From silver bullets to bullet ricochet

I'm going to comment on some additional statements by Lydia McGrew, from two sources:

http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2014/08/on_paul_copans_attempted_solut.html

http://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2014/08/no-magic-bullet-copans-insufficient.html

The point is that all the attempts to make that position *seem less bad*, such as by using phrases such as "original sin" or "capital punishment" or what-not, fail. And I think people use them because they find it hard to say, "Yes, these were innocent babies, and God ordered them slaughtered. You know, just exactly the sort of thing we're fighting against every day in the culture of death. Well, God actually ordered that done. But I'm okay with that."
I suppose it's good in the way that people feel uncomfortable saying that. But I have a niggling feeling of duty to take away the fig leaves and evasions.

The fact that we find it "hard" to attribute some statements or actions to God doesn't mean God didn't say it or do it. 

By the way, I want to note an interesting dynamic: In a conversation where I hear Christians at first staunchly defending the idea that God really did order putting a bunch of children to the sword, I find psychologically that any reversion to a view like Copan's ("Maybe it really is hyperbole; maybe it doesn't mean what it appears to mean") comes as a relief. There is something so shocking and horrifying to me about people's twisting their minds into justifying the slaughter of children (all the more so when the commitment to inerrancy is such that they will admit no reductio) that one would almost rather that they accept a view like Copan's. I believe that Copan's view is _intellectually_ untenable and born of wishful thinking, and that was why I felt that I had to write refuting it. But in the grand scheme one feels in one's gut that that's better than holding a view that is morally untenable and, frankly, morally corrupting.

i) Commitment to inerrancy means commitment to divine revelation. That Christianity is a revealed religion. That's not a secondary or expendable principle. Rather, that's foundational to the Christian faith. 

ii) What is morally untenable is for Lydia to reject revealed moral norms. Absent that standard of comparison, how does she avoid moral skepticism? She may appeal to "natural law" to undergird her moral intuitions, but having repudiated Biblical norms, why think her moral intuitions transcribe natural law rather than species variable natural instincts or cultural conditioning? 

iii) There are two basic problems with her resort to hypotheticals and reductios. To begin with, it's a diversionary tactic. And it's irrelevant to the issue it hand. Suppose she asks, "What if Scripture says God said or did such-and-such? Would you believe it? Would you obey it?"

Suppose I said no? Has she succeeded in extracting a damaging concession from me? Not at all. For she's not talking about the real Bible, but a hypothetical Bible. How does the fact that I might reject statements in a hypothetical Bible justify rejecting statements in the real Bible? The real Bible doesn't make those statements. How are imaginary commands germane to the case at hand?

Sure, we can postulate a hypothetical Bible with hypothetical commands, hypothetical narratives, &c. Suppose I don't believe it. Is that a reason not to believe the real Bible? How is "what if" a compelling reason to reject "what is"? There's no evidentiary parity between the two. 

Given Biblical revelation, we can posit there are some things God wouldn't say or do. But absent that revelatory standard of comparison, we lack a basis for the contrast. Her hypotheticals implicitly withdraw the benchmark. 

iv) Lydia takes refuge in natural law as her fallback position. But that's very naive. At best, natural law is pretty coarse-grained. It won't warrant the specificity and absolutism that she requires. 

If, moreover, you're skeptical about Biblical revelation, you ought to be equally skeptical about natural law. For instance, Lydia might say we find filial cannibalism morally repellent because that's grounded in natural law. But some animals practice filial cannibalism. How will she respond to an atheist who says the cannibalism taboo is simply a natural human instinct, while other animals have a natural instinct to practice cannibalism? 

I find all of that highly problematic, as I found the response by Steve on my personal blog in which he started going down the double effect rabbit trail. 

So if I mention the double effect principle as a counterexample, that's a "rabbit trail." But if Lydia floats hypotheticals and reductios, that's not a rabbit trail? Notice the egregious double standard on her part. 

Lydia acts as though discussing exceptions and counterexamples can only be motivated by a malicious agenda to "make room" for atrocities. But although that's sometimes the case, ethicists necessarily consider exceptions, counterexamples, borderline cases. She herself tries to bolster her position with analogies (e.g. suicide, euthanasia). 

Steve's point was similar: If this or that qualification is required, then the intrinsic evil of deliberately putting a child to the edge of the sword is called into question. I simply don't agree at all, and I think it is troubling to find that a technique in use is to call into question the _general_ intrinsic wrongness of unambiguously, deliberately killing a child in order to make space, as it were, for the slaughter of the Canaanites, in order to preserve inerrancy. Surely it should be obvious that such an approach has potential ramifications that go beyond just allowing the slaughter of the Canaanites.

Notice that she's not presenting a counterargument. She's just expressing her disapproval. 

What I did was not a "rabbit trail." I'm responding to her on her own grounds. Does she grant the double effect principle? If so, is that consistent with her overall position–or does she herself allow for exceptions? 

My argument is that we have to have a category of murder, and we do have a category of murder, which really is always wrong under every circumstance. 

By definition, "murder" is always wrong under every circumstance. But that's a decoy. The question at issue isn't the wrongness of murder, but homicide. Not all homicides are murders. There's such a thing as justified homicide. Lydia herself acknowledges that category. 

