You can listen online here.

You can listen online here.

Interestingly, there is some overlap in his comments and mine, particularly the issues regarding “social obligations” and how moral obligations constitute reasons for action.

Enjoy

In my previous post, I noted that Robert Adams has argued that if God exists, then divine commands “best fill the role assigned to wrongness by the concept”.[1] He argues that if moral obligations are divine commands this explains the fact, that (i) “wrongness is an objective property of actions,”[2], (ii) it accounts “for the wrongness of a major portion of the types of action that we have believed to be wrong,”[3]   (iii) it “plays a causal role … in their coming to be regarded as wrong”,[4]  (iv) it explains how moral obligations constitute a “supremely weighty reason” for acting or refraining from an action,   and (v) he contends that DCT explains the intuition that moral duties comprise “a law or standard that has a sanctity greater than that of any merely human will or institution”.[5]

Moreover, in my last post, I also argued that, for Armstrong to conclude his arguments call into question any theistic account of ethics, he must argue that his harm account of moral obligation provides a better explanation of all these features. Failing that, if his account doesn’t preserve these features of moral obligation, then he must provide us with a reason to suppose that they are not part of the concept of moral obligation. Or he must provide reasons for revising our concepts.

In his monograph “Morality without God” he attempted to do this. It’s my contention that he has failed in this task.

1. Social Requirements

Let’s begin with (v), In “Morality without God”, Armstrong purports to address this line of argument, he claims that “the best line of argument-because it is the only argument is that moral laws require a lawgiver”[6]. He attributes to popular writer Dinesh D’Souza. He then proceeds to make short work of D’Souza’s argument.

However, this is neither the best, nor the only argument offered in favour of a DCT. In subsequent articles and a monograph, Adam’s has developed (v) in some detail.[7] Adam’s proposes a “social requirement theory” of obligation whereby “being obligated to do something consists in being required (in a certain way under certain situations) by another person or groups of persons not to do it”[8]. Obligations are a kind of social relationship where one person makes a demand on another, failure to comply results ruptures in the relationship expressed in terms of blame, censure, punishment and alienation, which can be expiated by forgiveness. Adam’s offers a sustained argument that the role of guilt, censure, punishment, social inculcation, moral motivation, moral knowledge and forgiveness plays in our concept of obligation, make a social requirement theory plausible.[9] Nowhere in Armstrong “Morality without God” does Armstrong even cite let alone address this argument.

2. Supremely Weighty Reason

Similar problems afflict  (iv) In “Morality without God”. In this regard Armstrong provides two arguments as to why his account provides a better explanation of this feature of moral obligation.

First, he argues that divine commands do not constitute the right sort of reason for action. “If our only motivation to avoid hell or go to heaven, then our motivation is far from ideal”[10]

Second, he argues that the fact that “harming others is sometimes in our best interests”[11] does not entail people have no reason to refrain from harming others. Because, as Armstrong carefully goes on to argue, people can have reasons to not harm others which are independent of self-interest.

Both arguments attack a straw man. The first assumes that the only reasons divine command theorists give for obeying God is “divine punishment”. This, however, is false. While Adam’s social requirement theory does allow censure, blame and social estrangement and punishment to provide some reason for compliance with a person’s commands, he argues this is insufficient to turn a person’s demand into a moral one. The reason to comply with social requirements becomes stronger if the demand is a reasonable one. This reason becomes stronger again if the person who makes the command is a just person who loves us and is committed to our welfare. It becomes stronger still if the person is significantly more informed about the matter in question than we are. The commands of God, a perfectly rational, omniscient just and loving person, then provide supremely weighty reasons for compliance.

It’s hard to see how Armstrong could dispute this given he thinks an act is irrational if “normal people” would never advise someone “they cared about to do it”. If it’s irrational to act in such a way that normal, loving people would advise us against, how is it arbitrary to act in accord with the commands of an omniscient, rational, loving and just person?

