Abortion was never a right!

In light of the recent Supreme Court decision, there seems to be a lot of confusion over what has just happened. The erroneous idea seems to be that Roe v. Wade gave us the “right” to have an abortion and the recent decision took that right away. I blame the public schools and main stream media for the confusion. We have an entire generation of people who has not learned history nor do they receive “news” with any more substance than your average bumper sticker. Tsk tsk. A lot is being said about the subject right now and I don't want to repeat the same things everyone else is saying. Instead, I'm going to try to give you a few original thoughts I have about the matter.

The first thing we have to understand is where our rights come from. There are too many people who suffer under the delusion that the government gives us our rights. The danger in this way of thinking is that, if the government gives us our rights, the government can just as easily take away our rights. Our liberties would rise and fall at the whim of judges and legislators. That's scary and it's a quick path to tyranny.

When Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, he explained very succintly from where we derive our rights. From that document, we can read the following.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Wow! How much profundity we can learn from just these few words!

RIGHTS COME FROM GOD

One thing I've noticed about the left is that they are very noble-sounding and puffed-up when talking about protecting people's rights but they are rather vague on explaining how these people came to have these rights. They scoff at the idea that rights come from God. They're all about “separation of church and state” so to say that rights come from God is an affront to their sensibilities. So I have to ask, where do rights come from if not from God? Some might answer that rights are determined by society. If that were true, then a majority of people could simply vote to oppress the minority and it would be “fair.” But that doesn't sound very fair, does it?

Others will say that our rights are given to us by the government. Well, the government is not really a sentient being by itself but is merely just a body of people. Government officials are supposed to represent the views of the people who elected them so this is simply another case of rights determined by society.

Finally, some people will appeal to some cosmic sense of “fairness.” Rights are somehow universal and simply belong to humanity. This is a very subjective standard. Are these cosmic rules absolute? Where can I go to find them? Show me this universal right to an abortion because I don't believe it exists.

I heard a great definition of “wrong” from Dinesh D'Souza. He said, “wrong” means it's not the way it out to be. In a godless, impersonal universe, it would be very hard to say anything is wrong. The universe doesn't care what happens and there is no way things “ought to be.” Things are only how they are.

Christians, on the other hand, have a reason to believe in right and wrong. In Genesis 1:31, after God had created the universe, the Bible tells us, “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” God created the world the way it ought to be and, whenever something isn't the way God intended it, it's wrong. I've said before, it's God's world so it's God's rules!

If any absolute standard exists, then I say it must be the standard of the Bible. If our rights are endowed by our Creator, it seems fairly certain that something specifically prohibited by God in the Bible (namely murdering or harming a child) could never be considered a God given right. God is the author of life and only God can determine when it would be just to end life. The Right to Life was among those rights Jefferson said had been endowed upon us by our Creator.

THESE TRUTHS ARE SELF-EVIDENT

When Thomas Jefferson penned the famous words I cited above, he said the truth of them was “self-evident.” He didn't need to explain why they were true. He didn't need to offer a long defense or detailed apology. He merely presented the words in bold confidence, knowing they cannot be denied by any rational person. I believe the truth of them is just as obvious today.

I remind you again, the self-evident truths that Jefferson claimed we possess included life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Can anyone deny we have a right to life? Hardly! And I assert that a conceived child also has a right to live. It's obvious and I don't see any need to justify my assertion. To the contrary, if someone should deny that an unborn child has the right to live, then the burden would be on him to justify that claim.

Some people believe that abortion is a “right.” Really? It is somehow “self-evident” that a woman has the God-given right to take the life of her unborn child? Just seeing how shrill they become while trying to defend their position is evidence of how ridiculous it is to describe it as “self-evident!”

RIGHTS ARE UNALIENABLE

Because the left is confused about where rights come from, they seem to think we can lose our rights. I guess they think if the government gives us a right, then the government could also take it away. Let me use the 2^nd amendment for a moment, as an example. From time to time, there are calls to “repeal the 2^nd amendment.” Take a moment and read the 2nd Amendment. Pay attention to how carefully it is worded:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Notice that the amendment doesn't say, “the people will have the right to bear arms.” Instead, it presupposes that people already have that right and the amendment specifically forbids the government from infringing upon it. Repealing the 2^nd amendment doesn't take away our right to bear arms; it merely takes away our protection from a tyrannical government that might seek to infringe upon our right. Get it?

