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.

How do you handle it when someone is more in street fighting mode than rational thinking mode? We’ll talk about that today. On The Case for Life podcast. Recently we got a comment on our site from a commenter named Paul that thought he had a knockdown response to one of our recent episodes where he had totally destroyed the pro-life argument. And I’m just going to read you what he said. But before I do, I want to remind you of something we say again and again and again on this show and we’re going to keep saying it because it’s the most important thing we can remind you of and that is this: the three most important words in pro-life apologetics are syllogism.

In other words, you must State your formal pro-life argument to keep people on track so they don’t change the subject on you. So let’s recall what our pro-life argument is. Premise one: it’s wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. Premise two: abortion intentionally kills an innocent human being. Conclusion therefore: abortion is wrong. Now I’m going to read you here what Paul wrote and, Paul, if you’re listening, I invite you to com comment and tell me where you think I’m wrong here.

I’m going to read you what Paul wrote and then what I’m going to do is ask you, as listeners, to ask yourself this question: does anything Paul says here refute that syllogism we just mentioned by either showing the argument is invalid, meaning the conclusion does not follow logically from the premises, or that one or more of the premises is false? If not, the argument stands. So let’s just read what Paul writes. To allegedly shut the door on the pro-life case, he says this: crucial questions that magga politicians, anti-reproductive rtists and radical social media commentators absolutely refuse are or are unable to directly publicly answer.

And the question he puts in all caps, is: who decides? With bold print. Okay, here let’s just read what he says. If you can’t, perhaps you shouldn’t be telling others how they must lead their own lives in matters of personal reproductive Choice. Millions of you believe an embryo, whether IVF or not, measuring one 100th of an inch in length in week two is a baby. Millions of you also consider those who would in any way destroy that embryo, whether by accident or lack of feasibility, is a murderer.

Millions of you believe that anyone using ru486, that’s a, an abortion drug should be charged with murder or at least prison time. Millions of you do not believe it is a baby yet, but you have varying definitions of when an embryo or fetus is a human baby. Some believe it is conception, some at one week, some at 6 weeks, some at 5 months. The end of the timeline. When we’re all said and done, 99% of all abortions are happening well before 5 months.

He goes on to say, as an analogy, some vegans are directed by their own sincere religious beliefs of Thou shalt not murder. It doesn’t just say thou shalt not murder humans. Should their belief set policy over your personal dietary choices? He’s not done yet, folks, and some of you say, your religion says a fetus is not a child until they breathe their first breath outside the womb. Such a wide array of beliefs exist as to when you are a family member or a human being.

In that case, who gets to decide under the law if you are a murderer or not? He goes on. Is it your God? Is it another person’s religious interpretation of the Quran or the Bible? Is it a majority vote by Congress or by others in the country? Is it the Supreme Court who decides? Is it the president who decides? Is it my congressman who decides, who knows nothing about me? Is it a majority of citizens in my state, whether red or blue, I suppose.

Is it my husband because my Bible says I must defer to him? Or do I decide, in consultation with my doctor and family, myself as a reproductive right myself? This is where I’m going to have to interpret what. What is being said here myself as reproductive Rights is up to me, and in a free country, the government has no right controlling whether I must or must not have children. And then he gives an extra credit question: in the case of rape, does either the rapist or the government have a say?

So as what you do with your reproductive Rights, if you truly believe God is in charge. If you have a miscarriage, please explain how God has not just performed an abortion. Please use logic in your response. Okay, Paul, I’m up for the game. I’ll take the bait. Let’s go through what you wrote and see if we can’t apply the logic test you are insisting we all follow. Let’s start with what you begin with. You write that millions of you believe an embryo, whether IVF or not, measuring one 100th of an inch in length, is a human being.

Okay, stop right there. Notice the hidden and undefended premise in Paul’s assertion here. He nowhere presents an argument that body size determines one’s humanity or one’s value. He simply asserts that, or assumes it really. Where does he present a formal argument that how large you are determines whether or not you have a right to life? I mean, by that standard, two-year-olds are smaller than 20-year-olds. Do two-year-olds have less of a right to life? He nowhere presents an argument, he just asserts a hidden premise and thinks he can pull it over on us.