The second argument assumes that defenders of DCT claim that if harming someone is in our best interests we have no reason to refrain from harming others. This is also false: Hare[12], Layman,[13] and Craig[14] argue that unless self-interest and morality ultimately coincide, one does not have an overriding or supremely weighty reason for so acting.  One can have reasons for not harming others, but these reasons can be overridden by self interested ones.[15] Or they don’t count as reasons for “virtually everyone”[16]

Armstrong fails to address this criticism. Showing that we have a reason to not harm others does not show we cannot have other stronger reasons to harm others. In fact Armstrong later explicitly states that his account does not “establish a strong reason to be moral”, which he defines as: “a reason strong enough to motivate everyone to be moral or to make it always irrational to be immoral”[17] So far from refuting this claim he appears to concede  the point.

3. Accounting for the content of obligations 

Armstrong also fails to address (ii). Adam’s contends:

The property that is wrongness should belong to those types of action that are thought to be wrong- or at least it should belong to an important central group of them. It would be unreasonable to expect a theory of the nature of wrongness to yield results that agree perfectly with pre-theoretical opinion. One of the purposes a metaethical theory may serve is to give guidance in revising ones particular ethical opinions. But there is a limit to how far those opinions may be revised without changing the subject.[18]

Our pre theoretical intuitions suggest that there are a number of important cases of wrongful actions which cause no harm. Acts such as recklessness or attempted murder or conspiracy to commit harm, are obvious examples. Here however I will focus on one important example. Suppose a doctor derives sexual gratification fondling a child under general anaesthesia. Providing that the child was not informed of the event, it’s difficult to see how any of the typical, psychological harms associated with child molestation would occur. Nor, from fondling, need there be any physical harm involved in such an instance either. Yet the action is clearly wrong.[19]

In “Morality Without God” Armstrong provides two responses to this kind of counter example.

First, the while the doctor causes “no actual harm”[20] he created a significant risk the patient would find out and suffer harm in the form of “pain and humiliation”[21] This is an implausible response, if wrongness is identical with the property of causing harm, then, if there is no actual harm, the action is not actually wrong.  Moreover, this response entails that a person who knows about such molestations and covers them up is acting in a morally laudable way, while the person who reports the incident engages in serious wrongdoing. The former act decreases the chance that anyone will find out, and hence decreases the risk of harm. By contrast, in virtue of the fact that it elevates the risk of the victim discovering what the doctor had done, the latter significantly increases the risk of harm.

Second, Armstrong contends that actions like this qualify as harm. Discussing a similar case involving the rape of an unconscious woman Armstrong states:

“the doctor causes his victim to lose her ability to control what happens to her body in a very intimate way. He also violates her rights and dignity and such violations can count as harms”[22]

Here Armstrong identifies harm with loss of ability to do what happens in one’s  body, and violation of rights. He elaborates the relationship between these two ideas in an earlier paper [23] where he distinguishes between a neutral loss and a moral loss. The former involves the loss of something valuable; the latter involves the loss of something valuable that the looser has a right to. It’s morally wrong to cause moral losses on others, not neutral ones. This elaboration suggests that Armstrong understands the harm of sexual assault to be violation of the right to control one’s body intimately. This right is grounded in that person’s dignity.

However, this raises an immediate challenge. One important criticism of naturalistic ethics is that it cannot provide a plausible account for human dignity and rights.  Craig himself has argued that “on the atheistic view, there’s nothing special about human beings”. Rather, it’s a human “temptation to species-ism, that is to say an unjustified bias in favor of one’s own species.”[24] Craig’s references to “speciesism” – a term associated with Peter Singer – allude to a serious point made by both Singer and Nicholas Wolterstorff. In Justice: Rights and Wrongs Wolterstorff challenges the secularist who believes in human dignity and rights to identify a non-theological or non-religious property that:

(a) is possessed by all members of the human family;
(b) is not possessed by a terrestrial non-human animal;
(c) can be plausibly said to give humans worth sufficient to account for the standard rights we grant to humans; and,
(d) is not a property that is possessed by different humans to different degrees.[25]

Criteria (a) and (b) are required if rights are going to be granted to all human beings and not to animals like cows or dogs; (c) is required for the property to ground the kinds of human rights we recognise; (d) is necessary if all people have “equal rights”. If the property that grounds rights comes in degrees, and some people have it more than others, then people will not have equal rights. The problem according to Wolterstorff, is that no non-theological property we know of appears to fill this roll. Singer, a non-theist, has made the same point: arguing that our moral codes must be radically revised so that the welfare of human infants is not given more importance than that of pigs.

