This is how Nancy Pelosi answered Tom Brokaw’s question about when life begins: “I would say that as an ardent practicing Catholic this is an issue that I have studied for a long time, and what I know is over the centuries the doctors of the Church have not been able to make that definition. And St. Augustine said three months. We don’t know. The point is it that it shouldn’t have an impact on a woman’s right to chose.”
Does she really mean to say that if we did know when life begins (which we do), and it turns out life begins prior to the time abortions are allowed, that this should not impact a woman’s right to have an abortion? Is Pelosi so pro-abortion, that even in when the evidence is clear that what is being aborted is a living human being, that the right to an abortion trumps the life guaranteed to that human being in the Constitution? Talk about a radical position!
HT: Justin Taylor
According to David Berlinski, Thomas Aquinas argued the universe must have begun at a finite time in the past by appealing to Diodorus’s (1st cent. B.C. Greek philosopher) view of possibility: if it is possible that something not exist, then it is certain that at some time or another it did not exist. Only that which has a necessary existence can be, and must be eternal. [1]
Aquinas argued that while our universe does exist, it does not have to exist. It is contingent, not necessary. This much seems reasonable. After all, it is possible to conceive of our universe not existing. There is nothing about the physical constituents of the universe that demands they exist. Using Diodorus’s principle, Aquinas concluded that since it is possible that our universe not exist, then it is certain that at some time in the past it did not exist.
Berlinksi thinks Aquinas’ argument commits the fallacy of composition (e.g. just because every part of an elephant is light, does not mean the elephant as a whole is light). He argues that while Diodorus’s principle might be true of things in the universe, it is not necessarily true of the universe as a whole. But I think Berlinski misses the point. The point is that only necessary things must exist eternally. Nothing else needs to, or can for that matter. Contingent things have causes, and hence beginnings.
What do you think of Aquinas’s argument, Berlinski’s criticism, or my response? I tend to think this is a decent argument for the finitude of the universe. What do you think?
David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Crown Forum, 2008), 85.
Thinking to Believe 