A compressed 500-word summary of 'Evangelium Vitae' by Pope John Paul II (1995)

     Impermissible "crimes against life" include abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, capital punishment, genocide, and suicide. Artificial reproduction, prenatal medical testing, and organ donation are acceptable in some circumstances.
     The full meaning of life is found in eternal Christian life, but life on earth is also sacred. Christ is in everyone, so to attack life is to attack God. Even a murderer has dignity. God, although he punishes, has mercy.
     Killing should not be justified in the name of "individual freedom." Abortion degrades the medical profession and doctors should conscientiously object.
     Young people must be taught the meaning of sexuality, love, procreation, marriage, and chastity to form a pro-life conscience. It is disturbing when the conscience against abortion is missing.
     The materialistic worldview separates the "unitive" and "procreative" meanings of sexual intercourse. A couple should not wish to unite without procreating, nor to procreate without uniting. The married couple are "co-workers with God" as God's image appears in their child.
     New reproductive technology is troublesome because embryos conceived in a laboratory have a high fatality risk, and extra embryos are treated as material and discarded. Prenatal diagnostic tests are acceptable if aimed at the treatment of the baby, but unacceptable if aimed to selectively abort the fetus. Organ donation is "praiseworthy" but should not hasten the death of the donor.
     Although the culture considers suffering itself to be evil, suffering is really a mystery with meaning and value. The blood of Christ represents life and hope. The meaning of life can be learned through dying for one's brothers and sisters.
     Humans were given "dominion" over the world, but this should not be misconstrued as the right to use and misuse natural resources. We have moral responsibilities to the natural world. Man's "lordship" over himself and the world should reflect God's lordship.
     Popular consensus or "relativism" doesn't make a crime acceptable. The Biblical prophets "condemn offences against life" and "awaken hope for a new principle of life."
     Violence should not be used to protect public safety "if bloodless means are sufficient." A pro-life politician may support legislation aimed at limiting the harm of abortion.
     Deliberately killing an innocent person, from embryo to old age, can never be permitted, even as means to an end. No one can ask or consent to be killed or to kill someone in their care. A threat to a mother's health does not justify abortion. Choosing to die in childbirth is "heroic."
     Euthanasia is based on the idea of the elder as a burden. While there is no obligation to share Jesus's passion by refusing painkillers at the end of life, patients should not be drugged unconscious without good reason, so they may fulfill their "moral and family duties." True compassion means sharing someone's pain.
     "Suicide is always as morally objectionable as murder." (3.66)
     Democracy becomes empty if its moral foundation of respect for life is even questioned. Rejection of human life is rejection of Christ.
     Women who've had an abortion may repent and take the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

Pope John Paul II. Evangelium Vitae [The Gospel of Life]. Papal Encyclical, Rome, March 25, 1995. Official Vatican English translation.

This summary was written in 2005, along with a series of other 500-word summaries of philosophy books, as an exercise in brevity.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

one thing non-Catholics need to understand about the subset of 'traditionalist' Catholics who never accepted (or are suspicious of) the changes brought about the Second Vatican Council is that one of the things they were most upset about is that the church told them they had to give up hating Jews

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— Christopher Federico (@cmfederico.bsky.social) May 18, 2024 at 9:36 AM

A compressed 500-word summary of 'The Case for Christianity' by C. S. Lewis (1942)

Part 1: "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe"

     Everyone is aware of basic moral standards, knowing security and happiness depend on fair play, yet we fail to comply perfectly. An objective observer would never guess a Moral Law existed.
     The Moral Law encourages individuals to choose between impulses, but is neither impulse nor instinct. Though we teach it to children, we can't alter its content. Its universality is indicated by our quarrels over questions of fairness.
     Virtues are universal despite different cultural expression. When a moral standard appears to change significantly over time (e.g. executing witches), it is usually because factual knowledge has changed (e.g. witches donÍt exist).
     The "religious" view holds that humans were created by an intelligent being that prefers our good behavior, while the contrasting "materialist" view holds that the world was created through a series of impossibly slim chances.
     Christianity speaks only to people who already recognize the Moral Law and think they need forgiveness for failing to live up to it.