Well, Paul, I’m not buying. I need to see your argument for why body size determines value. He goes on to say that, millions of you believe that anyone who would destroy that small embryo is a murderer. Okay, let’s stop for a moment. Let’s go back to our syllogism. It’s wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. Abortion does that? Therefore it’s wrong. Could that argument still be a good one, meaning sound and valid, even if prol lifers take no position on whether the person who kills that embryo is a murderer or not?

And the answer is yes, that argument can be sound because it stands on its merits, not the behavior of the people making the argument. So again, Paul is insisting on logic, but the fallacies are just. They just keep on coming through this. Let’s keep going, he. He then says: some of you believe that it’s a human life at conception, some at week six, some at week five, some at the end of the timeline. And you know, in other words, what he’s basically saying here is: there’s such a wide variety of opinion, why should your particular view be the one that is Law?

And the answer is simply this: the absence of consensus does not mean an absence of truth. The fact that people disagree has no bearing on what’s reality. You have to make an argument for it. I could respond by saying: his own claim here is self-re refuting, because people disagree with his view that abortion should be legal until birth and that the decision should be solely that of the mother. A lot of people disagree with that. So if a lack of consensus means you can’t put your position into law, his own position can’t be put into law because lots of Americans disagree with it, including me.

So his argument here is literally self-refuting. And for a guy who is insisting on logic, there seems to be an obvious lack of it here. Let’s go on. He says: some of you say your religious view is that the fetus is not a child until they breathe. Others of you believe it’s at conception. But who gets to? Who gets to decide? Should it be your religious view or should it be someone else? Okay, let’s stop right here. Here’s another common fallacy.

When prol lifers argue that it’s wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being, that abortion does that, therefore it’s wrong. You cannot dismiss that argument by calling it a name. It doesn’t work to say, well, that’s just your religious view. No arguments are sound or unsound, valid or invalid. Calling the argument religious is, as Francis beckworth points out, a category error, like saying how tall is the number three. It doesn’t work. You have to do the work of refuting the argument.

And, by the way, pro-lifers support that argument was science and philosophy. They support it from science by arguing from embryology, the very obvious truth in every medical textbook in the world, that each of us began at the point of fertilization. That from the very beginning, from the one cell stage, you were a distinct, living and whole human being. You were not part of another human being, you were already a member of the human family. You just had yet to grow and mature.

Then we argue philosophically that there’s no essential difference between you at that small one cell stage and you, the adult. That justifies killing you at that earlier stage of development. Differences of size, level of development, environment and degree of dependency are not good reasons for saying we could kill you then but not now. Now, maybe prol lifers are wrong about the way they argue. Maybe their formal argument is either invalid or unsound, or maybe the way they support it is inadequate.

Okay, fine, if we had a situation where Paul said, okay, I’m going to show you where the support for your formal argument fails, then we would interact with that. But he doesn’t even try. I mean, he, quite frankly, he’s lazy. He doesn’t even try. He just says: oh, that’s your religious view. Well, that’s not going to work. You got to do the hard work of refuting our argument, not merely dismissing it with a label. That’s not logic, Paul, that’s actually laziness.

He goes on to say: well, who is going to decide then? Your God? Another person’s religious interpretation of the Quran? Your Congressman? The Supreme Court? A majority vote by the state? Your husband, your Bible? Or should it be left to you, the individual, in consultation with your doctor and family, to make your own decisions? Okay, let’s stop here for a moment I will grant. Okay, listen up. I hope you’re listening, Paul. I agree with you completely. Pro-lifers like me and every other pro-lifer on the planet ought to butt out of this issue and leave the decision solely to the mother.

I’ll agree with that. I’ll also agree that our tax money should be spent funding abortions for every woman in the world. I’ll further agree that no pro-lifer should seek to legislate his position in law. I agree with you completely. If, what if? The unborn are not human. But I need you to argue for that. It’s not enough for you to just assume that. You need to present an argument from the science of embryology showing The Unborn are something other than a human being.

