Congratulations! It's a Boy...We Think

Reprinted with permission from Baptist Bulletin, May/June, 2010. All rights reserved.

My older daughter is pursuing a degree at the local extension of one of our state universities. Not surprisingly, the course offerings are more limited than at the main campus, and since she is pursuing a career in social work, she signed up for one of the required courses in Women’s Studies.

Women’s Studies

Women’s Studies is a relatively recent and notoriously doctrinaire addition to university departments, and I had warned my daughter about what she was likely to encounter: the most shrill, angry, and even irrational fringes of the feminist movement. Indeed, some of the more extreme apologists for Women’s Studies have claimed that rationality is a male way of thinking and should not be imposed on females. Still, we were both taken aback at the unbending and unapologetic polemics of the course, which turned out to be primarily a barrage of propaganda in support of all manner of nonheterosexual identities and behaviors: gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual (those who through surgery and hormone treatments have tried to alter their gender). There was little of what would normally be called scholarship, and, in any event, scholarship—the discovery, examination, synthesis, and application of information—was not the aim of the course. The aim was the propagation of a set of attitudes about the subject, and the acceptable set was not simply tolerance, but approval and advocacy. It was a course that violated everything universities claim about themselves: places where truth is pursued and disseminated objectively and fairly, and where differences of opinion are welcomed as part of this pursuit. In point of fact, dissent was bullied into silence, and probing questions were shuffled off as inappropriate to the course’s aims—as, of course, they were. Small wonder, then, that my daughter came to refer to this course as an encounter with the Lesbian Gestapo.

Radical subjectivity

What caught my special attention was the glossary of terms that were central to the course’s vocabulary, this one in particular: “Sex: an identity assigned at birth by doctors, parents, and others.” Here, clear and dramatic, was the central issue dividing a Christian mind, a Christian understanding of truth, from what has come to be called postmodernism. Here was an example of the watershed issue of thinking and understanding in the first decade of the 21st century. Here we are confronting what I’ll call radical subjectivity.

The question is this: Is truth external and independent of our own minds, or is truth contingent and variable, simply a social, political, and psychological construct?

If the first is true, if truth is objective, then we must conform our understanding and our behavior to its contours. Scripture puts it this way: “This is the way; walk in it.” The task of a Christian thinker, then, is to learn what is true—that is to say, to discover some part of the mind of God—and conform our understanding and our behavior to that truth.

Sometimes this is physical truth, and only lunatics would try to ignore the facts of physics. If the lift force of an airplane’s wings is inadequate to overcome the plane’s weight—because of overloading, say—then the plane won’t fly. This fact is not contingent on my understanding or wishes or on the experiences that shaped my psychological outlook. It just is, and to ignore it is to ensure disaster. It matters not at all if the plane’s designers and pilot are Christians. It’s not “their” physics. It works the same for everybody, and all designers and pilots had better understand what is required to get the plane in the air and keep it there. This is not an assigned understanding; it’s a recognition of what is and how things work.

Christians insist there is also what I’ll call a moral universe, whose laws are, like the laws of physics, both discoverable and binding.

It’s not only Christians who believe this. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson appealed to the “laws of nature and of nature’s God.” And when another son of the Enlightenment, Ben Franklin, set out in pursuit of moral perfection, he made a chart of 13 virtues, such as chastity and temperance, and measured his daily behavior against this standard.

Of course Franklin never achieved anything like moral perfection, but the point here is that he recognized a universally authoritative, objective standard of right behavior. To be morally responsible required him to measure his conduct against that standard. The blots Franklin entered on the chart marked his recognition that he had often been “found wanting,” that he had not measured up. This standard was not “his morality,” as the contemporary phrase would have it, but existed independently and was binding upon everyone.

Objective vs. subjective

So what lies behind the astonishing definition of sex that my daughter encountered in her classroom? The answer is a denial of the most obvious implications of a biological fact, that to be born with male sex organs means one is a male, and to be born with female reproductive organs means one is a female.

One would think this identity is obvious: The doctor holds up the newly delivered infant, takes a look at the plumbing, and announces, “It’s a boy.” It’s really not hard to tell; after all, generation after generation has been able to tell, and in precisely the same way: they looked at what was there. And, contrary to what my daughter’s instructor claimed, this sexual identity is not assigned; it’s recognized.

And from this recognition certain behavioral expectations follow. Male and female organs, whether belonging to roosters and hens, stags and does, or men and women, are complementary. They have their purposes, and we understand what those purposes are, just as we understand that the forms of our molars or our ears or our nostrils indicate their functions.

