It is commonplace to see science at odds with religion. There is certainly a place for this, but, from what we know from medical science about conception, it seems that an Old Testament text from Exodus 21:22 – 23 harmonizes neatly. What I am investigating here is twofold: (1) what does this OT text say as applied to abortion and does this accord with science, and (2) if we do not accept this scientific or Old Testament framework for life as it relates to abortion, who will decide when life begin? I do not think these are novel ideas, but they are worthy of revisiting given the severity of the topics of ‘life,’ ‘abortion,’ and ‘god-like decider of when life begins.’

Revisiting the abortion discussion, the Old Testament Law, antiquated and obscure as it sometimes feels, offers insight even on such a modern issue. The text states:

“If men are fighting and they strike a pregnant woman resulting in her child(ren) coming out and no harm occurred, he {the man who struck the woman} will be punished with a fine as what the husband of the woman sets, and he will give it in accord with the judges. If, however, harm occurred to the child(ren) then you shall give life in place of life . . .. (translation mine from the Masoretic Text, Hebrew OT)”

Exodus 21:22 – 23

The text goes on the added refrain, “eye for eye, hand in place of hand,” etc.  The harm done to the child is born out of human conflict and violence. The abortion of these child(ren) is the outgrowth of misplaced violence, the arbitrary overflow of men fighting onto the pregnant woman. That the text calls the pre-born “children” decidedly marks them as part of the family; they are not merely human and they certainly are not something less than human. When do babies start to take humanoid physical form? The text begins forcefully with calling for ‘life for life’ or literally ‘soul for soul’ if the baby is “aborted” through this violence resulting in the baby’s death. A baby takes humanoid form as early as 4 weeks, which is often prior to a woman knowing she is pregnant.

Perhaps more importantly is the use of the word, “soul,” which is nefesh in Hebrew. Soul is not some immaterial of the human (that was Plato’s view); in the OT, it is the distinguishing marker of life. ‘Soul’ is used to show that something lives, that what was once life-less is now animate, that real vitality is part of it now. God in Genesis 2, breathes the breath of life into the pre-formed man and man became a living ‘soul.’ Before moving forward, we should juxtapose this notion of ‘soul’ with the legal court’s notion of ‘viability’ that is so central to the issue of abortion in the United States.

‘Viability’ in this abortion conflict means “the time at which the fetus can live on its own outside the womb” and is notoriously vague, leading to the big question of why so vague a term would be used to determine something so sacred as human life. Does it mean viable with tech helping the baby or does it mean able to feed himself or herself? Up until June 24^th, 2022, the Supreme Court let stand the notion that viability was set at 24 weeks although I do not know the full history on the develop of this term and concept. Now that Roe v. Wade is overturned, we are seeing viability situated in different States around a number of new spots, like the appearance of the heartbeat. I want to return to the OT text’s usage of nefesh, or ‘soul.’

The OT law sees this pre-born life as a nefesh, a soul. If the baby is harmed to the point of death, it takes another nefesh as payment for the loss of this baby’s nefesh, “soul in place of soul.” When does the accountability for the life of the baby inside the pregnant woman begin in this Old Testament text? The immediate answer is when it is discerned that the woman is pregnant and that the baby is forced out of the woman apart from the natural progress of pregnancy and birth. We must do some recontextualization to move from ancient time’s medical and physiological knowledge to modern day: that a woman was pregnant in the ancient world can be indicated in several ways: nausea, odor of urine, and obviously missing a menstrual cycle. Many of these can be discerned in the first few days. The OT text’s emphasis on parts of the baby’s body being harmed is also suggestive of the earliest weeks of pregnancy since humanoid form takes place during the end of the first month of pregnancy. With this said, knowledge of being pregnant even in the ancient world could happen very early on for the discerning or careful observer. It is little different today; someone might be very attuned to her body and notice differences. There are pregnancy tests that have an assorted range of accuracy if someone wants to attend to her body with extra attention. With all this said, in this OT text, accountability for the baby’s life comes virtually at the time of conception, with a range of deviation for the careful versus careless observer. If a woman knew she was pregnant, even if not showing, and she is struck resulting in a miscarriage, the soul of that baby would require the soul of the man who struck her as recompense: “life for life, soul for soul.”

