The Great Thought Divide

A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, by Seattle University philosophy professors Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert J. Deltete, is a must-read for Catholics such as myself who are locked into neither a pro-life position nor a pro-choice stance, but are honestly trying to decide whether abortions are in and of themselves sinful. Dombrowski and Deltete argue they are not.

There are two horns to their argument. Horn One: virtually no Catholics still believe, as St. Augustine did, that sexual sin is anything sex-related which fails to uphold procreation — not bodily pleasure, not even conjugal love — as the sole acceptable basis for sex between two marriage partners. That abortions make a mockery of the biblical procreation mandate ("Be fruitful and multiply") was the reason Augustine found abortions sinful, for he did not believe — and neither did St. Thomas Aquinas — that an embryo or fetus possesses either sentiency or a rational, God-given soul until some point late in pregnancy.

Horn Two: if "delayed hominization" — the position of Augustine and Thomas — is correct, then modern abortion foes who explicitly or implicitly assume there is "immediate hominization" — or a God-given soul which arrives on day one of pregnancy — are philosophically out of step with current medical science, which seems to affirm delayed hominization. To wit, we now know that it is only in the 24th through 32nd weeks of pregnancy that the central nervous system has developed to the point of being able to undergo any sort of experience. Being able to have conscious experience, including the ability to suffer, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the development of a rational soul, which is the fulfillment of human personhood.

So say Dombrowski and Deltete. I think they're right.


Unless, that is, there is reason to believe that a fully human "identity" simply exists at all points in the temporal career of the fetus, past, present, and future, being there from the instant of its conception through all of its embryonic and post-embryonic developmental stages; being present at its birth; then accompanying its life as an infant, as a child, and as an adult; and finally persisting to its death and beyond.

This view, which Dombrowski and Deltete explore, and the antithetical one which they prefer both bear upon the question of what time is. As Dombrowski and Deltete point out in their chapter on "The Importance of Temporal Asymmetry," there is and has long been a tendency among philosophers to believe that time is basically symmetrical.

If time is symmetrical, then it indeed makes sense to say that a newly fertilized egg cell already contains that immutable "substance" which gives it, now and forever, its unique "identity." Abortion is, on this view, wrong because it snuffs out that "substance," that "identity."

Philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Leibniz held in the 17th century, say Messrs. D. and D., that there is indeed an immutable "substance" in which inheres the constant "identity" of a person throughout life.

Time is therefore symmetrical, in Leibniz' view, because a person accumulates no added identity as time goes on. What is essential to a person's identity never changes.

The identity of any one person is, on this view, something like the subject of a sentence. It can accumulate more predicates over time, without itself being changed in any essential way.

Or, it is like a noun that can, over the course of time, have more and more adjectives attached to it, without having its core meaning altered in any fundamental way.


Dombrowski and Deltete disagree with Leibniz on this matter of time and identity. To them, we are what we have become. Our life is an ongoing process whose events, though they do not cancel the past, mean that a partially new and even unexpected identity emerges with each event that transpires in our lives. Each new identity is not strictly the same as any of our previous identities, though it subsumes all of them.

It is for this reason that Dombrowski and Deltete say that time is asymmetrical. The future for each of us is not set in stone, even as all of our past identities remain exactly what they always were.

As I said in this earlier series of posts, Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine has written in The End of Certainty of scientific discoveries and insights that give him abundant reason to think science should abandon its longstanding conviction that time is symmetrical, and that our awareness of an "arrow of time" is but an illusion. If we think Prigogine is right, then I'd say it becomes easier to find Dombrowski and Deltete right as well.

But we are all somewhat heirs to the other type of thinking, the one which Leibniz upheld, which looks for an immutable, unchanging core of our (or anything's) existence. Such an immutable core of existence makes each of us in the present moment not different in any fundamental way than what we were in our (already determined) pasts and/or what we will be in our (equally predetermined) futures.