Because our rights are given by God, governments do not have the authority to take them away. Roe v. Wade did not give a woman the right to have an abortion. There is no God-given right to an abortion. All Roe v. Wade did was overturn the laws that protected the unborn babies right to life!

Rather than looking to the government to give us rights, the Founding Fathers understood that the job of the government is to protect our rights. They said this overtly in the Declaration of Independence:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

When we won our independence from England, we wrote our Constitution. In the Preamble, we again read that this is a stated purpose of the new government:

[To] secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.

Our rights were endowed on us by the Creator – not by any man or body of men. We establish governments for the expressed purpose of helping to protect our rights. Also, it's not just our rights but also the rights of our Posterity – the generations that come after us. The right to life belongs even to the unborn! It always has. Even after Roe v. Wade, abortion was never a right!

The un-divine god of evolution

Genesis 1:1, In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

In these ten words, we find perhaps the most terse, scientific statement ever penned. Time, space, and matter were created simultaneously and supernaturally by the uncaused, first cause. We call the Creator, God.

The rest of Genesis 1 goes on to explain how, in six days, God shaped the universe by His word. Genesis 2:2 then says God rested and made the 7^th day the Sabbath. Obviously, God didn't need to rest because He was tired. Rather, He ceased creating. Intentionally. So the Bible describes a brief time when everything in the universe miraculously began to exist, punctuated by a distinct event when matter/energy are no longer being created. This is consistent with what we've learned from science.

Apart from God, we have trouble making sense of the universe. You may remember learning about the law of conservation of energy which is sometimes summarized as, “energy can neither be created nor destroyed – it can only change forms.” But if energy can't be created, where did it all come from in the first place?

Natural laws are properties of the universe. We use them to describe how the universe behaves. Take gravity, for example. We're not sure what gravity is, but we're pretty successful when predicting how it behaves. But, if natural laws are properties of the universe, we can't really use them to explain the origin of the universe. Logically speaking, nothing can create itself; rather, everything that begins to exist is caused by something outside of itself. To invoke natural laws as some natural explanation for the universe, is like saying nature created nature, which is absurd. So the cause of the universe must be something outside of the universe, something “supernatural” by definition.

This line of argument has been called the Kalam Cosmological Argument. It's rather obvious and, to my knowledge, has not been successfully rebutted. Mind you, there have been many responses made by critics but, in my opinion, they all seem to suffer from a similar flaw. The critics are merely assigning divine-like qualities to the universe. They're essentially calling energy/matter eternal and uncaused.

Unbelievers are in denial about the religious nature of their beliefs about origins. They are trying to posit a creator with similar attributes that we normally associate with God. In other words, they want us to believe there is a supernatural, eternal, uncaused cause for the universe – but it's still not God! It's just something like God. The skeptics are invoking a god-like non-god to explain the same things Christians credit to God.

I've said before that unbelievers in God are believers in poofism. There was nothing then, POOF, there was everything. Time, space, and matter just poofed into existence. Something had to cause it to happen. They don't know what it was but they're sure it wasn't God. //RKBentley scratches his head//

I don't believe in God because it sort of makes sense. I believe in God because that's the only thing that makes sense. Everything we know about the universe confirms over and over there is a supernatural cause behind it. Deep down, skeptics tacitly admit this too. They just stubbornly deny Elohim is the Creator. The god of evolution is a capricious, clumsy, invisible god that is indistinguishable from dumb luck. They seek to rob God of His glory by worshipping the undivine god of evolution. How sad.

Laughing at evolution

In order to believe in evolution, a person has to accept some weird science. I'm not just talking about points of the theory that seem counterintuitive; I'm talking full-blown denial of things we know to be true. The well published, evolutionary biologist, Richard Lewontin, made this amazing admission [Billions and Billions of Demons, January 9, 1997]:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

In this candid statement, Lewontin has revealed the true heart of many evolutionists. They would rather cling to even the most absurd “natural” explanation of our origins rather than accept the possibility of a supernatural Creator. What are some of these patently absurd constructs that he was talking about? I'm glad you asked. In this post, I'm going to list a few of the more far-fetched ones. Prepare to be amused!