In summary, ‘viability’ has little value except to provide human governments the god-like ability to declare when human life begins. This OT text accords better with science than any of these laws built around ‘viability.’ Why would we have any interest, religious people or not, in the government having a de facto position to determine when human life begins. Frankly, it is a hellish proposition, and we have seen hell rise as a result: baby parts’ market, massive pharmaceutical research and development using these parts, dismembered babies stored in the baby parts warehouse at the University of Pittsburgh, or even a generation of women viewing babies as an infringement of their freedom instead of the miracle a baby is. Conception is the moment of actualized and perpetuated union, between a man and woman, resulting in a new life, a new soul. The OT text intimates that people are accountable for that baby’s life as soon as their discernment realizes that the baby lives. The resulting death of a pre-born baby from external, unnatural force applied to the mother required the death of another person, ‘soul for soul.’ Abortion should therefore be banned in all States since a mother seeking an abortion has knowledge of her baby’s existence and thus is accountable for that baby’s life. Whatever humanizing we do to limit the consequences for killing one’s own baby (I am ambivalent about this), that they are accountable must be implied in the consequences by being severe enough to communicate that someone is acting as a murderer.

Dr. Scalise

Thoughts on 1 Cor. 11:2 – 14 in Light of Ancient Pagan Cult Practice

These verses are obscure and lack needed historical contextualization to draw a full set of strict conclusions. Specifically, St. Paul seems to be drawing on some conversation familiar to the Corinthians, but we do not know what that was. With this in mind, we then can pull from that text what can be known from the text alone without speculating on what St. Paul taught them before. Paul is repeating a clear teaching from Deuteronomy 22:5, “A woman shall not wear a man’s apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever does such things is abhorrent to Yahweh your God.”

Ancient paganism of Mesopotamia — specifically referring to the fertility cults best known around the god Baal and goddess Asteroth — and the ancient world generally came in much the same form, which often involved transvestites, genital mutilation, and the instinct to confuse the sexes, male and female. These pagan temples, often associated with demonology of the ancient world, would also include male and female prostitution, with all the confusion of that transsexualism. What is remarkable about the limited statues and architecture we know of that time is the Baal and Molech depictions. They often show a man’s body, a beast’s head, and female breasts. The body is clearly masculine while confusing that with animals and women.

Why am I bringing Ancient Near Eastern culture and context to bear? It is because much of the fertility cults and their rituals form the backdrop, or historical cultural context, of prohibitions in the Old Testament. Even the text above, Deut. 22:5 — given the battle ancient Israel had with the worshippers of Baal (and Asteroth) and how frequently these deities are mentioned in the Torah — supposes knowledge of the transvestite (and often genital mutilating) practices of these cults. As we zoom out to look at the rest of the ancient world’s pagan practices, we find a striking similarity among most: prostitution, often of males who were castrated, transsexualism, transvestitism, and orgies or other sexual escapades. These trends do not cease and continue down to the times of the New Testament and indeed even to the modern day.

What can we draw from this rather strange text on how men and women dress and adorn hair? This Corinth passage points to these truths, at least the ones I am comfortable to say are clear: (1) men and woman are to be distinct as distinctly created and different, (2) men are woman are to emphasize those distinctions, (3) and to reduce those distinctions is abhorrent to God, “dishonoring oneself.” The context of the many pagan temples in Corinth should not be missed, including the male (and female) prostitution. Hair styles of that time, which deviated from ‘standard male’ or ‘standard female’ styles, aside from signaling a male going effeminate or a female going masculine, were sometimes used to convey sexual availability especially concerning the cult prostitutes. It is not so much different from today, really. St. Paul’s instructions on how to dress and adorn one’s hair is as much about distinguishing maleness and femaleness in the church as it is about disassociating from the styles or adornments suggestive of cults, transsexualism, and associated illicit sexual behavior. Given that converts were coming into the church from these cults, it is altogether appropriate that St. Paul would readdress the importance of not only male and female distinctions but of cult vs. church distinctions. Social trends and embedded meaning in the culture born from those trends battle and invade subcultures like a church’s culture and ethos. It is no different today from then. Although it may seem trivial to focus in on hair style and adornment, it is really the fool that doesn’t understand the nature of cultural embedded influences who is captured by them. Because of the way hair, dress, and adornment are part and parcel to the cults’ devotees involvement, addressing the same within the church is as prudent as essential: likely the church being just down the street with converts coming in from these cults,