Einstein said, "God does not play dice." If indeed God were never a dice player, we could be assured that being, rather than becoming, is alone at the heart of who we are. If that is so, our future is somehow already written, and an omniscient God knows what it is.

But, as Dombrowski and Deltete point out, this view of what divine omniscience supposedly is contradicts the traditional Catholic belief in free will, which denies that each of our fates, salvation-wise, is predestined.


It seems we have two dueling sets of ideas here, each set being a constellation of multiple notions that somehow "go together" and likewise somehow mutually contradict all the notions that make up the other constellation. One set of ideas elevates being over becoming, identity over process, constancy over change, omniscience over wait-and-see knowability, determinism over free will, destiny over potentiality. The other set of ideas flips the picture over and emphasizes the second of each of these matched pairs.

The first set of ideas seems to me (and I am not trained in philosophy) to be basically Platonic, while the other is basically Aristotelian. In the view of Dombrowski and Deltete, the Catholic Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas were more Aristotelians than Platonists, while (I gather) people like Leibniz and René Descartes were more Platonists than Aristotelians.

Platonists believe that objects in the material world are fleeting, imperfect renditions of eternal ideas or forms. These forms are more real than anything tangible or physical. Christian Platonists think of the God-given soul as a real, eternal, indestructible thing; hence the soul is much like a Platonic form. At base, the soul's existence is independent of the physical body of the embryo or fetus that it is bestowed upon. Hence, God's act of bestowing the soul can be assumed to take place at the moment of conception.

Aristotelians (I gather) grant more reality to physical matter than do Platonists. There is no absolute divide between form and substance, mind and matter, etc., such that the one can exist without the other. Hence, it can make sense to believe that that which anything presently is can come about, at least in part, only through a process of becoming, and no part of that something's "identity" can be separated from the process by which that identity has been built up.


If I am right about this distinction — this Great Thought Divide — between Platonists and Aristotelians, then I imagine the late Ilya Prigogine was an Aristotelian (and Einstein was a Platonist).

And I, too, am an Aristotelian at heart, even if I sometimes catch myself thinking like a Platonist.

For too many years to count, I have been assiduously working out a worldview in which my belief as a Christian need not contradict my views as an (amateur) philosopher or (equally amateur) scientist. In my capacity as amateur philosopher-scientist, I have yearned to see how the Darwinian theory of evolution can be brought into accord with Christian belief, or vice versa. To make a long story short, I've come to embrace the extensions of Darwinism that the sciences of "complexity" have recently offered (see my Beyond Darwin blog).

According to the sciences of complexity, even chaos (defined mathematically and scientifically, of course) is of creative value in an unfolding cosmos. The "edge of chaos," where genesis is ongoing, is where evolution takes place.

Complex systems that evolve at the edge of chaos, and even chaotic systems per se, pass through "bifurcation points" where they opt for one possible future trajectory and bypass at least one other. In this earlier series of posts about Prigogine's book — a book which upholds the notion that all "dissipative systems" are intrinsically "complex systems" in the above sense — I suggested that God works minor miracles at the bifurcation points of such systems' developmental processes. With the "assent" (in some sense of the word) of the system itself, an evolutionary branch is taken which pleases God.

Yet God does not coerce assent at the time of what I am calling the mini-annunciation that he makes to the system, seeking its cooperation, nor does he know what the system will choose to do in advance.

Such an idea about mini-annunciations and mini-miracles, it seems to me, tips the philosophical scales toward the Aristotelian constellation of notions, and away from the Platonic. Time is asymmetrical, and the future is not somehow already latent in the past. The human person, likewise, is not somehow already "there" in the fertilized egg cell. The genesis of worldly being is not somehow "above" the process of evolutionary becoming. And God in his omniscience does not know everything that will someday happen.

Such an idea about mini-annunciations and mini-miracles as part of the ongoing process of creation, while it flies in the face of Platonic notions of genesis and ensoulment, does not make me un-Christian. It just puts me on the other side of the Great Thought Divide from a great many other Christians.