be not to convey the truth to the Nazis and instead protect the Jews, because it is a greater moral principle to protect innocent human life than it is to tell truth to people who are going to use it to commit evil.

So in that case, we don’t say there are no moral truths, we say that we’re going to suspend or degrade, if you will, the objective truth that we ought to be honest in favor of a greater moral principle that is in play at that exact moment, given the context we are in, evil men wanting to use the truth to kill innocent human people. We would then suspend, as it were, the obligation to be honest in favor of a greater moral principle, that is, that we ought to protect innocent human life against people who want to take it. That’s not relativism, that is simply give giving greater moral R weight to a greater moral principle in that particular circumstance.

Now the thing is this: if all moral truths are absolute, you can’t do what I just said, because you would have to say: telling the truth is a moral absolute. We must always do it. We can never set it aside for any reason, because it’s an absolute principle. But if you argue that truth is objective, meaning it’s real and knowable, it allows enough room for those situations and they’re rare. You’ll probably never face it in your life. But those rare circumstances where you might have to set aside one objective principle in favor of one that bears more moral weight at the moment, and by calling someone an absolutist you don’t allow for that Nuance at all you’re just dismissing them and not really dealing with their argument.

Now I think there’s another problem here. We often hear from these same folks that if you don’t have bombproof certainty, if you don’t have absolute certainty that your position is right. You’re really out of bounds claiming to be right. So if a pro-lifer, for example, argues The Unborn are human, and he presents a good argument from the science of embryology, he also presents a good moral argument that there’s no essential difference between you, the embryo, and you, the adult that would justify killing you, at that earlier stage.

It’s not uncommon now to hear people say, Well, you aren’t absolutely sure the exact moment when life begins. Therefore, you’re not being very humble in your claim, you’re being an absolutist and you’re ignoring the perspectives of others who have a different view. All right, let’s get some rules straight here. I don’t have to have absolute certainty to believe that I have knowledge on something. For example, I cannot prove beyond all doubt that my wife is not in Las Vegas with Michael Jackson right now and that Elvis is doing the music for their marriage ceremony.

You say, well, that’s ridiculous. Of course you have absolute truth. No, I don’t. Is she in the room with me right now? No, she’s not. Could she be in Vegas? Is it least possible she could be? Yes, I could be misinformed about her whereabouts. I could be misled, we could argue, but is it reasonable for me to believe that the answer is no, because I have strong plausible reasons to believe she is right here in our hometown and she is helping my son get off to work today, and that is what she is doing.

She is not in Las Vegas. There are no plausible reasons to believe she is now. I don’t have bomb Pro certainty, but I do have justified true belief. It is more reasonable to believe she is here than she is in Vegas and therefore I can with confidence state that my view is true that she is not in Las Vegas. Often times this is done with Christianity as well. People will say: well, you don’t have bombproof certainty that Christianity is true. I don’t need to have bombproof certainty.

I just need to be convinced that the reasons for Christianity are stronger than the reasons against it. In other words, if I have greater confidence that God did raise Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, then I am justified believing that if my reasons for believing that are stronger than those against him being raised from the dead. And the same is true here on the pro-life issue. You can’t dismiss pro-lifers by saying you don’t have absolute certainty of your view. No, you got to do better than that you got to show why the abortion Choice arguments are stronger than the pro-life arguments.

And outside of that, you have not refuted the pro-life argument, you have simply. You have simply tried to dodge the hard work of refuting the pro-life argument and we shouldn’t fall for it now. Of course, I would also take issue with this author. The mere fact that people disagree does not mean nobody is right. As we’ve said before, the absence of consensus does not mean an absence of truth. It does not mean nobody has any right knowledge on anything. I mean people once disagreed on whether the earth was flat round.

We didn’t come to the conclusion that there were no right answers. But I think there’s an even more nuanced aspect of this that I want to get into a little bit right now. A lot of people think that we don’t need to question at all the Sciences or the mathematics of the world. We don’t need to question any of those principles because they are true and absolute. But we do need to question morals, and the only reason they make that distinction between science that they say we can know and morals and religion, which they say we can’t, is because there is a hidden and undefended premise in their claim, and here it is, moral and religious truths do not count as real knowledge.

Now, that’s a hidden premise that is almost never, put forward clearly and never defended. It’s just assumed, and we are right to call it out. I mean, if you think about it, why should we believe that torturing toddlers for fun is a mere preference? I mean, it makes no sense at all. We are within our rights to call somebody out who would even question that, who would even say, oh, it’s okay to torture toddlers for fun. And if they questioned our prohibition of that, we would be within our right minds to say: you’re just nuts.

Anybody with a functioning conscience can see that you don’t torture toddlers for fun, you don’t practice spousal abuse and rape and murder are wrong, and anybody who doubts that, just because it’s a moral principle, they’ve got a problem. Not you, but people like to assume this hidden premise that somehow moral and religious truth claims aren’t really knowable. They tend to be just mere preferences. This is something Francis Schaefer, the great Christian apologist, is pointed out in numerous books, including: how should we then live?

And whatever happened to the human race? The primary epistemology today, meaning the primary way that people think we know things, is a split house. Think of a house with an upper and lower story. Science, empirical things go in the low, lower story. We can know them, we can walk right in the front door of the house and know them immediately. But when it comes to ethics, when it comes to religion, we have to take a leap of faith to the upper story, meaning we have to believe, in spite of evidence, that these things are true and they’re not real items of knowledge up there.