I am unprepared to opine on whether the covering for women is their hair or not; 1 Cor. 11:6 suggests that there is a covering of some sort that is not her hair. However, in 1 Cor. 11:14 – 15 we find that the woman’s long hair is her covering. To revisit what I said at the beginning, there is a historical conversation that we simply do not have access to that might clear all this up. Plenty of commentators run you through the list of possible meaning on this issue, so I will leave that to their capable minds and save myself both the time and space. There are a few words in verse 14 that have always stood out to me: οὐδὲ ἡ φύσις αὐτὴ διδάσκει (oude he fusis aute didaskei), “Does not nature itself teach . . .” that a man with long hair dishonors himself and a woman with long hair has glory. I want to leave on this point because I’ve always been captivated by theological aesthetics, or just aesthetics, the “study of beauty.” There is something objectively “true” about a woman with long hair being a marvel of beauty, and I appreciate that “nature itself” teaches this as a way to break out of the notion that all this is merely cultural, built out of and around the meanings embedded at that time in place.

Dr. Scalise

The rights of the pre-born are in our thoughts today, now more than ever. I want to advance our “war for life” in ever more resounding and determined ways. The days of letting the politicians do as they like, promising and failing to perform, and us sitting on the sidelines are over. This is a democratic Republic; We the People have the power, governing authority, and the right to out-source that to representatives that really stand for our interests. The Christians, the church, the religious right: the text of the Declaration of Independence,

means that the government authority resides with the “consent of the governed” and is given to representatives for the sake of efficiency and effectiveness. This means religious people are not under a Nero, a Roman Emperor, or any other autocratic or aristocratic government: when Jesus the Christ says, “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” this requires massive recontextualization of the government context from that of which Jesus was under to that of a “consent of the governed constitutional republic.”  No excuses for the religious people not to be full in on the abortion “war for life.” There is no excuse that you have to just submit to government and do as you are told; this would imply that the constitution is not born out of ‘We The People’ and that the Declaration of Independence did not put the authority to govern in the hands of the people. The impact of the Supreme Court’s ruling this week was as much about decodifying a so-called ‘right to murder’ as it was about telling the government that it cannot play God. If you read Justice’s Alito’s Majority Opining, it comes to a decided conclusion:

“. . . the Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. . . . We now . . . return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

US 597 DOBBS v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION 2022, Justice Alito, Majority Opinion, pg. 79.

Kavanaugh says something similar shortly thereafter: “The Constitution neither outlaws abortion nor legalizes abortion.”

That the government cannot play God is implied in at least three ways from this conclusive closing comments by these justices.