In other words, you’re going to have to argue how it’s possible for two human parents to create offspring that isn’t human but later becomes human, and then you’re going to have to argue philosophically why any of the differences we mentioned between you, the embryo, and you, the adult, justifies killing you at that early, earlier stage of development. If you can’t do that, then I don’t know why I need to pay attention to your raw assertions here. You need to do the hard work of arguing.

It’s not enough to just make these assertions. Now he goes further and he wants to throw out here an extra credit question, and we’ve already dealt with the issue of rape on this podcast, so I’m going to skip that one and go to the next challenge he puts out there. He says: if you truly believe God is in charge if you have a miscarriage, please explain how God has not just performed an abortion. Please use logic in your response. Okay, gladly, here it is.

Here you go, Paul, let me help you out here. How does it follow that, because nature spontaneously triggers a miscarriage, that a the embryos in question are not human, or, B you can intentionally kill them? That does not follow at all. Look, nature causes all kinds of people to die. Earthquakes in third world countries kill hundreds of thousands because of the crappy business codes they have in a lot of these or the building codes, I should say, in many of these countries.

Does it follow that mass murder is just justified? There are countries, like India and parts of the Sudan, where infant mortality rates are horrendously high. Does it follow that those of us who are going to live longer have a right to intentionally slit the throats of those who are going to live shorter? This is silly logic, Paul. I really don’t know where you thought that was going to make a persuasive case for your view that we ought to be allowed to intentionally kill an innocent human being.

All right, so that’s the highlight of what Paul threw at us and, I hope he does respond. And, Paul, if you do, I’ll take it up on another podcast. But please understand, you have not done anything to refute the pro-life argument. You’ve only changed the subject, which is what we typically see. What we typically see is people refusing to engage the actual pro-life argument, refusing to engage the support we offer for it, and instead what they do is they attack they’ll.

They’ll attack the person making the argument, as if somehow the argument stands or falls on the person making it, or they’ll make assertions with hidden premises that are undefended. That doesn’t work either. Or maybe what they do is they will assume The Unborn aren’t human. They’ll just simply assume The Unborn aren’t human, and we saw that in some of what Paul argued there. But I want to remind you, Paul, I agree with you completely: if, what, if? The unborn are not human.

But I need you to argue for it, sir. It’s not enough for you to just throw out a string of assertions. Hey, friends, we’re going to take a quick timeout and when we come back I’m going to say more about what Paul said before we let you go for this session.

Welcome back everyone again. Great to have you with us. We’ve been discussing a comment by Paul that was left on our site, where he listed a whole bunch of reasons why he thinks the pro-life view does not hold up to reason and logic. Actually, they weren’t reasons, they were assertions, as we’ve pointed out. But I want to return to something he said that I didn’t have time to deal with in our first segment. Here. He says: should a majority vote of my country determine my rights?

And here is where he and I would agree. I think I hope, and the answer is no. In fact, our founding fathers made sure we are not ruled by majority vote. That’s why we’re a constitutional republic and not a pure democracy. In a pure democracy, you just take the majority vote, the popular vote, and that’s it. That’s, by the way, why we have an electoral college for our presidential elections. We do not want to be a country where majorities on the east and west coast set the agenda for the entire country, and the founders understood there’d be a problem if there were heavily populated areas that did not reflect the interests of rural Americans that weren’t as numerous, and so they instituted the Electoral College to prevent majority rule, because you can obviously see the problem with majority rule.

The majority could actually end up inflicting great persecution on minorities. What if the majority decides women have no rights and we have enough men that get together to decide that and women are stripped of All rights? Would that be just? The obvious answer is no. Or what if the majority decides it’s okay to frame innocent people for crimes they didn’t do in order to keep civil peace in a given region? Well, clearly that would be wrong. But the reason it would be wrong is not because we believe in majority rule.

The reason it would be wrong is this: our Founders understood that human beings have natural rights that transcend government, meaning that you have certain rights that are, before government, they’re pre-political. For example, a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness would be some examples we see written right in the Declaration of Independence. So what we, what our Founders understood and a lot of people today don’t understand, these natural rights are not contingent on government? Instituting them in statutory law. They are not cont?