Part 2: "What Christians Believe"

     If the mind was produced by evolution, it is untrustworthy. "Unless I believe in God," Lewis wrote, "I can't believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God."
     Injustice does not disprove God's existence because the concept of injustice derives either from God's Moral Law or from personal preference.
     Abrahamic religions believe God made the universe and takes moral positions. Christians may think other religions are partly correct, whereas atheists must believe they're all wrong.
     Jesus talked as if he were God: forgiving sins, judging the world, always existing. He couldn't have spoken pantheistically (believing God animates the world and is beyond good and evil) because he was Jewish. He either told the truth about his divinity, or was crazy or evil; calling him merely a great teacher is not an option.
     The belief in a dualistic battle between good and evil is incoherent because no one is evil for evil's sake and because a third party would have to judge which side is "good." Christianity instead maintains there is "a civil war, a rebellion." The Devil gave Adam and Eve the desire to usurp God.
     It is more important to accept what Christ did--dying to cleanse us and conquer death--than to understand theories about it. Punishing the innocent Christ would have been unfair; rather, he paid our debt of repentance. He was the only one who could repent perfectly because was both God and man.
     We are given a choice to join God willingly before he invades the world. "Christians are Christ's body"; to have "Christ-life" means to be animated by Christ and to be helped by him to do good works. Accepting God is the only path to true happiness.

C. S. Lewis. The Case for Christianity. 1942) New York: MacMillan Co., 1960.

This summary was written in 2005, along with a series of other 500-word summaries of philosophy books, as an exercise in brevity.

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You may wish to read something much longer I wrote about my opinion on C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity.

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

A compressed 500-word summary of 'The Reasonableness of Christianity' by John Locke (1695)

     Because of Adam's disobedience and the punishment of mortality, humanity needs redemption. Jesus, the "Second Adam," restores men to eternal life.
     Was it fair to punish all humans for Adam's sin? It is not exactly a punishment, because immortality was never an entitlement to begin with. The Law of Works (also called the Law of Reason or Nature) is the only rational way to live. It applies to Gentiles as well as Jews because it can be discovered by reason and natural conscience. If people could obey it perfectly, they would be immortal, but they cannot. God cannot soften the law, because it would be against his nature and a slippery slope towards immorality.
     Faith makes up for shortcomings of works. Under the Law of Faith, a Christian is only required to believe that Jesus was the Messiah. (The Epistles include additional doctrines but they are not central to the faith.)
     The Messiah is the Deliverer and a metaphorical King. Jesus himself did not claim publicly to be the Messiah to avoid attracting negative attention from Jews who might have killed him. Until the Last Supper, Jesus did not make the claim to his own Apostles. Instead, Jesus performed miracles so people would realize he was the Messiah.
     Jesus chose Apostles who would trust him rather than question him and who would preach the uncomplicated doctrine that he was the Messiah. He chose, as Locke put it, "a company of Poor, Ignorant, Illiterate Men--but meer Children."
     Acknowledging a popular claim that the identification of Jesus as the Messiah is merely a "historical faith," not a "saving faith," Locke insists the Bible says it is sufficient and says he is not aware of any other doctrine that would be a "saving faith."
     God wants people to come heaven so they can praise him. He accepts people as long as they profess allegiance to Jesus the Messiah-King and make a sincere effort to follow to the Law of Works (otherwise, the Law of Faith would be an excuse for anarchy). Jesus required good works in the Sermon on the Mount and demanded repentance for sins. God would not demand more than is possible for people who lived before Jesus existed.
     People have always wanted to know their moral duty. Philosophers laid codes, but none had authority, and if people cherrypicked their moral beliefs from different philosophers, they would be accountable to no one. No one before Jesus managed to present the Natural Law in its entirety. "He was sent by God: His Miracles shew it; And the Authority of God in his Precepts cannot be questioned," Locke wrote. Another reason no other culture managed to develop virtue was that none had laid a firm belief in eternal life. It's not enough to say virtue is its own reward; the only way to encourage people to be virtuous is to impress upon them a belief in Heaven and Hell.

John Locke. The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures. (1695) Ed. John C. Higgins-Biddle. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.

This summary was written in 2005, along with a series of other 500-word summaries of philosophy books, as an exercise in brevity.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

See my thoughts on Joel Edward Goza's America's Unholy Ghosts, a book that discusses John Locke. My article is a 5-minute read, and the link I provided is unpaywalled. If you buy a paid membership, you don't have to worry about the paywall.

Knowledge of the First Indemonstrable Principle

Originally posted to Helium Network on June 24, 2012.

St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in the Second Article to his thirteenth-century Summa Theologica that "the first indemonstrable principle is that one cannot at the same time affirm and deny the same thing." Appealing to Aristotle's Metaphysics, he says that "this principle is based on the nature of being and nonbeing, and all other principles are based on it." He quickly concludes that "the first precept of the natural law is that we should do and seek good, and shun evil."

Appealing to a law of non-contradiction is a standard trope in Western philosophy that forms the cornerstone of many logical arguments. But is this principle really inflexible? How do you know what you think you know about it?

