Saturday, February 25, 2012

Yet Another Black Eye for the Pascal Lecture Series

The Pascal lecture series at my university, the University of Waterloo, has a history of inviting really terrible speakers. (Why a public university should be sponsoring an explicitly evangelical lecture series is a good and legitimate question, but not one I'll address today.)

You can read about last year's embarrassing choice, Mary Poplin, here, here, and here.

I didn't think it was possible, but this year's choice seems even worse than last year's. It is Charles E. Rice, an emeritus professor of law at Notre Dame. Rice is a big believer in "natural law", which (big surprise) just so happens to coincide with the Catholic Church's stance on everything from contraception to abortion to gay marriage. Here you can read Professor Rice's enlightened views about homosexuality.

You can watch 10 minutes of Rice in action here on Youtube. How many distortions and misrepresentations can you find? It'd be great to see the rest of this lecture, but I haven't been able to find it anywhere. Maybe some reader can help out.

Rice, by the way, is a director of the Thomas More Law Center, the legal organization that lost the Kitzmiller v. Dover intelligent design case. Here you can read Professor Rice's deep and penetrating analysis of the issues involved in that case.

While not an outright birther, he seems to have some sympathy with the birther movement, as evidenced by this column. Money quote: "The American people do not know whether the current President achieved election by misrepresenting, innocently or by fraud, his eligibility for that office."

I've been reading Rice's book, 50 Questions on the Natural Law. Stay tuned.

6 comments:

John said...

"The American people do not know whether the current President achieved election by misrepresenting, innocently or by fraud, his eligibility for that office."

That could apply to any president. Why target this one specifically? </sarcasm>

Anonymous said...

Jeff, the Catholic stance coincides with natural law because it is based on natural law, which itself as old as Aristotle at least...

Jeffrey Shallit said...

You missed the point completely, Anonymous. "Natural law" is a fiction. 150 years ago, it was "natural law" that blacks and whites should not mix - hence anti-miscegenation laws. Aristotle said nothing about contraception! "Natural law" just means whatever prejudices the speaker has.

I was being sarcastic - sorry you missed that.

Anonymous said...

Marrying a person of different skin tone does not contradict what the nature of being a human person is.

The study of natural law is rather rigorous and it should have been plain to anyone that it does not apply in that case.

Why should Aristotle have spoken about contraception? We don't expect Archimedes to have spoken explicitly on differentiation...

Miranda said...

"Aristotle said nothing about contraception!"

I guess you never read Historia Animalium.

John said...

Anonymous,
"We don't expect Archimedes to have spoken explicitly on differentiation"

No, but he had some things to say about integration.

The Archimedes Palimpsest