Armstrong anticipates this objection and responds:

[H]umans are moral agents, because they are free and have freewill….The kind of freedom needed or useful here involves the ability to reflect on and respond to reasons… Because normal adult humans have the ability to tell what is moral and immoral, and because they have the ability to reflect on their choices and conform to what they take to be moral, they are governed as well as protected by morality…they have moral duties in addition to moral rights, in this respect humans are special even according to secular morality[26]

This is far too quick, as Wolterstorff[27] and Singer[28]  have both pointed out, normal adult humans have these properties but infants and small children do not. Infants do not have free will, children are not moral agents in this sense either. David Boonin has noted “by any plausible measure dogs, and cats, cows and pigs, chickens and ducks are more intellectually developed than a new born infant.”[29] So this answer gives us no reason for thinking a child or infant has a rights or dignity, over and above any other animal, and so fails to address the counter example I mentioned.

[1] Robert Adams “Divine Command Meta-Ethics Modified Again” Journal of Religious Ethics 7:1(1979) 74.

[2] Ibid, 74

[3] Ibid, 74.

[4] Ibid, 75

[5] Ibid, 75.

[6] Walter Sinnott-Armstrong “Morality without God” 97

[7] See Robert Adams Finite and Infinite Goods (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) and “Divine Commands and the Social Nature of Obligation” Faith and Philosophy 4 (1987) 262-275.

[8] Robert Adams Finite and Infinite Goods (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 242.

[9]Ibid chapters 10 and 11, see also  “Divine Commands and the Social Nature of Obligation” Faith and Philosophy 4 (1987) 262-275.

[10] Walter Sinnott-Armstrong “Morality without God” 119

[11] Ibid, 114

[12] John Hare The Moral Gap (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996; Paperback 1997); Why Bother Being Good? (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, April 2002); “Moral Faith and Providence” a paper presented at the 1996 Annual Wheaton Philosophy Conference, accessed 27 December 2010; “Is Moral Goodness without Belief in God Morally Stable” in Is Goodness without God Good Enough: A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics eds Robert K Garcia and Nathan L King (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008).

[13] C. Stephen Layman “God and the Moral Order” Faith and Philosophy 19 (2002) 304-16; “God and the moral order: replies to objections” Faith and Philosophy 23 (2006) 209-12; “A Moral Argument for The Existence of God” Is Goodness without God Good Enough: A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics eds Robert K Garcia and Nathan L King (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008) 49-66.  Layman is not himself a divine command theorist, he simply argues theism accounts for the overriding nature of moral obligations better than atheism does.

[14]  William Lane Craig “This Most Gruesome of Guests” in in Is Goodness without God Good Enough: A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics Eds. Robert K Garcia and Nathan L King (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2008) 182.

[16] Robert Adams “Moral “Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief” The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York :Oxford University Press 1987) 158

[17] Walter Sinnott-Armstrong “Morality without God” 118

[18] Robert Adams “Divine Command Meta-Ethics Modified Again” Journal of Religious Ethics 7:1 (1979) 74

[19] See Matthew Flannagan, Is Historic Christian Opposition to Feticide Defensible in the 21^st Century? 274

[20] Walter Sinnott-Armstrong “Morality without God” 58

[21] Ibid

[22] Ibid, 57.

[23] Walter Sinnott-Armstrong “You Can’t Lose What You Aint ever had: A Reply to Marquis” Philosophical Studies 96, 1997: 59-72

[24] William Lane Craig “Opening statement” in Are the Foundations of Morality Natural or Supernatural? A Debate between William Lane Craig and Sam Harris. University of Notre Dame, 7 April 2011, transcript available at http://www.mandm.org.nz/2011/05/transcript-sam-harris-v-william-lane-craig-debate-%E2%80%9Cis-good-from-god%E2%80%9D.html

[25] Nicholas Wolterstorff Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) see chapter 15.

