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The Limitations of Science in the Abortion Debate: Why You Need Philosophy

Part Two

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One of our not-so-secret missions at ERI is to help pro-life advocates to think well about philosophy as it relates to the abortion debate. The problem with scientism is it says that philosophy isn’t a valid way to reach truth or discover facts. According to this position, our philosophical case for the unborn doesn’t matter, because only science really matters.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes.

Book with glasses.

Now, if scientism was true, we would have to drop our strong philosophical arguments and just talk about biology. Biology and embryology can be helpful in articulating the pro-life position, but we don’t think they can get you all the way there. Just knowing that the fetus is human doesn’t tell us how to think about it. But scientism is false—more than that, it’s self-defeating, as I showed in the first article in this series.

So, How Far Can Science Get Us?

This is important, so to say it again: scientism does not equal science. Scientism says that arguments don’t matter, only bare scientific facts. Science stems from philosophical foundations. It answers questions about the world while using basic rules of logic to do so. This makes it a second thing, not a first thing, but scientism pretends that science is first and only. As C.S. Lewis writes:

“You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first.”

If we pursue science as first (scientism), then we lose science in its proper place.

And science in its proper place gives us good and valuable facts which can support various arguments in the abortion debate. We cannot say, with the justices playing make-believe about biology in Roe, that we don’t know when life begins. 96 percent of biologists (not just embryologists, mind you) agree in acknowledging that life begins at conception.

The study of embryology expands on this consensus by telling us what happens at and after conception. An individual human being develops from a single-celled organism into a recognizable baby, maintaining biological integrity and continuity the entire way. We can detect early cardiac activity; we can observe the differentiation of stem cells; we can see movement and interaction. And science adds new discoveries, such as the likely pain threshold for prenatal humans recently being pushed back from 25 weeks to 12 weeks.

ERI-Dialogue-Tip #11

Loving, truthful people are always more persuasive than unloving, truthful people.

For more of the context of this quotation, read the full article here:

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Scientism: the Self-Refuting Argument that has Contaminated Abortion Dialogue

Part One

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Scientism is the belief that truth, insofar as it exists, is only (or best) discovered by using the scientific method. In other words, scientism says that fields like biology, chemistry, and physics are superior ways (or the only ways) of knowing what is true and that philosophy or theology can only be matters of opinion, rather than ways to discover the reality around us. This belief isn’t often named, but it shows up everywhere. Public media and private conversations about all sorts of topics make use of this worldview by stealth.

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes.
Nuclear Energy Waste

Science vs. Scientism

Despite “science” being in the name, scientism is actually not a doctrine of science. Rather it is a philosophical position that distorts science by undermining its very foundation.

We want to help you confront this false ideology when it appears in conversations about abortion and other important issues. We’re indebted to Dr. J.P. Moreland’s work on this topic, Scientism and Secularism, and we’ll just use page numbers to reference his book (which you can buy on Amazon) throughout this series of posts. Moreland is a professor at Biola University with a Ph.D. in philosophy, but also majored in chemistry and was awarded a fellowship for Ph.D. study in nuclear chemistry before choosing philosophy instead. In other words, he knows a thing or two about both science and philosophy.

ERI-Dialogue-Principle #37

Successful social change comes from recruiting those who agree and reaching out to those who disagree.

For more of the context of this quotation, click here to read the full article, “Five Lessons for Pro-Lifers from the Women’s March.” 

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Don’t Blindly Use Statistics in Dialogue

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A few years ago, I used to enjoy watching popular political commentators debating or responding to questions from college students after speeches. I gained a lot from the videos because they provided me with new ways to think about complicated political issues. The arguments and responses I watched tended to include a barrage of facts and statistics.

That is all perfectly appropriate for debates, where your goal is to beat your opponent and move the audience. But when I tried to replicate that approach in my dialogues, it didn’t go as well as I had hoped.

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes.

Responding to the Question of Rape

One day at work, I struck up a conversation with Jeff*, a coworker. It eventually turned to politics. He began by saying, “In some issues, I don’t care what people do, like in abortion.” I responded with, “Well, it’s not a casual thing, like an appendectomy; it’s the killing of a child.” To this, Jeff grinned widely and snarkily shot back, “Oh yeah? What about rape?” I immediately fired back, “That only has to do with less than one percent of abortions. What about the other 99 percent? Are you fine with those?” Jeff admitted that he was fine with them so I suggested we discuss those first.

Point for me, right? Not really. As great as it felt to turn this common and rhetorically charged objection on its head, I don’t see how it helped Jeff. I’m not sure he’d ever heard a good response to that objection, and I had just perpetuated that streak. Sometimes people bring up marginal cases because they think it will be a winning argument; they want to throw something difficult in your face so they don’t need to defend their own position. But that isn’t the only reason that pro-choice people ask about the question of rape. In fact, most of the time they ask this because they want to know if the pro-life person cares about people or understands the consequences of restricting abortion access for women. To them, as to us, abortion is a human rights issue, and you can’t get around questions involving human rights by responding that such-and-such issue only concerns a small minority of humans.