The following is a copy of an email, composed in response to some questions put to me by a student in 2002.

Dear Amory,

Thanks for your email - I hope it's not too late for me to respond.

I can remember asking similar questions of my lecturers as an UG - I don't remember their advice, though, but it must have done something useful.

1) Belief threatened.

-- most people will believe different things from you - so don't necessarily feel threatened by that. While it's easy for me to say (I never liked finding people who agreed with me, even when I was in my early teens - I've always loved an intellectual fight) I think that this sometimes makes life more interesting

-- people who have different beliefs from you will have to find ways of interpreting the way you believe - but you'll be doing the same with them. So, for e.g., you will no doubt have certain ways of assessing why some people are atheists (possible interpretations of atheism that I've heard Christian friends give - failure of the church, misunderstanding of Christianity, desire to do as one wants, demonic influence, and so on). So it's to be expected that they will challenge your beliefs because you're challenging theirs.

-- untested beliefs are not worth having - people believe different things for different reasons. I believe that my wife loves me. I have, as yet, no reason to doubt this - but it is not an irrational belief in that I have reasons for believing it - e.g., because of the way the she relates to me, my knowledge of the kind of person she is (honest, reliable, faithful, and so on), and that she has made marital promises (and given what I believe about her character I have faith that she will stick to them). But should I start to receive new information to the contrary (spending lots of time with another man, discovering love letters from another, and so on) then it would be foolish for me not to at least raise doubts about my beliefs about our marriage.

I can't see how theological beliefs are any different in at least the sense that if there is little reason for holding them (i.e., if there seems to be a better reading of the materials that one believes in) then they need to be modified (sometimes that may be a less significant modification than at other times). Paul said something about testing the spirits, and the bible has constant injunctions against idolatry (the Israelites at Sinai probably had no idea that they were worshipping an idol - the bull imagery was as much part of Israel's tradition rather than being something Egyptian).

-- faith is not seeing = believing is always a precarious business. I think there are good biblical grounds for believing that when our beliefs become invulnerable (untestable, or secure against testing) there’s something wrong with them – after all, we walk by faith and not by sight.

-- you’re not alone in your struggles – they key is to be humble, learn as much as you can (not in order to defeat an opponent, but rather to understand your faith better), and to live prayerfully. I rarely try to console my students, but to provoke them to think and to live humble loving lives.

2) Peter Singer on abortion

My knowledge of these debates is limited, but I can direct you to some very general considerations which can help you in all the philosophy you do, and the conversations/debates you become involved in more generally.

-- all arguments come from more general beliefs – someone who believes that abortion is wrong does so for certain reasons (because it is the taking of a life, because it derives from a selfish strain in contemporary western culture, etc.)

-- note that even though there are 2 main positions on the subject (that abortion is a good thing and that abortion is a bad thing – there may also be some positions somewhere in between) there are many different perspectives that enable people to argue these. For instance,

• Utilitarian
• Deontologist
• Situation ethics
• Virtue ethics
• Relativism

-- note further that no perspective (even if you believe in the conclusion of their argument – e.g., that abortion is a bad thing) should remain unchallenged. Peter Singer is broadly a utilitarian in his ethics (greatest good for the greatest number), and that utilitarianism has certain problems and flaws which are reflected in Singer’s work [I think I have a lecture somewhere on utilitarianism – I’ll send it to you if I can find it].

-- Resources – direct use of the bible raises as many questions as it answers (in that sense banning the bible in the class makes sense – it makes people intellectually lazy to settle an argument by saying that ‘the bible says so’), although an indirect use (that your understanding of the world has been shaped by what you understand to be the witness to God’s ways with this world) will shape your logical arguments.

What you need to do is to find ethics books that give you good ways of disrupting the reasoning of other ethicists that you do not share the perspectives of. I can’t really help with reading lists here since the kinds of writers I find particularly illuminating are not generally recommendable for UGs (Alasdair MacIntyre, John Milbank, Stanley Hauerwas, Karl Barth, Friedrich Nietzsche, Donald MacKinnon). Strangely, I don’t find most mainstream Christian writers on ethics helpful – they often tend to assume problematic things that are too similar to things in the writings of those they disagree with.

Personally, for what it’s worth (and I’m by no means an expert in the area - and that means that I'm afraid I can't be of much help in directing you to the sources you are looking for), I take the line that ‘abortion is not a good thing’ (and not just for the foetus) –

• for the woman – I know people who have psychologically suffered from guilt considerably after having an abortion (it’s not, for most women I know, like cutting off a toe-nail, despite what many claim in public)
• for society – free-range abortions derive from, and further facilitate the selfishness and individualism that permeates western societies (recourse to language of rights become ‘my rights’; also think of how the ‘it’s my body’ claim works – it’s my body, I’ll do what I like with it, it’s not for others to tell me what to do [sounds more like an impetuous adolescent])

But there are also other qualifying factors that complicate the matter – rape cases for instance; health matters (mother and baby cannot both survive) … Also, there are matters that need to be addressed concerning the male oppression of women. There is little in life that is as clear cut or as simple as what we imagine – but even those we disagree with oversimplify matter, and this area of ethical concern no different.

I hope this helps a little.

Best wishes

John