Judge Not By Race
To the Editor:
How generous, how fair, how broad-minded of the Forty Acres Club that it will admit official guests of the University, no matter what their physical characteristics!
Seriously speaking, a little sense is better than total nonsense.
How much longer can any club, especially any in a university community, remain blind to the truth that human worth consists in how people think, feel, and act?
In this country we have undertaken to judge people by their individual achievement, not their ancestry.
Being a “white person” is not an individual achievement, nor is not being white an absence of individual achievement.
This is a simple point, but the whole world is watching to see how long it will take us “North Americans” to catch on, that is, to be honest and intelligent about our own professed ideals.
The ideals are fine, the practice needs attention.
Charles Hartshorne
Dept. of Philosophy
Daily Texan
Jan. 14, 1964
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Creation Science
Rep. Mike Martin, who proposes a bill to require “creation science” in schools, seems to think that belief in evolution means disbelief in God.
For over a hundred years there have been devout believers in God who also believe in evolution. The Bible is a religious book; when it was written there were no sciences of physics or biology, consequently the relations of religion to science are not discussed in the Bible. The branches of learning dealing with relations of religion to science are philosophy and theology.
Philosophers and theologians separate the question, “Did evolution occur, much as scientists say it did?” from the question, “Does God, the supremely wise and good Creator of the universe, exist?” Science deals with relations of creatures, things in the world, to other things, later or earlier in time or elsewhere in space. Only theology and philosophy deal with relations of creatures to the Creator.
The proposed bill represents a misunderstanding. Most scientists, philosophers and theologians would, I believe, reject the attempt to identify scientific evolutionary biology with atheism. Atheism is a philosophical not a scientific theory. I write as a well-known philosopher who bas sometimes been called a theologian and is also known in a branch of biology (ornithology).
What might well be taught in schools are a few philosophical and theological ideas about the difference between religion and science.
Charles Hartshorne
724 Sparks Ave.
Austin American-Statesman
5/23/81
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The Innocent Fetus
Anti-abortionists keep telling us about the innocence of a fetus. A fetus is guiltless only because it lacks the brain development to know the difference between right and wrong. It does not act against its conscience because it bas no conscience. It is neither immoral nor moral. Being unable to distinguish right from wrong, it is not yet a person in the full dictionary sense.
Since no one defends abortion as punishment to fetus for its wrongdoing, the so-called innocence is irrelevant to the point of absurdity. So is the contention that the fetus is alive. The relevant question is, when is a developing human being a person, able to distinguish right from wrong? Only then is killing it murder in the proper sense. Even infanticide is not that.
Misuse of words is the chief weapon of the extreme opponents of women’s right to abort.
Charles Hartshorne
724 Sparks Ave.
Austin American-Statesman
Summer, 1982
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Letter Misunderstood
Letters to a newspaper are easily misunderstood. I did not say nor mean to imply that infanticide was justified. I said it was not murder in the full, normal sense of killing an actual person that is (Webster’s dictionary) an individual with “consciousness and a moral sense.”
Lots of things are wrong and many of them illegal that are not murder in the normal sense. Even William Buckley says that calling abortions “murder” is “metaphor,” that is, not literally true. I support the Supreme Court’s decision to legally permit abortion if the fetus is under five months old. I do not advocate permitting infanticide, though I would distinguish it from murder in the most proper sense.
Charles Hartshorne
724 Sparks Ave.
Austin American-Statesman
Summer, 1982
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These four letters were provided, as images of newspaper clippings, by Donald Wayne Viney.
HyC