SPONTANEOUS GENERATION

There was once a time when people believed in a thing called spontaneous generation. It's the idea that life could rise spontaneously out of non-living material. For example, people used to believe that maggots would spontaneously appear in rotting meat or that mice would appear in appear a jar containing wheat husks.

Over a couple of centuries of experimentation and observation, most examples of spontaneous generation had been debunked. In the case of maggots, it was learned that flies were laying their eggs on the rotting meat. It was understood that spontaneous generation did not occur in “higher” or more complex forms of life, like mice. However, the idea still endured that “simple” forms of life, like single-celled creatures, could spontaneously appear. If a jar of clean water was left in the sun, it would begin to cloud. When examined under the primitive microscopes of the 19^th century, they could see the water teeming with microorganisms.

Louis Pasteur, who was a contemporary of Charles Darwin, remained skeptical. He designed an experiment using special flasks that would allow air to reach the water but prevented air-borne microbes from falling into them. He boiled the water inside the flasks to insure that nothing already in the water was left alive. After several months, no microorganisms had formed. It was through this experiment that he devised the process we now call pasteurization. It was also the final nail in the coffin of the theory of spontaneous generation; all believed examples of life rising from non-living had been disproved.

Spontaneous generation had been replaced with the Law of Biogenesis. It is the scientific principle that life can only arise from life and not from non-living material. Of course, this creates a quandary for evolutionists: if life only comes from life, then how did life begin in the first place? What a pickle!

Secular scientists still cling to spontaneous generation, only now they call it abiogenesis. Regardless of its new title, it's still the same idea that life can arise from non-living matter. Continuing under the delusion that spontaneous generation must have happened, scientists have spent decades trying to create life in the laboratory. Yet even artificial life eludes them. The closest they ever came is the famous Miller-Urey experiment which produced some amino acids. Since DNA is made up of amino acids, they believe they had made the first step toward finding how life could arise “naturally.” It's funny how they are conducting experiments, trying to create life, just to “prove” that it happens by itself!

Everything we have learned from science, everything we have observed for centuries, every experiment we have ever conducted has proven over and over that the origin of life is a miracle. It cannot happen apart from a supernatural cause. Yet, in spite of all the evidence, evolutionists still want us to believe in an idea that was discarded about the same time as blood-letting! Excuse me while I laugh my head off!!

GRAVITY CREATED EVERYTHING FROM NOTHING

Where did matter come from? That question strikes at the heart of the problem with all secular explanations of our origins. Natural science has no theory or even a credible story to explain the ultimate origin of matter. In fact, matter (or energy) simply appearing naturally seems to contradict the well established, scientific principle that matter/energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only change forms. The mere existence of matter lends itself strongly to the idea that there was a supernatural cause for the universe.

Unfazed by secular science's lack of a plausible explanation for the origin of the universe, Stephen Hawking, made this humorous quote:

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

What I find most comical about this statement is the sheer hypocrisy of it. How could there even be a law such as gravity until there's a universe? Hawking's “solution” seems to suffer from a chicken-and-egg dilemma. If natural laws are properties of the universe, how can they be used to explain the origin of the universe? That's like saying natural laws created natural laws! You can believe that if you want but I think it's looney toons.

EVOLUTION ADDS TRAITS BY REMOVING TRAITS

One day, an enterprising young man in the city thought he'd start a business selling watermelons in suburban neighborhoods. He'd drive out to the country, buy watermelons for 35 cents each, then resell them 3 for $1. They were very popular and always sold out quickly but each time he drove to buy more, he always seemed to have less money. Not sure what he was doing wrong, he explained his business plan to his father. His father thought about it for a minute, then slapped his son on the back. “I see the problem,” he told his son confidently, “you need to buy a bigger truck!”

Then he said, 'But if it continues for a million years...'