ENT on a majority deciding. They’re legitimate, they exist and it’s government’s responsibility to line up and protect those rights. In other words, government doesn’t grant natural rights, it is to recognize and protect them. So where does that leave the right to life? The right to life is a natural right. We’re not arguing that fetuses should have a statutory right to drive a car or vote in the next election or sit in a chair of logic anywhere. We’re not making that argument.

We are simply arguing they have a natural right as a human being not to be killed without rendering justification that would warrant killing them the same right we would grant to any other human being. So The Unborn are not getting additional rights, they’re not getting special rights. They’re not getting more rights than their mothers. We are simply saying they deserve the same natural rights that every other human being deserves. For example, when I go to England in a in a couple of months, I do not have a right to vote in their next national election because I’m not a citizen of that country, but I do have a right not to be gunned down in the middle of St James Park while I’m strolling around the city.

That right does not come from the British government, it does not come from the American government, it does not come from Donald Trump or from anybody in the UK government. It is a natural right I have in virtue of being Human. And if Kier starmer, the Pres, the current, prime minister of the United Kingdom, says, well, I don’t want you to have that right, he cannot get rid of that right, he cannot take it from me, because it’s a pre-political right.

It exists independent of government, indeed prior to government. So when we argue that The Unborn have a right to life, that right is secure, not because a majority approves of it, but because it’s written into our nature as human beings, or, as Christians would say, as image bearers. So when we argue for rights, we need to be very clear. What do we mean now, when? When we see Paul here arguing for a right to an abortion, the first question I would ask him over coffee would be this: what do you mean by rights and where does that right to have an abortion come from?

In other words, what exactly is the choice you want a right to exercise, and where does the right to exercise that choice come from? Does it come from the state? And that’s probably what he would say that, oh well, you know, the Supreme Court once said that women have a right to an abortion. That’s fundamental. You’re right, the Supreme Court did say that. But here’s the problem: the same court that grants a right to an abortion can do do what take it away, which is exactly what happened in the Dos decision and it.

It was humorous to me to watch people who argued for decades that there is no such thing as a natural right to anything rather, All rights come from the government then get all bent out of shape when the government that they worship suddenly said there’s no right to an abortion in the Constitution. All of a sudden everybody gets their nose bent out of joint. But wait a minute. If rights come from the government, the same government that grants them can take them away.

What we’re arguing is, prol lifers, is that each of us, from the moment we began to exist, the moment of fertilization, have a natural right to life. That is pre-political, it precedes government, and government’s job is to recognize our right to life at every stage of development. At no point are we anything but a human being. Therefore, if we have value now we had value then your stage of development does not determine whether or not you should have natural rights now.

Again, I want to point out, Paul, if you’re watching: I welcome your response if you can give a reasoned response, I’m happy to consider it. I’ll even read it here on the show and interact with it, as I have with your response here. Now I want to make something clear to the prol lifers watching, though, as we conclude here. I don’t think what Paul wrote here even came close to being a rational, reputation of the pro-life view. It’s not even in the same universe as a reputation.

But please do not think, if you’re a pro-lifer, that everyone who supports abortion is lacking thoughtful engagement. There are some thoughtful people out there that are mistaken, and in my book, the Case For Life, the second edition, which I hope, if you have not gotten a copy, I hope you will this book outlines many of the thoughtful thinkers that are out there, people like Peter Singer, Michael Tulie, David boan, Kate grizzley, and others who present arguments that I do not agree with, that I think are logically flawed, but it would be a mistake to dismiss them as just making assertions, as we saw Paul do here. So I think we need to be careful as pro-life Christians that we not assume that there are no people on the other side that are using their brains on this issue.

They may be mistaken, but at least they’re presenting formal arguments and I can respect them for that. Even though I disagree very much so with their conclusions, I at least can agree. Hey, they’re. They’re adding something to the debate. All right, folks, great to have you with us today. Thank you for joining us and I look forward to seeing you on the next show.