But none of this matters to the radical subjectivists. Biological facts don’t determine gender identification; what matters is how they feel. If an anatomical male says he feels like a girl, well, it’s up to him to decide which he is.

And if anatomy is not recognized as determiners of sex, it’s hardly surprising that many postmodern thinkers reject the idea of objective moral standards. In other words, if sexual identity is not a matter of easily observed objective biological markers, but is instead a matter of how one feels—if sexual identification is unmoored from sexual facts—then it’s easy to reject the idea of objective moral markers. My conduct will be guided and judged not by referencing a standard outside my own preferences and inclinations, a standard that includes virtues such as chastity and temperance, but by—well, by referencing what? Anything at all?

Only myself and those in my identity group

If there is no external referent for our conduct, then how can we tell if we’re doing the right thing? If, as so many now insist, what used to be understood as moral statements—“thou shalt’s” and “thou shalt not’s”—are merely statements of power (if, for example, objections to abortion are only the rhetoric of those trying to maintain the subjugation of women), then by what standard is behavior to be judged?

In other words, when people insist that “morality can’t be legislated,” and “you can’t impose your morality on me,” they are disclaiming any common moral authority, an authority outside merely individual preferences; so how can anyone judge what is right conduct?

And here, of course, the postmodern ethicist has run himself into a cul-de-sac, for he cannot live in a world devoid of objective moral standards. He won’t talk long without making value statements that he believes to be morally binding on everyone. When, for example, he declares that a ban on abortion is unfair to women, he has just abandoned his claim that there are no universal moral absolutes. He is saying that we all have the idea that people should be treated fairly. He is adamant about this. He would be shocked if someone replied, “Well, who cares about fairness? That’s your morality, and you should not try to impose it on anyone else.”

There are plenty of arguments about what “fair” means.

Is it fair to try to treat every child in the family exactly the same, or does fair treatment take into account differences in age, temperament, and talents? Is it fair that Bill Gates must pay taxes at a higher rate than I do to use the same interstate highway and be protected by the same military forces? Is it fair that a genetically gifted athlete earns millions playing games while a hard-working field hand gets little more than minimum wage for producing our food?

Here’s the point: We can argue about the application of a moral truth, but only because we recognize that moral truth, that fact in the moral universe. Otherwise, we are simply reporting feeling and preferences.

Christians must take care to keep in mind Scriptural bases for making judgments. I am uneasy when my students tell me that the day’s chapel was a “good” one because they had “felt really blessed.” I’m glad they felt good, but all too often, I’m afraid, they really mean they were excited. It would be just as easy to say, as some might have said, that it was a “bad” chapel because it didn’t excite them. The referent for judgment is their own feelings and little else.

Men and women walk away from marriages, abandoning sacred vows and damaging their children’s sense of security, for the same reason. They believe something else—or someone else—will produce better feelings, and that is the standard of moral measurement. Good people leave good churches because, they claim, their needs are not being met.

Feelings matter. But they cannot be the standard driving our conduct. Devoted soldiers do their duty even when—especially when—they are tired and hungry and frightened. Responsible adults go to work when they’d rather snooze or golf or fish. Good parents care for their children every day, including days when the kids are cranky, disrespectful, and generally unpleasant to be around.

In an age when we hear daily that truth depends, that truth is contingent, Christians must remember that we live in the kingdom of the great I Am, the One Who embodies eternal truth. It is His righteousness, not our own, that we must seek, embrace, and live out.


Jim Hills teaches American Thought and Culture at Corban College, Salem, Oregon.

Discussion

how are we supposed to take this essay seriously when it fails to interact in any meaningful way with anything from the social or biological sciences and instead seems to just be a knee-jerk reaction to the author’s understanding of postmodernism?

What would the social or biological sciences have to do with it? I think you have missed the argument. What it’s about is radical subjectivity. The gender issue is just an illustration of how far into absurdity this kind of epistemology has taken us.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

[Aaron Blumer] What would the social or biological sciences have to do with it? I think you have missed the argument. What it’s about is radical subjectivity. The gender issue is just an illustration of how far into absurdity this kind of epistemology has taken us.
I can’t speak to social sciences, but biology speaks for itself. Because of the fall (though that would not be recognized by evolutionary biologists), we have to deal with the actual existence (not just declaration) of sexually-ambiguous humans. Of course, the people referred-to in the article would take that whole concept much further, and make gender a construct solely of the mind and what people want it to be. That doesn’t negate the fact of the fall’s effect on even an area as basic and foundational as gender. Some people really have to deal with the reality of hearing “It’s a boy, we think …,” and our faith has to be able to take even this into account, as uncomfortable as it might be to have to consider.

