Today, we're going to learn one tip for discovering inconsistent or contradictory views.

More than ever before, Christians need to be equipped to find views that aren't true, to find views that can't be consistently applied, and more importantly to find views that do not accord with what scripture teaches. There are many tips and techniques that one could look at to get better at this, but the one we're going to look at today involves taking a position and seeing where it leads: How can this view be consistently applied, can I try and put this principle into practice in other areas? We're going to look at several examples of this.

The first is that of abortion. Some people will say that if abortion were illegal, then there would be more and more unwanted children in the world. For instance: children that are treated very poorly perhaps in a foster care situation, there would be even more of those and surely we wouldn't want more unfairly treated children. Here's the question. They're saying we could kill children who are unwanted. Does that view work if we apply it to the child currently in the foster care situation? Can we kill children who are currently in foster care because they are being treated poorly? I think the answer's going to be no. Another question we could ask here is: is your worth dependent on how you're treated? Are you less valuable, are you less of a valuable human being if you're mistreated compared to if you are treated well? Once again, no.

The real question with abortion is what is the unborn? It is a human being that's alive. It's the product of a living sperm and a living egg that come together to make another cell that's alive, that takes in nutrients and expels waste and adds to itself. It's alive, and it's also human. It's nothing else. Genetically, it's totally human. Since it's a human that's alive, we should treat it like any other human being when it comes to end-of-life issues. More than that, this reason given for abortion is inconsistent because it would actually support killing children currently in foster care.

Another thing we might say is, "Well, abortion should be legal in the case of rape." As tough of a circumstance as this is, I can't imagine what that's like, but we can think through together how one could consistently act in this sort of circumstance. If the argument is, if a woman is raped then it's permissible to kill her child, then how should we respond to the one year-olds who reminds a mother of rape? Can the mother kill that child too? Can she kill her at five or at 10 or at 20? I think the answer to all of those questions is going to be no. We see it's inconsistent to say you can kill the unborn child because they remind you of rape but not the post-born child because there's no substantive difference in being in the womb and out of the womb. It's just a change in location, it's not a change in anything else. That's another reason for abortion that can't be consistently applied. It would be in favor of killing toddlers. This is a tactic called “trotting out the toddler” where you say, "Well, is the reason that's given, would it actually apply to a toddler too?" Many of the reasons given do. There are many other ways we could look at this, but I want to give you some other examples also.

Some people will say, "You can't trust the Bible, it's written by men." I might ask that person, "Where did you first learn of this line of argument?" "Well, I read it in a Richard Dawkins book," they might say. "Okay." Now, I'm going to see if their way of reasoning as to how they can trust something is being consistently applied. I'm going to ask, "Is Richard Dawkins a man who wrote this book you read?" They're goi…