1. Intrinsic authority that is then outsourced to local representatives to decide local and State (like Florida, or Tennessee or Pennsylvania) laws is retuned to the voter. The Supreme Court’s de facto legalization of abortion, without going through legislatures, has been corrected; the three branches of government have regained equilibrium on this matter of abortion. Each man and woman must decide how his or her relationship with God will go. It is thus fitting that individuals in States will have determining say in the legality or illegality of abortion.
2. The term ‘viability’ — which means that a fetus can be considered not a human up to 24 weeks — has been vacated of its national importance. This term more than anything else in this Roe v. Wade drama was used to play God. What the Supreme Court decided does not remove ‘viability’ as a functional and legally important term for this war on abortion. What is implied in the term though is that the government, and not God, gets to determine when human life starts. Some blue States will undoubtedly still use the concept of viability; other States, however, will make the concept irrelevant as many States — already 13 States at the time of this writing — will just make abortion entirely illegal.
3. This decision likewise reemphasizes the right to privacy a woman has entails responsibility to keep her body private. Arguably, aside from horrid situations of rape, a pregnancy is evidence that the woman has decided to make her body available to someone, and hence void her right to privacy on her own, willingly. It is now no longer a centralizing authority (the US government through the Supreme Court) stating that a woman’s right to privacy (together with the notion of viability), guaranteed by the Constitution, ensures her the right to abort a baby. Likewise, that a woman’s pregnancy should be understood as a private matter is returned to the States and the people of those States to decide. I’ve argued elsewhere that the fetus, no matter how early, is partly the man’s body and not merely the woman’s body. As such, the fetus itself is the actualization of a non-private enterprise and the fetus is not “owned” by the woman. It is as much the man’s body as the woman’s body with the exception that the woman carries the baby in her body. The matter of how privacy should be understood, then, is up for discussion. In some sense, this ruling of the Supreme Court makes the entire discussion about privacy a bit less important since it was, arguably, the right to privacy that the Constitution provided which somehow made abortion a constitutional right. The return of responsibility and marginalizing this “privacy” aspect of the abortion debate recenters the discussion on woman’s right to choose as it relates to (a) herself, her conscience, (b) the man, who has vested biological interest in the fetus, and (c) the woman responsibility before and/or with God. Most movements toward individual sovereignty in terms of self-determination are equally theocentric, or God centered. I can’t argue this here; I would get too far afield, but the significant freewill God provided humanity entails God’s intent that humanity have self-determination.

This is a Constitutional win, for sure. It is likewise a Declaration of Independence win too. As such, it is a God-centric win as well. Determinative authority residing in individuals, as responsible persons and as part of the “consent of the governed” crowd will always bring with it, so long as the form of the Declaration of Independence persists, the Creator who endowed that authority and dignity. The totalitarian shift is often marked by the government making determinations, often on the most profound of issues, for the people and alleviating them of responsibilities. The Supreme Court has this week said that profound moral questions (per Justice Alito, pg. 79 – 80) are best decided by the people through the States. The task at hand this is to advance this war on abortion, to go State by State, arguing for the only truly viable point of a human’s beginning: at conception. If you think otherwise, understand that history is not on your side. Before the mid-1900s, abortion was virtually outlawed in all places in the United States. Do not be an “ageist” which is the bigotry of thinking your immediate time and place is somehow more excellent than all other ages. I will do a biblical piece on abortion today too.

Dr. Scalise

This is a question I’ve been putting out there time to time as I advance the fact that becoming unbiased is impossible. It is no more possible to evade bias than it is to evade being a limited human. If you’ve never thought about it, humans are defined by their limitations: whether it be running, power, thinking, height, knowledge, etc. It other words, to be human is to be restricted. This idea goes further though: to be anything in the cosmos is to have some restrictions on it. Even the cosmos itself has some energy restrictions on it: energy cannot be created or destroyed and the energy that exists is moving into greater disorder every day (entropy is increasing). At one point in my audio, I stated that even God has a point of view, which may suggest that I think God is biased.

Scripture gives a profound and heavily agenda-oriented report of events that are discussed in it pages. Any human reporting in this fashion we would say has their bias controlling them or are totally into their confirmation bias. I will not deny any of this. There is an a priori question about the nature of Scripture, one that cannot be discerned by the scientific method. Why not?

As Richard Dawkins has opined in various contexts, and I am paraphrasing, “If God is, it is a scientific question even if science has no methods to resolve the question.”