Dave Barnhart

i don’t think he’s interacting with the subject because looking in a recent dictionary for http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sex] sex and http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/gender] gender would have shown that some definition include the cultural, psychological, functional, etc. distinctions between men and women. sometimes this part of the definition is called gender or sexual identity. some groups make different distinctions between gender and sex than others. for example, the world health organization defines gender and sex the opposite of the definition in jim hill’s example ( http://www.who.int/gender/whatisgender/en/index.html what do we mean by “sex” and “gender”? ).

gender identity is not just a construct of the social sciences. medical science also diagnoses gender identity disorder.

even if you don’t agree with those in women’s studies about the extent of the identity that is culturally assigned, a historical study will show that most of the modern ideas about gender identity have not been fixed through all times, cultures or places.

anatomy is not a sure test for biological sex. in addition to the birth defects dcbii mentions, there are also other kinds of ambiguities like the case of caster semenya that was recently in the news.

now if the main example of the article is handled carelessly, what about the rest of the article. is the main point still true that morality requires a universal absolute? maybe, maybe not. but i don’t think there’s anything like a convincing case in this article.

the examples of morality from jefferson and franklin do not mean that their morality was from some universal absolute instead of some conception from their time and culture. jefferson was no theologian (see ” http://history.hanover.edu/hhr/hhr93_1.html Who is Nature’s God? ” for a more thorough look), and it seems like the only reason for quoting from america’s founders would be to convince those who were already convinced of the revisionist idea of america being a christian nation. also neglected was that franklin never tried to reach perfection with all of his 13 virtues at the same time. he only tried to be perfect with them one at a time, and then satisfied that he was capable, moved on with his life (” http://www.ftrain.com/franklin_improving_self.html Benjamin Franklin on Moral Perfection “).

the example of soldiers also struck me as false. see grossman’s on killing for many examples and psychological justification for why even devout soldiers avoid their duty.

I think the point of the piece is pretty clear regardless of quibbles about the examples. Popular postmodernism increasingly rejects the idea that anything is true beyond the opinions/perceptions of observers. But that way of looking at truth is self defeating. If nothing is “true” in a sense that transcends my point of view, then the idea that “nothing is true in a sense that transcends my point of view” is also only true to those who see it that way. So you have some folks—like me—living in a universe where truth exists independently of what anyone thinks, and other people who live in a universe where it’s all a matter of how you feel. Do we live in two universes? I’m sure radical postmodernists have special terms for these problems and complicated ways of not facing them, but they are there, nonetheless. You can’t posit such a world without embracing irrationality.

Dave’s right though that there are exceptional cases where gender is more complicated that usual. But as he suggests, the point is not dependent on there being no exceptions but rather on there being a norm that makes it possible to recognize “exceptions.”

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

I know nothing except that which God has revealed to me by His Word.
Sorry, Dave, but I can’t let that slide. Science and our own increased technology to view the universe has shown us far more than what the Bible touches. You simply can’t put the Bible side-by-side with a PDR and declare that all you need to know about “medical science” is housed in the Bible and that the PDR can’t be trusted because it was compiled by sinners.

I realize the author’s intent was to demonstrate that relativism can go haywire but at the same time, the cavalier attitude with which he approaches the issue, dismissing or marginalizing those times when medical science disagrees with his neat and tidy packaged conclusion, casts a shadow on the rest of the essay. Put another way, like one of my Bible teachers used to say, “Great message; I just wish he would have gotten it from a different passage.”

Psalm 19, Romans 1… but really, it’s self-evident. We can only read the Bible because we learned how to read from sources other than the Bible.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Dave, are you being sarcastic? I ask because I’m really not sure. Saying that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west is not incompatible with the observation that the earth moves around the sun, just like all the other eight planets (I include Pluto here, but that, too, is for a later discussion), because from the perspective of the observer who is whizzing through space at give or take 30km/s, despite the fact that he is moving, the sun is what appears to be doing the moving. In reality the sun is in the same fixed location in the galaxy (more or less) and it is we who are moving around it.

Might be interesting to get RPittman involved at this point. I was arguing a while back in another thread that there is a long tradition of using information gained through the senses about “immanent reality” to refine and shape our interpretations of Scripture. What I asserted then, and continue to believe, goes kind of like this:

  1. We know we all make mistakes interpreting Scripture
  2. We know we do arrive at some truth by observation and reasoning
  3. We know that all truth is ultimately harmonious. God is its author and all truth agrees with all other truth.
  4. Sometimes what we observe via the senses (and reason from) exposes our mistakes of interpretation.
    The idea of the earth being the center and the sun moving around it is one of those. It’s not about “swallowing the notion hook line and sinker” it’s about using good sense. There are dozens of ways to verify that the earth moves around the sun if you do some observing and then do the math.