Qualities such as heat and cold, wetness and dryness, etc., are opposites, but you never see them at their "pure" extremes. Instead, whenever they describe something in nature, they appear somewhere along a spectrum. To say that something is partly wet is also to say that it is partly dry. This looks like a potential case of affirming and denying the same thing. Indeed, it seems that there is some inevitable contradiction in any assessment you might make about the qualities of a thing, since your words are only rough approximations of the world they describe and nothing is ever a pure example of the categories you attach to it. You try to be mostly right, but you are always a little bit wrong. You could speak for hours or write hundreds of pages and never get at the full, exact meaning of what you are trying to convey.

Furthermore, when such observations are made, they typically involve an observer whose subjective appraisal taints the "fact of the matter." For you to say that something is hot is to imply that it is warmer than you might normally expect and also to suggest that you attach a value judgment to it: a pleasingly hot dinner, perhaps, or a scaldingly hot one. Otherwise, if there were nothing interesting to report, why would you be speaking about its temperature? So when you affirm or deny something about your dinner, you're also affirming or denying something about yourself and what you find noteworthy.

This sort of psychological reading of even the simplest factual assertions introduces a new level of complexity. The hard material world may not seem to admit contradictions, but the soft abstractions of humanity certainly do. Happiness and sadness are opposites, yet you can be happy and sad at the same time. You may affirm and deny your happiness simultaneously because you do not know yourself well, because you know yourself too well, or because you wish to influence what others believe about your mental status regardless of whether you are convinced it is true.

As another example, if you ask someone whether they like chocolate, they might reasonably assume you are offering them a small dessert following a meal. In that case, they probably do like chocolate. But they would not like to be forced to eat three pounds of chocolate in the middle of the night. So there are different senses in which they do and do not like chocolate. It's that crucial interpretation that makes your sentence appear (mostly) true or (mostly) false.

Thomas Aquinas wants to apply the "first indemonstrable principle" to the ethical realm. To get started here, you would have to agree that good and evil are opposites; that to be one is not to be the other. This is not as straightforward as one might suppose, since it is not obvious whether evil is merely the absence of good or whether evil is some positive trait in itself that somehow opposes or frustrates good. Good and evil might be on a spectrum just as wet and dry are. After all, anyone giving an honest assessment of themself would have to admit they are neither wholly good nor wholly evil.

This brings you to the psychological angle which cannot be removed from questions of good and evil. If you meet two beggars and only have one coin, how do you choose which one to feed, or whether to feed yourself instead? To choose one person leaves another in the lurch. There is no option uncontaminated by complexity and the possibility of competing ethical valuations. You cannot choose good in one area without choosing the absence of good in another area. And whether you've chosen good at all is arguably a matter of opinion. The beggar who receives the coin will affirm that you've chosen good, while the one who goes hungry will deny that you've done so. How should you evaluate yourself? Why should it be impossible that both beggars' assessments of you are true? Why must you affirm one and deny the other?

There is another problem with Western philosophy's fixation on the supposed law of non-contradiction.  It is that arguments tend to reduce to only two sides. In the nineteenth century, Harriet Beecher Stowe, reflecting on Protestant-Catholic disputes about the proper reverence of the Virgin Mary, wrote in her essay "The Blessed Woman": "Truth has always had the fate of the shuttlecock between the conflicting battledoors of controversy." By this she implied that neither the typical Protestant nor Catholic argument captured what she saw as the real truth about Mary. In other words, the problem is that, when you frame your idea of what the argument is or should be, you tend to close off your imagination to solutions that lie outside the bounds of the argument you've just constructed.

Of course, there may be multiple religious opinions about all sorts of subjects, and many of these beliefs are compatible with each other. If one reduces these opinions to a simplistic debate about whether it is, or is not, proper to make a statue of the Virgin Mary, then one has framed the debate in a way that seems to force everyone to take sides - even those who are not Christian and should have no recommendation about the worship of Mary at all!

One would seem foolish, hypocritical, and untrustworthy if one went around publicly affirming and denying the very same statement. In this way, what Thomas Aquinas calls the "first indemonstrable principle" is somewhat of a social norm governing clear, reliable communication. Non-contradiction helps to manage useful pieces of information and creates boundaries in which people can respect each other. But it is not necessarily descriptive of the way things "actually are."

Fortunately, for many questions you are not called upon to affirm or deny anything at all. Most subjects to most people are irrelevant or beyond their ken. When you are asked to make a choice about some obscure or abstract question, you should be suspicious not just about which of two options is more correct, but about what motivates someone to ask someone to "pick sides" in the first place.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.