I’ll grant there are ways to a posteriori determine the divine origination of Scripture at least in an abductive logic manner. Abduction is the logical process of “inferring from the data to the best explanation.” Doing historiography and archeology from the pages of Scripture is one way to discern if events in Scripture describe historical events accurately. Still, the intangibility and, presumably, the ‘stuff’ of the Divine, of God, is not something creaturely discerned or naturally produced, and as such, obscures and perpetually frustrates merely naturalistic ways of investigation. If these events are truthful, then by extrapolation, the associated theocentric (focused on God narrative) point of view on the event may be assigned some measure of truth-value.

Moving on: I will assume the Judeo-Christian worldview is true as are its formative Scriptures (the Bible), and I mean ‘true’ in the sense that they accurately describe the cosmos and point to its Author as the Constitutor of truth. This means that God is a maximally great Entity, and, for our purposes here, has the properties of omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and immensity (or magnitude).  He is all knowing, all powerful, everywhere, and fully able to attend to all information, knowledge, data without any diminishment in His capacity to comprehend, synthesize, and “know” the best point of view on this data. We might also note the fact that His Mind abilities should not be strictly governed by time-sequence. Why is this importance: if you have access to all intel, data, info, at all times and places, if God had to work through this in any sequence that implied time, we might wonder if the info would ever be worked through. Simply put, this would imply a restriction on God; the maximally great God would be infinite, and such time restrictions would be unbecoming – and might inadvertently make time more supreme than God Himself.

We are now ready to address the question of whether God is biased.

Next to that, we will also ask does God have a point of view. The answer is that God is not biased but God has a robust and extremely agenda-oriented point of view.

How can this be? Humanity has their biases built out of their limitations – where were you born, what language did you speak, what were the cultural norms, the mores of that group, traditions, demographics, etc.? These biases are inescapably part of who you are. Don’t mishear me. I am not saying that you cannot limit or rid yourself of a bias. You can. You cannot rid yourself of all biases though without gaining divine capacities – because humans are, as is the cosmos itself, defined by its/their limitations. Humans thus are ‘boundary defined’ in what they think. Again, this does not mean you can’t break out of the boundaries in some ways – hence the importance of imagination and self-transcendence = narratives and story telling – but it does mean that some limitations or boundaries will define and control what you think. God, on the other hand, as a maximally great Entity, does not have His point of view formed in this way, like humans or like creations. He has access to all intel at all time, in all places, without diminution to his attentiveness to that intel, with the needed power to comprehend it. His point of view, then, is born from objective reality as His mind constitutes it. It is not that He sees the objective truth of the cosmos, and whatever particular event in the cosmos as it should be understood; it is that His mind is constitutive of how the cosmos really is. The notions of absolute “best interpretations” of an event already assumes that a mind is involved. In this case, it is the Mind, and this maximally great mind sees all intel in a way that grounds the entire notion of objective truth or knowledge.

The crux of the matter resides in the fact that God’s understanding of events is formed from a maximally great set of data, beyond which cannot be conceived, while humans’ understanding of events is always born from limitations. Ergo, God can have a point of view while not being biased because bias assumes limitation, of which God has none. When we read the Bible and it seems to us an entirely too agenda driven narrative, we need only remind ourselves that the humans that masquerade as neutral interpreters are the real deceivers. All humans working within the naturalist framework have biases implicitly or explicitly. Even the scientific method, concerning which I love, must make a decision, a pre-experiment decision, about the contours of the experiment – the limitations both in the experiment and the humans doing it are already implied. This is no assault on the scientific method; it is a naturalist method, and as such should be limited as its method requires. It is the context of the manifold interpreters, of limited humans, that complicates the situation. Don’t think God missed this issue either. It may well be the case that God has massive interest in preserving the freewill of humanity, and as such provides reasonable grounds for rejecting Him. I don’t know for sure. In conclusion, God has a point of view, but how He informs it makes it categorically different than a bias. Is the journey done? No, not at all. Part of the intrigue of theism, or believing in God, is that it provides a run-way that does not end in death, in the heat deprivation of the universe. Discovery becomes its ethos, morality its means, and its Author the framework that makes it all possible.

Dr. Scalise