They’re mere preferences, and who are you to impose your views on someone else who has different preferences? The only way these arguments work is, as Schaefer points out, you. You have this bifurcated view of truth. Science and, empirical stuff counts as real knowledge, but not ethics and religion. You got to take a leap of faith to claim to know things there, and I want to ask: why should we believe that? And the answer is: we shouldn’t. Another variation of this goes like this: you really shouldn’t claim to know the pro-life position is true, because how has that worked out for you?

Since roie Wade I mean since roie Wade the claim goes: abortion rates have gone up in States. How’s that working out for you? It doesn’t seem the results of your argument have unpacked in your favor, have they? And therefore, why do you keep working to make abortion illegal? Why do you keep working to pass laws protecting The Unborn when, in fact, none of this has worked in your favor since Ro v Wade was reversed? That’s the claim. But let’s look at this for a moment.

How does it follow that there are no moral truths simply because the results of recognizing those moral truths might have consequences we find negative in the short term, or even the long term, for that matter? Would anybody we know today argue that slavery was actually a good thing for some blacks? Because, after all, Freedom hasn’t worked out very well for an awful lot of blacks. Today there’s many inner city poor that are living on the street. They’re addicted to drugs. They’re going to die early.

At least when they were slaves, they had a roof over their head, they had food to eat. Yeah, they worked long hours, but at least their living conditions in some cases were better than they are now as free men and women. Anybody who argued that way today would be roundly hit with mob. Action on social media people would be all over them. The Twitter mob would be after them. The social media mobs would be after them saying: you are a racist for even thinking that, and the argument, rightly so, would be: blacks deserved freedom on principle, regardless of the consequences of freeing them.

And so when people argue that laws against abortion actually have not helped The Unborn, how does that prove that in principle a, it’s wrong to intentionally kill The unborn, or, B, they don’t deserve a right to life that is legally protected? So people like to pick and choose when they employ principal and actually when they don’t. I remember, for example, growing up this is not the case now, but growing up there was this policy in education known as busing, and here’s what that meant.

It meant that we would take students from the inner city and we would bust them into white, Suburban, affluent school districts and these students would go to school there. And we would take white students from ALU suburbs and bust them downtown to inner City schools, often that were full of gang violence and the educational quality was poor, and these white students were forced to be busted into these inter city schools, and as a parent, you were not allowed to oppose that. You would be arrested if you held your kid back from going on these buses.

The only choice you had was to pay a lot of money to put them in private schools, that that was the only option you had available in the 1970s. Well, we could make a very good argument that that whole program was a colossal failure, and it was. It didn’t help the inner city kids and it didn’t help the Suburban kids. It just subjected both groups to circumstances and things that didn’t help them learn better. And yet it was considered morally wrong to even question the POS, the possibility that busing was not a good thing.

In other words, if you even questioned it on principle, you were called a racist, a segregationist, and the argument was that this was a good thing to do on principle and that we were morally obligated to do it, whether it worked or not. Well, why can’t a pro-lifer argue that we are morally obligated to recognize the natural rights of The Unborn, including the right to life, and that that right should be protected in law regardless of consequences? And of course, on the left, the immediate thing is ha haa.

That hasn’t worked for you. Look at the abortion rates since row was reversed. Now we can question empirically whether their claim about the rates going up or down is true. Nationally? I would argue it’s not. It’s only true in states that have made abortion tourism a priority, blue states that are trying to convince people to come their way to get abortions. It’s not true nationally. But set that aside for a moment. The key principle here is this: that people are quite willing, it seems, to recognize moral principles that ought to be acknowledged as objective and true when it fits their particular issue.

So if we’re talking, for example, about welfare, it’s considered in many cases uncharitable, unchristian, to even question whether welfare has helped the poor, and when the empirical data comes out, show it hasn’t, right away these people on the left are going to scream: oh, you just hate the poor. You don’t act like Jesus. Jesus would have welcomed all people and he would have given the shirt off his back for the poor. Why aren’t you willing to use your tax dollars to do that?

So they invoke a moral principle even in the face of empirical data that suggests that what they’re arguing for hasn’t worked. And yet, when it comes to abortion, what they want to do is dismiss the pro-life argu? Ment based on alleged results that they say have actually made the abortion issue worse for The Unborn. This isn’t going to work. Look, things are objectively true when they correspond to reality. Do we have good reason to believe The Unborn are human from conception?

Yes, we do. Do we have good reasons to believe that there is no essential difference between you, the embryo, and you, the adult that justifies killing you back then? Yes, we do. And, by the way, on both points there are leading philosophical advocates and academics who will concede both of those points I just mentioned. They’ll concede The Unborn are human and they will concede that you and I are identical to the embryos. We once were sure they’re going to argue for abortion other ways, but they will concede those points.

In other words, those two points are not Mere leaps of faith that arrogant absolutists are taking. No, they are grounded, rational thoughts that we can make a case for, and it’s up to our opponents to refute that case, not dismiss it with a claim that we’re just an absolutist or somehow we’re intolerant and we’re not open-minded. All right, thanks for joining us today. Remember, keep the main thing, the main thing. The three most important words in any discussion you have on abortion are syllogism.

What is that syllogism? Premise one: it’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings. Premise two: abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being. Therefore, conclusion: abortion is wrong. Your opponents have to defeat that syllogism by showing it’s either invalid or unsound. Outside of that, your argument stands. Don’t lose confidence in your case just because someone wants to, wants to dismiss you with a name or a label. Thank thanks for joining us today. I look forward to having you on the next episode.