Natural selection is an observed phenomenon where traits not suited to the environment are removed from the population. In the famous, peppered moth example of “evolution,” birds would eat light or dark colored moths as environmental factors changed. Over time, the ratio of light/dark moth in the population would change and evolutionists call any type of change, “evolution.” According to evolutionists, these little changes (microevolution) will accumulate over time to become big changes (macroevolution).

My question to evolutionists has always been, “how long would birds have to eat one color of moth until new colors appear?” The significance of the question usually escapes them but the answer is obvious. You cannot create new colors by continuously removing one color. It doesn't matter how long you do it. Duh!

For evolution to occur, new traits have to be added to the population. For a dinosaur to become a bird, you have to add feathers. The supposed first ancestor did not have feathers. Neither did it have hair or scales or even skin. Nor did it have bones, blood, or organs. For a bacterium to become a bird, there must be a continuous parade of novel features added. That is the only way for one kind of creature to become another kind. Evolutionists love to bring up examples of natural selection and say it's evolution. They believe the change just needs to happen for a long enough time.

If natural selection REMOVES traits and evolution requires animals to ACQUIRE traits, then we have a problem. Continuously removing traits will never add traits no matter how long it continues. It's like trying to make money by losing a little bit at a time. The idea that microevolution plus time equals macroevolution is a joke. It's a joke funnier than the one above because the one above is fictional and the evolutionists are serious. I agree that populations change. I don't agree that “change” over a long time could ever amount to evolution. Time is not the savior of evolution. Time is the “bigger truck” of evolution.

THINGS THAT LOOK DESIGNED AREN'T DESIGNED

Have you ever heard an expression like, “Cheetahs are built for speed” or “Bird wings are remarkably well designed for flying”? Most of the time, when evolutionists makes statements like these, they don't really mean to say these things are actually designed. Yet intended or unintended, they are admitting there is an apparent design in nature. A tired complaint I hear from evolutionists is that there is no evidence for creation. Evidence for design is everywhere but evolutionists refuse to see it because of their circular reasoning. Note that I said, “they refuse to see it” and not that they can't see it. Richard Dawkins, wrote about this very thing in his book, The Blind Watchmaker. In the book, Dawkins said, “The complexity of living organisms is matched by the elegant efficiency of their apparent design. If anyone doesn’t agree that this amount of complex design cries out for an explanation, I give up.”

It's been my experience that the most obvious answer to nearly any question is usually the correct one. It's like the old joke: Why did the chicken cross the road? The first time people hear this, they usually search for some deep meaning or clever answer yet completely overlook the obvious answer – to get to the other side. I think that's what's going on here.

Q: Why does everything look designed?

A: Because it's designed!

Evolutionists may be blind and foolish, but most of them aren't stupid. They know the obvious implication of design. Yet not only do they refuse to accept design as evidence for creation, they also go to great lengths to explain to others why they too should not make that reasonable conclusion.

I normally like to link to non-creationist sources but I couldn't find a direct link to read Julian Huxley's book, Evolution in Action. In the book, Huxley is cited as saying, “Organisms are built as if purposefully designed, and work as if in purposeful pursuit of a conscious aim. But the truth lies in those two words 'as if.' As the genius of Darwin showed, the purpose is only an apparent one.”  

That's just a fancy way of telling people, “I know everything looks designed but it only looks that way. It really isn't.” Huxley could see design. To even use the word, “built” implies a builder. Huxley knew that the most reasonable implication of design is the “purposeful pursuit of a conscious aim.” Nevertheless, he boldly denounced the obvious and correct answer.

Another shameless example of explaining away design comes from Francis Crick , the co-discoverer of DNA. Crick said, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see is not designed, but rather evolved.”

Gee. How more conspicuous can anyone be? Crick is overtly saying, “I know it looks designed but keep telling yourself everything evolved!”

Evolutionists go to great lengths to explain away design but the more they explain, the more they prove my point. They would not put in such effort if they didn't grasp the clear implication of design is that there is a Designer. It's almost funny to see how they reject the most reasonable answer for such an unlikely one. It's like they're saying, “No! The chicken did not want to get to the other side!'