People aren’t anti vax or climate change deniers because it wasn’t taught in school. They just choose to ignore evidence, and arguments, and reason.
This is somewhat uncharitable because this conspiratorial thinking is the result of an understandable lack of trust in our institutions. For example, a lot of Black folk initially didn’t want to get the vaccine because the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” experiment is still in living memory.
They just choose the emotional “reason” of “b-but its a baaby”. They dismiss any education on a fetus, in fact, not being a baby.
This is a blatant straw-man. The question “When does human life begin?” is inherently philosophical in nature. We may, as educated persons, reasonably defer to science for an answer. This isn’t the same, however, as science answering the question. Further, religious people who believe human beings have souls are unlikely to defer to science. The notion of a soul is outside the purview of science, and so presenting scientific facts to them will be ineffective. (For more, see the mind-body problem in the history of philosophy.)
The point here is not to say that they have a good argument to enforce pro-life on the rest of us. Why should religious belief in human souls constrain the conduct of non-believers? Rather, my point is that you have completely misrepresenting the opposing view in order to preach to the choir.
This is somewhat uncharitable because this conspiratorial thinking is the result of an understandable lack of trust in our institutions. For example, a lot of Black folk initially didn’t want to get the vaccine because the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” experiment is still in living memory.
This is a blatant straw-man. The question “When does human life begin?” is inherently philosophical in nature. We may, as educated persons, reasonably defer to science for an answer. This isn’t the same, however, as science answering the question. Further, religious people who believe human beings have souls are unlikely to defer to science. The notion of a soul is outside the purview of science, and so presenting scientific facts to them will be ineffective. (For more, see the mind-body problem in the history of philosophy.)
The point here is not to say that they have a good argument to enforce pro-life on the rest of us. Why should religious belief in human souls constrain the conduct of non-believers? Rather, my point is that you have completely misrepresenting the opposing view in order to preach to the choir.