[26] Walter Sinnott-Armstrong “Morality without God” 70-71

[27] Nicholas Wolterstorff Justice Rights and Wrongs 325-341

[28] Peter Singer Practical Ethics

[29] David Boonin, A Defense of Abortion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 121, the neurological data is summarized in Michael Tooley’s  Abortion and Infanticide (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) Ch. 11.5.

You can listen online here.

You can listen online here.

You can listen online here.

In the past week we’ve had people phone, email, text and raise in conversation that Easter was invented by Constantine, that the bunnies and the buns are pagan and thus consuming them is an offence against God. We’ve heard that the dates are wrong and that Easter dates do not coincide with Passover, that it is a Roman festival, while others say that Easter is tied up with Ishtar. This wasn’t limited to people coming to us; Matt was on the Pat Brittenden Mornings Panel earlier in the week and because of that we heard that talkback radio was full of this too. So, it was very cool that Matt and I were able to have a word with the producers at Radio Rhema after the Panel, and put them in touch with Dr Tim McGrew whose interview as to Whether Easter is Pagan aired on Tuesday – click the link to listen.

Tim is a good friend, a world renowned scholar whose expertise on miracles and particularly the historical accuracy of the resurrection qualifies him as an authority on some of these Easter-is-pagan claims. While he does not touch on all of the above in the interview he debunks a lot of it.

Normally Matt and I try to do a Passover-ish meal – we do lamb, rosemary and red wine – and the kids all get to choose a king size block of chocolate each (they reason they get more chocolate for the money than buying Easter Eggs) and I try to ensure indulgement in a decent hot cross bun. Throughout the weekend we focus on Christ, his death and resurrection. We read relevant passages, we have conversations about the Passover and the fact that Christ is the fulfillment of it, in years gone by when the kids were younger we’ve made Easter story cookies. Basically we enjoy the food, the public holiday and we weave learning opportunities and ways to focus on Christ in as we go so that the thrust of Easter is on him.

We are not worried about taking this approach because Christ conquered all and our focus and heart and intent is on him. Don’t get me wrong, it is important to pause and check that one is not engaging in Paganism but just because something at some point had something to do with Paganism does not mean it is Paganism presently. Tree worship is common among Pagans so must we eschew wood? What about Pythagorus’ theorem? If Easter was just Ishtar worship then we would not be celebrating it; how many of us wanting the spiritual side of Easter are heading to the local Ishtar temple this weekend? As for Constantine inventing Easter, direct evidence for Easter being celebrated by Christians can be identified in the 2nd century, some couple of hundred years prior to Constantine – Wikipedia can tell you that much.

]]> http://www.mandm.org.nz/2012/04/jesus-hot-cross-buns-easter-eggs-ishtar-and-constantine-is-easter-pagan-tim-mcgrew-says-no.html/feed 24 http://www.mandm.org.nz/2012/04/contra-mundum-after-birth-abortion.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=contra-mundum-after-birth-abortion http://www.mandm.org.nz/2012/04/contra-mundum-after-birth-abortion.html#comments Thu, 05 Apr 2012 10:21:35 +0000 Madeleine http://www.mandm.org.nz/?p=10302 “What we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn baby) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.” These words, published in the prestigious “Journal of Medical Ethics” by ethicists Dr Francesca Minerva and Dr Alberto Giubilini, sparked outrage around the world.

After-birth abortion is, of course, a nonsensical euphemism; the term ‘abortion’ means to ‘terminate a pregnancy’, it cannot, by definition, apply post-pregnancy. The authors are talking about infanticide: the killing of infants; in essence, putting human babies down. People were shocked and perplexed that ethicists were advocating this and that a leading medical ethics journal was taking this idea seriously.

The outrage the followed has forced the authors to back-pedal; they have since argued that there conclusion was only theoretical, it was only published for Ethicists to read and they were not engaging in political lobbying. This response is odd. The whole point of Ethics is to answer the question of how we ought to do things. If the author’s conclusion is correct then doctors should perform after-birth abortions; they should kill newborn babies on any ground that currently abortions can be performed on, which, in practice, is almost any ground at all. It is precisely this implication that is widely and correctly condemned as outrageous.