Now, we already know that that category does not apply to God when God acts directly. The whole point of a category such as "murder" is that it applies to finite creatures in their interactions with one another. We wouldn't even have the category at all if we were just talking about God.

That's an important concession on her part. 

I'm willing to allow that there could be _adjustment_ in the category of murder, so that it is murder under normal circumstances for an individual to kill someone for (say) his private p*rn*gr*phy use, but under some extremely strange but imaginable circumstances, God might appoint another human being to execute him for that sin. But that the human killing of infants is intrinsically wrong is something that I've spent twenty-five years arguing as part of the pro-life movement.

Of course, she's begging the question. She keeps resorting to stipulative claims, as if expressing her vehement opinion should suffice to settle the matter. 

I've been through all the blocks and moves, all the "what ifs," all the attempts on the part of the pro-aborts to say that there is such-and-such an exception, all the scoffing at absolute moral prohibitions, all the attempts to undermine this one. This is old hat for me. 

And where's the actual argument?

And intrinsically wrong means just what it sounds like. It means that you can *never* deliberately aim a sword, swing it, and deliberately kill that baby right there with it.

That's her claim. Where's the supporting argument?

(The very fact that God doesn't need to swing swords, that God is capable of exercising His will to take someone to Himself via direct, unmediated, sovereign power over His creation, is one clue that there is a huge difference between the two.) 

How is that metaphysical difference equivalent to a moral difference? How does that begin to demonstrate that it would be illicit for God to delegate such a task to a human agent? How is the medium all-important?

The same thing is true, by the way, of both suicide and euthanasia. In the pro-life movement we have spent all this time arguing that it is wrong to kill yourself, yet the argument given here would (as far as I can see) also license God's ordering you to perform a suicide bombing against the equivalent of the Canaanites. After all, it's just God "indirectly taking life," right?

Here she's propping up one disputable claim by appeal to another disputable claim. Is suicide always wrong under every conceivable circumstance? What about a suicide mission? What about a soldier throwing himself on top of a live grenade to shield his comrades? What about a member of the French Resistance who kills himself before the Nazis apprehend him so that he won't give up the names of his comrades under torture? What about stranded office-workers on 9/11 jumping to their death to avoid incineration? 

Or consider a suffering baby. We have argued that the infanticide for disabled and suffering children in Europe is an abomination. But the argument here would mean that God could order it as being *no different from* God's quietly ending the child's suffering via His own action. Of course, the whole _point_ of arguing against euthanasia is that there is a _huge_ difference between the two. There's nothing wrong even with _praying_ that God would take a suffering loved one to Himself. There's something hugely, always, directly wrong in giving the lethal injection to end the suffering. That's why God wouldn't order you to do it.

This assumes that mercy-killing is always wrong. What about a wounded soldier? What if his comrades have to leave him behind. There isn't time to medevac him. The enemy is minutes away. If they know the enemy will torture him to death, is it wrong for them to euthanize him? 

That's why we show movies like _The Silent Scream_. That's why we understand and rejoice when an abortionist like Nathanson or clinic owner like Abbey Johnson finally cannot do this anymore. We take that to be listening to the voice of conscience. I would go so far as to say that suppressing that voice of conscience is the road to damnation. Now, what some are saying in the case of the Canaanite slaughter is that it was an _obligation_ for the Israelite soldiers to suppress that horror and revulsion, that God wanted them to do so. To my mind, this is near-blasphemous, as it is saying that God was tempting man to suppress the very instinctive, conscientious revulsion which God Himself placed within man as a clue to the nature of reality. But James says that God does not tempt any man.

i) Why assume Israelite soldiers were suppressing revulsion? Where's her evidence that they felt the same way she feels?

ii) Her appeal to James is only as good as her interpretation. It is, moreover, self-defeating to pit Scripture against Scripture. Having repudiated inerrancy, why is James more authoritative than Deuteronomy? How does one fallible book trump another fallible book? 

iii) Sometimes doing your duty can be painful. What if parents have a psychotic teenager. He threatens his mother with a butcher knife. The father shoots his son to protect his wife. That's an excruciating choice for the father and husband. 

Then, of course, there are plenty of Bible verses against murder, as well as the biblical statement that God hates "hands that shed innocent blood." If they don't mean an absolute prohibition on killing babies, I'm not sure what they do mean.

What it means, in context, is to not knowingly execute a defendant for a crime he didn't commit. "Innocent" of violating the Mosaic law. If you falsely charge and convict him of a capital offense, then carry out the death sentence, that's "shedding innocent blood." 

By the way, the babies and young children didn't just have to be driven out to die in the wilderness. They could have been kept and raised as adoptees.

That's highly unrealistic. That might work for babies and toddlers who were too young to remember who did what to whom. But for children old enough to remember that the Israelites killed their parents, I imagine that when they got to a certain age, some of them would return the favor by killing their adoptive parents to avenge the death of their biological parents. Revenge is a powerful motive. 

Lydia has replaced Copan's magic bullets with bullets that ricochet. That's no improvement.