David Ancell / Friday June 24, 2005
This comes out of a number of things I’ve seen and read in the past few years. There are many well-intentioned people out there who defend proper moral teaching but who use inaccurate science to do so. For example, I remember a chastity speaker who got out a package insert for an oral contraceptive and mentioned the fact that it said some cancer occurred in 0.5% of patients who took it. Her statement was that the odds may seem small, but if you were the one who got cancer, it wouldn’t matter anymore.
That might be true enough, except for one little piece of information that she was missing. Had she consulted a doctor or pharmacist, she might have found that anything with that small of an incidence may well have not been caused by the drug. The FDA makes manufacturers report anything that happened to occur while they were taking the product.
So what’s the problem with doing this? Well, for starters, it brings the person’s credibility into question. If you couldn’t (or just didn’t) verify your scientific facts, how can I be sure that you are applying the moral law correctly? Secondly, there are those who won’t believe you anyway. While you aren’t likely to convince those people, why give them ammunition? People will paint believing Christians as ignorant and superstitious regarless of what they do. Why give them objective evidence of ignorance?
Although I strongly oppose abortion as the murder of a human being, I think the emphasis being placed by many pro-lifers on the abortion and breast cancer link is misguided. If a new, well-designed study turned up that cast doubt on that link (and it could), you had better believe the pro-aborts will use it not only to tell the world abortion is safe, but also to tell the world that pro-lifers don’t know what in Gehenna they are talking about.
There’s also a problem with over-emphasizing scientific arguments, though the practice isn’t bad in itself. It seems that we are somewhat uncomfortable with bringing forth the truth that God is an objective reality. Therefore, violating God’s law is an objective problem in and of itself. After all, that’s the main concern.
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