Less widely commented on is the argument the authors gave for this conclusion. Minerva and Giubilini note that “abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the foetus’ health.” Taking this acceptance as given they then advance three key claims. First [1], they argue that an infant, like a foetus, is only a potential person and is not an actual person. Second [2], that potential personhood confers no right to life upon a biological organism. Third [3], that the interests of actual people to not be encumbered with the care or financial burden of raising a child (or even adopting) can be significant enough to justify killing potential persons. These claims are all extremely familiar; in fact, [1], [2] and [3] are simply claims that are already widely accepted in the literature justifying legal abortion, arguments which lead to the legalisation of abortion in the west some forty years ago.

Take [2]; if merely being a potential person confers a right to life on an organism then foetuses have a right to life because they are at least potential persons. Defenders of abortion deny that feticide is killing an actual person; hence they accept [2].

Similarly [3] is accepted, at least implicitly, in New Zealand. Current practice allows people to destroy potential persons for a wide variety of reasons, including the burdens of care associated with child rearing and economic grounds. If one accepts this current practice then potential persons can be destroyed for the sake of relieving all manner of unpleasant economic and social burdens. There is minimal outrage over this; those who express it are generally dismissed as extremist nutters, so [2] and [3] appear to be conventionally accepted as mainstream liberal thinking.

In the same way, whilst it may not be widely known, [1] has been implicitly accepted in pro-abortion literature for the last 40 years. The reason is this: a foetus is clearly and unequivocally a human being. Whilst people sometimes claim that a foetus is merely a clump of cells, this is, at best, only accurate at the earlier embryonic stage of development. By the foetal stage of 6-8 weeks after conception (which is, incidentally, when most pregnancies are confirmed and most abortions occur) one clearly is talking about a living, biological, physiological human animal. To justify abortion defenders of abortion had to argue that whilst a foetus is a human being this fact is insufficient to give it a right to life.

Two reasons lead to this conclusion. Firstly, a widely held position known as secularism contends that religious reasons must be bracketed from discussions of public policy. Hence, one cannot approach the question of abortion presupposing the standard Christian view that human beings have been made in God’s image and as such have been given a special dignity not given to other animals. One can afford human beings such a dignity only if one identifies a non-theological or natural property that human beings possess and which other animals lack that plausibly grounds such a status.

Secondly, once religious beliefs are bracketed then it is very difficult to find any such property. The fact that an animal is of a particular species is, of itself, no more relevant than the fact that someone is of a particular race. The only properties that seem remotely relevant are that mature humans typically possess higher psychological functions that other animals lack such as: sentience, self-consciousness, rationality, ability to use language, autonomy and so on. These functions are relevant because an animal with these properties can be aware of its future existence and value it, judge it valuable, and desire its preservation. In the literature, these psychological properties are referred to as ‘personhood’. Even if there is no God to confer value or dignity on human beings, persons can still have lives that are valuable to themselves.

To defend abortion rights, a distinction was drawn between being a human being and a person. Whilst foetuses are actual human beings they are not actually persons as the psychology of a foetus is extremely primitive. Foetuses do not appear to be conscious at all until around 28 weeks, and even then the consciousness is primitive. Most mature non-human animals are far more developed psychologically than a human foetus, and even though the foetus has some minimal consciousness, it certainly is not yet self-aware or rational or so on. Hence, foetuses are only potential persons, and according to [2], have no right to life.

There are several problems with this argument. First, it implies that only those who value their life and desire its preservation have a right to life. This is subject to some obvious counter examples. Consider the depressed suicidal teenager who has broken up with his girlfriend or consider some mad and deluded person who believes the gods will reward him if he is the victim of a human sacrifice. In both cases the person has a right to life despite lacking a desire to live.

But the most serious problem is that, by this definition, infants are not persons either. In “A Defence of Abortion”, leading defender of abortion David Boonin notes that “by any plausible measure dogs, and cats, cows and pigs, chickens and ducks are more intellectually developed than a new born infant”. Human infants have a very rudimentary form of consciousness, which is similar to that of other animals, but they are not rational, autonomous, self-aware and nor can they speak a language. These capacities are acquired by human beings sometime after birth. Infants are human beings, but are only potential persons. Hence, by parity of reasoning, infants do not have a right to life either.

