I am tempted to take absolutely lunatic, brain-dead pro-abortion arguments like notabilia’s about as seriously as I take the philosophy of materialism, or accounts that the moon is made of cheese. In other words: Not at all.
Unfortunately, I can’t. If notabilia is to be believed, it isn’t just random atheist internet bloggers who think that arguments like this do literally anything. Take this article from his blog. He reveals that he got his “People die before birth naturally a lot, therefore murdering them should be legal” argument from an actual published journal on secular humanism. He says this about the article and its author:
One of the foremost citizen researchers (nearly unknown and basically uncompensated [Anthony’s note: God is merciful indeed]) on the religious madness of the US stripe, Gregory S. Paul, wrote a magnificent demolition of the zygote zealots’ intellectual idiocy in the June/July 2020 issue of Free-Inquiry.
A quick google search of Gregory S. Paul reveals him to be a paleontologist who dipped his toe in the water of bad new-atheist style takedowns of religion. Your guess is as good as any as why his expertise on dinosaurs makes him any sort of authority on religion or theology.
Here is Paul’s “magnificent demolition” of the “zygote zealots’ intellectual idiocy”:
Here’s a figure that a fair number do know. To date, around a 100 billion Homo sapiens have been born, with estimates ranging from 80-150 billion (of which half were born before this alleged Jesus fellow). A while back, it hit me that a lot of those humans would have died in childhood due to natural causes; to be specific, about half of them. Oddly, I had to think that up on my own; the horrific fact that 40-70 billion people have died as kids had strangely never been calculated and published anywhere… I further detailed how nearly all of this “Holocaust of the Innocents” has been due to the vast number of cruelly torturous diseases that infest the child-toxic planet on which the creator – if any such being exists – saw fit to stick us with one way or another. But the full toll is even more colossal. The human reproductive system is so inefficient and dysfunctional that three-quarters of pregnancies fail. So the number of preborn who have died is in the hundreds of billions.
“But Anthony”, you say, “Yes, this is basically just the same argument from evil as every other argument from evil, just made to look scarier by using really big numbers. But I thought you said it was a pro-abortion argument?”
Never fear, dear reader. Notabilia is here to connect the dots:
Got that? If you want to call yourself “pro-life,” let’s see you account for those uncountable hundreds of BILLIONS dead preborn fetuses. What are you doing to stop this monumental mountain of conceived and then dead human forms? Why are you not thinking and praying and protesting these dead, dead preborn babies? Where is your commitment to the “sanctity” of human life? Can’t you rescue all this dead humanity? Why not? This is your imagined business, to “revere life,” in the form of other people’s zygotes. blastocytes, and fetuses, to the absurd, immoral, moronic stage where you insist that all must be brought through pregnancy and birth, though you do none of the extremely dangerous labor, you contribute not one dime or one minute of your time or money to the raising of these children, and you kill living children by the millions with your contributions to the regnant supersystem of global poverty and militarism.
I want to note here that in the quoted section, Paul makes no such argument, and the argument actually appears to be an attempt to argue against the idea that we live in the best possible world. This argument isn’t particularly good either, or at least not interesting – a single dead child would do the same job.
Notabilia, though, is a visionary. This is not just an argument against God’s existence. It is an argument for ABORTION!
How, you might ask pitifully, how can this possibly be an argument for abortion? How does the fact that lots of unborn people die of natural causes have anything at all to do with killing them?
The answer is, good point, that objection is pretty fatal. Yet notabilia has some questions for you. What, he asks, “are you doing to stop this monumental mountain of conceived and then dead human forms?”
This is a very good question, and so I have a confession to make. Despite heart disease being one of the leading killers in the world, I have not done anything to contribute to the end of heart disease. However, hypocrite that I am, I still think drive-by shootings should be illegal.
It is absolutely amazing, almost inconceivable, that it needs to be said, but here it is: People dying of natural causes has nothing to do with murder.
Also, just about everything notabilia says about anti-abortion protesters not helping women is simply a lie anyway. Remember when we were criticized for not adopting children who were going to be aborted? When we said “Good point” and moved to do that, Mark Hamill went on Twitter to call us all psychopaths. When people said that if we were going to force women to bring these children to term, we need to support them, we said “Good point” and built crisis pregnancy centers, which search engines then proceeded to intentionally throttle and which were literally attacked by pro-abortion zealots. It was all always lies, all the way down.
Pro-abortionists don’t care about women. They care about abortion, which is a secular sacrament. If this wasn’t obvious before, it should be now.
Notabilia ends with this truly inspired bit of lunacy:
Could the mad mullahs, Alito and Thomas and Kavanaugh and Barret and Gorsuch and Roberts, provide any answer to the question of what they have done about deaths of hundreds of billions of conceived humans through natural abortions? Of course not – they are locked into indefensible charlatanism that casts enormous suffering onto mostly poor women across the country and by imitation the world. Why would anyone give such gross immoral criminality a moment’s claim upon political consideration?
I also have done nothing personally to end drunk driving, but I also think that hitting people with a car intentionally should be illegal. According to notabilia, this is hypocritical. We can only be personally against intentional murder if we, personally, have campaigned in an effort to prevent all death.
Let’s not mince words here. This is moronic.
Will notabilia ever respond to me? I doubt it. In the comments section he says this:
I don’t respond in any fashion to people I suspect of that affiliation [meaning Republican].
Sorry, notabilia. I voted for Donald Trump.
But I will leave a genuine offer on the table: If you would like to dialogue about Jesus Christ, and the importance of believing in Him for salvation, please do not hesitate to reach out to me. There are some great resources on this topic. “The Case for Jesus” by Brant Pitre is superb. If you want a good analytical breakdown of the New Testament Scott Hahn’s annotated Ignatius Study Bible is a must-read. If some of the passages in the Old Testament are giving you trouble, try Tent Horn’s book “Hard Sayings”. I haven’t read it yet but I’ve heard Mike Licona has done superlative work proving the historicity of the Resurrection.
But please, if you truly value logic and reason, if you think it is at all important to be intellectually rigorous, stop making this absolutely atrocious argument in favor of abortion. It is very, very obviously not good. Look up Judith Jarvis Thomson’s Violinist argument for something that will at least take a little work to dismantle.
The Mechanical Dragon 