    Nice thing about math: anybody can check it. If it works at all, it works for all (until you get into the really, really obscure stuff only a few people are capable of understanding… but even then it works for all who are capable of grasping it).

    But we’re a wee bit off topic … I am a believer that theology must constrain Science and not vice versa.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

The difference between this discussion and the case of Columbus is that Columbus was the first to observe and report back his findings. Observation of the natural world will always harmonize with God’s description of his creation. There are countless examples of beliefs about science or history that have had to change in the light of observation. Pure observation, simply seeing what is out there, is not colored by sin nature or rebellion. Saints and scorners alike will validate that grass is green. So when a telescope, a machine, records that the planets are moving around the sun, and we then read about the sun rising or standing still, we must harmonize observation with scripture. If the two cannot be harmonized at all, then we must refine our observtions. But if the two do agree or can be harmonized in the light of each other, there is no shame in admitting this and settling on it as acceptable.

Pure observation shows that the Earth moves around the sun. Pure observation of other close-by star systems show the same. Pure math (1+1 always = 2) describes future movement perfectly and precisely. New planets are discovered by the math that describes our planet’s orbit. You are welcome to say that nearly everyone in the last 500 years, from those with backyard telescopes to billion-dollar observatories, saints and sinners alike, are incorrect and you are right, but I see no wrong in interpreting your proof texts as a simple turn of phrase rather than a scientific treatise.

Should I infer from your remarks that I am therefore unsaved? You did, after all, accuse those who did not take your texts (among others) literally of being “so-called ‘Christians’ ” which I assume means they are not true Christians. If that is the case, am I to understand further that the position of the Earth in relation to the sun is a key point of salvation, and if one holds an “incorrect view” he cannot be saved?

It’s part of my growing trust in the Lord, His action of transforming my mind by His Word, to reject as untrustworthy everything that sinful man has “accomplished”. Oh, there’s probably a lot of truth there, but the jury is still out as to its accuracy from my point of view.
Nope, the jury is already back. It took less than one second because the evidence is that you trust all kinds of things that are accomplished by sinful man. You trust your bank, bridges, buildings, elevators, car brakes, airplanes, computers, dollar bills, and the list could go on and on. Sinful man, because of the image of God and God’s common grace is able to accomplish all kinds of trustworthy things.

No, Dave, all is not relative, and nothing I said suggests that. But the idea that we cannot trust anything that sinful man accomplishes is not an idea that comes from the Bible. Nor is it an idea that you (or anyone else) lives by. It is not a part of any biblical doctrine.

I think the objections to the article are misplaced. But think of what you have done here just today. You accused those who believe that dynamic equivalence is a valid theory of translation as being unbelievers headed for hell. Your clarification was not particularly convincing. And if you believe what you said over there, then yes, you are among people you don’t know. The Bible does not make that a test of salvation.

Here in this thread you essentially accuse people who believe in a solar centric creation as not believing the Bible. Again, that’s simply a false standard.

The idea that man’s mind is affected by sin is affirmed here by most, I imagine. But you have to understand what that means. It does not mean that man can do nothing good. In fact, the biblical teaching on total depravity affirms that unsaved man can do much civic good. It means that his spiritual reasoning is corrupt. It does not mean that he cannot offer any valid scientific contributions to society. You are failing to make clear the biblical distinction of spiritual reasoning and blindness. Unbelievers clearly can make valid contributions in all kinds of fields, and you believe that I imagine. The question is, Why not interact with the evidence that I used to suggest that you don’t actually believe what you said?

I am a young earth creationist. So I reject much of what is called science. I reject the social engineering type of things that are being put forth by some, perhaps even in this thread. So your mindset about biblical authority is not alone here. Many of us share that mindset.

But as you say, growth takes time and perhaps the few years will help you in that regard.

Dave… just some questions because I’m curious.
  • Is it your belief that the observations and reasonings of sinful men are wrong 100% of time?
  • If “the world is established, so that it cannot be moved” (Ps.93.1) means it is fixed in space and motionless, was David fixed in space and motionless?

    (In Ps40:2 he says his steps are “established” and in Ps16:8 says he will never be moved… same Hebrew as in Ps93.1, by the way)
Like I said, just curious.

Now if I can just think of a way to tie this into the actual topic… OK, here’s a link: there is something sort of postmodern about affirming mutually-contradictory ideas. Nonsense is the new sense.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.