This problem with the standard pro-abortion position is, within ethics, well known. In one of the most important defences of abortion rights, which is now widely used in first year ethics texts, Mary Anne Warren noted this problem. She conceded that a foetus is not a person, and does not have a right to life. However, she argued, infanticide is still wrong because other persons (adults and society) value infants and desire their preservation. This is not merely a fringe position; it is the mainstream pro-abortion position of writers such as Joel Feinberg, Michael Tooley, Louis Pojman, Tristram Englehardt, Joseph Fletch, Peter Singer and many others.

So, if one accepts the standard arguments used to justify legal abortion, [1] seems unassailable. If infants are only potential people then they have no right to life and are protected only because their parents or society want them to live. The implication, of course, is that if these infants are unwanted or if their existence proves burdensome on parents or society, they can be aborted or terminated just like a foetus.

What is novel about Minerva and Giubilini’s position is their frank admission that raising children is burdensome and that if parents really believed infanticide to be no more problematic than abortion then many would not want their children.

Consider the burdens typically used to justify legal abortion. We are told that abortion prevents unwanted children who are likely to be poor, abused or engage in crime. It is hailed as a solution to over-population and the existence of more handicapped people. It prevents adult and teen women from falling into economic hardship and stress. It enables them to complete their education and pursue their careers. However, all of this is equally true of infanticide. Infanticide prevents the existence of unwanted children and their associated social costs, lowers the population, prevents the handicapped existing and save women and teenagers from the economic and emotional stresses of parenthood. The case for abortion and infanticide are on par.

Minerva and Giubilini propose a morally outrageous conclusion that it is permissible for women to kill their newborn infants for any of the reasons by which society currently permits abortion – which in reality is almost any reason at all. This is obscene. Yet the argument flows logically and quite naturally from the claims upon which the philosophical case for legal abortion has been based. These assumptions are taken for granted going by New Zealand’s current stance. New Zealand faces a dilemma; if it accepts these assumptions then it must logically accept child-killing. If this is unacceptable then those assumptions are mistaken and legal abortion needs to be rethought. Burying ones head in the sand and chanting “keep your rosaries off my ovaries”, or putting sappy uninformed sound bites out into public debate does not cut it.

Matt writes a monthly column for Investigate Magazine entitled “Contra Mundum.” This blog post was published in the  April-May 2012 issue and is reproduced here with permission. Contra Mundum is Latin for ‘against the world;’ the phrase is usually attributed to Athanasius who was exiled for defending Christian orthodoxy.

Letters to the editor should be sent to:
editorial@investigatemagazine.DELETE.com

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The book version of Come Let Us Reason: New Essays in Christian Apologetics can be pre-ordered at this link on Amazon.

Matt’s chapter is “Did God Command Canaanite Genocide?” Here is the editorial review from Amazon:

Come Let Us Reason is the third book in a series on modern Christian apologetics that began with the popular Passionate Conviction and Contending with Christianity’s Critics. The nineteen essays here raise classical philosophical questions in fresh ways, address contemporary challenges for the church, and will deepen the thinking of the next generation of apologists. Packed with dynamic topical discussions and informed by the latest scholarship, the book’s major sections are:

• Apologetics, Culture, and the Kingdom of God
• The God Question
• The Gospels and the Historical Jesus
• Ancient Israel and Other Religions
• Christian Uniqueness and the World’s Religions

Contributors include J. P. Moreland (“Four Degrees of Postmodernism”), William Lane Craig (“Objections So Bad That I Couldn’t Have Made Them Up”), Gary R. Habermas (“How to Respond When God Gives You the Silent Treatment”), Craig Keener (“Gospel Truth: The Historical Reliability of the Gospels”), and Paul Copan (“Does the Old Testament Endorse Slavery?”).

Paul Copan is a professor and the Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Marquette University.

William Lane Craig is research professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. His Ph.D. in Philosophy is from the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.

The Come let us Reason series is designed to bring scholarly work to the lay person so, depending on whether you prefer Kindle or book form, order or pre-order your copy now and let us know what you think.