Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger In League With White Nationalism? Only A Hack Like WSJ's William McGurn Would Push That

What to make of WSJ columnist William McGurn's claims in his Sept. 1 op-ed 'White Supremacy and Abortion', p. 15, in which he writes:

"Black pro-lifers are treated as if they don't exist. Quick example: how many outlets even reported the National Day of Mourning, with a prayer service for all the black lives lost to abortion?"

Seriously, does McGurn even care? Does he even give a shit apart from being able to employ reverse identity politics to spin his bunkum in an effort to get more blacks to side with the Right?  After all, we're well aware -  from a recent NY Review of Books piece ('The Culmination of Republican Decay' (Oct. 10, p. 10) by Sean Wilentz,   and Tim Alberta's 'American Carnage'-   that "Republicans were driven crazy over issues to do with race based on 'Obama's perceived exploitation of racially driven politics."

And what triggered that craziness?  Well, "Obama's emotional response to the murder of Trayvon Martin".  In other words, Obama rendering a human, compassionate response to a black kid's murder sent the Reepos' brains off the edge.  How to get back? Well, dig up the old eugenics bogey and pin that tail on those like Margaret Sanger, who did her utmost to ensure all poor women - white or black - were not saddled with more kids than they could support.

And this is relevant because in many other McGurn screeds we see him ripping poor and working class folk for not doing more to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps as opposed to depending on food stamps, Medicaid or other government support.  As for the question at the end of his quote above, why would national outlets pander to a PR stunt which is what that 'national day of mourning' was.  As a reality check on this bullshit we can cite Ethics prof Cheryl Mendelson's observation - from her book, 'The Good Life' (p. 159) regarding nature's rate of disposing of fetuses:

"Nature sloughs off early pregnancies at a high rate and we do not hold funerals for these embryos and early fetuses.  As many as 60 to 70 percent of fertilized eggs are lost overall, usually silently - without anyone ever knowing fertilization took place. 

Up to 15 percent of known pregnancies miscarry in the first trimester. Were we to take seriously the morbid pseudo-moralism ... we would recognize these countless millions of miscarried embryos and fetuses as lost lives..."

In other words, each day there's a still birth or other untoward natural event  resulting in a fetus' termination - if people really cared -  we'd see a full- on funeral, burial service, even a memorial.   But we don't.  Why not? Because nature is "sloughing off"  early pregnancies at a rate at which no sane person can keep up. And in addition, these naturally -aborted entities are not regarded as full human persons.  Nor should they be.  Recall, as Antony Flew once noted, this is the genetic fallacy, basically like asserting an acorn is an oak tree because it is going to become such.

  But those like McGurn keep beating the drum of pseudo outrage because they want poor black women to feel guilt at having an abortion.  Oh, and thereby making a concrete effort to stave off having to access the government benefits like food stamps - which actions McGurn also condemns!  

So no surprise McGurn would also turn his sights on Margaret Sanger (ibid.) intimating she'd possibly elicit the black pro-lifers to believe she "wanted to exterminate the Negro population" at the time.   This, given: 

 "It was Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, who in the Negro Project - started a campaign to get African Americans to have fewer children".

An evil, nefarious plot? Hell no!  Sanger was simply percipient enough to see how African -Americans were being held down economically by a white capitalist overclass, and prevented from getting livable wages.  Wages - as well as decent housing - that would have delivered a secure financial foothold. In this setting, the absence of birth control leading to 6, 7 and even 8 or more kids, was a virtual death sentence in Whitey America.   At the very least it was a condemnation to endless indignity,  scraping from hand to mouth, beggary and early demise - physical and mental.  There were no government benefits that could be effectively summoned at that time, whether food stamps or Medicaid, and it was long before the era of Affirmative Action.  So, minus the economic leveraging via fewer births (birth control) African-Americans remained at perpetual disadvantage.   

As for the "Negro Project",  we learn this from a piece in Rewire News e.g.

https://rewire.news/article/2015/08/20/false-narratives-margaret-sanger-used-shame-black-women/

"In her seminal book Killing the Black Body, Dorothy Roberts points out that leaders in the Black community actually welcomed Sanger’s birth control agenda in the 1930s, and even criticized it for not going far enough to serve Black people.
W. E. B. Du Bois, who was one of the first Black leaders to publicly support birth control and who worked closely with Sanger to advocate for it, even serving on the board of a clinic that Sanger opened up in Harlem, criticized the wider birth control movement because of its failure to address Black people’s needs as well."

Further and most germane to McGurn's agenda:

'The Negro Project had nothing to do with some nefarious plot to exterminate Black people or to “sterilize unknowing Black women,” as claimed by BlackGenocide.org—which is a widely read website seemingly dedicated to spreading false information about Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood.

Rather, the Negro Project was a concerted effort by Sanger and Black community leaders to bring birth control to the South in a way that would assuage the deep-seated fears of Black birth control opponents like Marcus Garvey, who believed that the use of birth control in the Black community was tantamount to Black genocide.

Many opponents of Planned Parenthood purposefully obfuscate this history in order to paint Sanger, and in turn Planned Parenthood itself, as spearheading a plot to kill off Black people."

Thus,  American women  - black and white - owe Margaret Sanger a debt of gratitude for providing the future basis for a choice NOT to remain barefoot, poor and pregnant.  While we're at it, let's point out that Sanger was actually anti-abortion. As noted from the Rewire article:

"Sanger opposed abortion. She believed it to be a barbaric practice. In her own words, “[a]lthough abortion may be resorted to in order to save the life of the mother, the practice of it merely for limitation of offspring is dangerous and vicious.” Her views are, ironically, in keeping with the views of many of the anti-choicers who malign and distort her legacy. In fact, Planned Parenthood did not even begin performing abortions until after 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade legalized the practice."

Of course, distortion artists like William McGurn would always prefer lies and misrepresentation to potential female liberation, because, well... he's a rich white man.  A white man with no principles or ethics who in his piece attempts to elide those like Margaret Sanger, abortion providers, birth control providers, with white nationalist scum. 

The choicest remark at all McGurn leaves to the end:

"But no pro lifer ever said life was easy. We say life is beautiful!"

Yeppers, so long as you and your capitalist ilk don't have to raise taxes to provide food stamps, Medicaid or even child care - to help those poor women who actually DO  give birth.  In other words, McGurn's bandwagon is fully aboard to defend the rights of the unborn.  Just don't ask them to do anything for those already born! They are on their own in McGurn's 'dog eat dog'  world.

Update: WSJ Letter response from Alexis McGill Johnson, President & CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation:
--------------------------------------

"William McGurn's description of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger's  'Negro project' is callous and incorrect. A full reading of Sanger's leter about the project reveals her outlining the important role black doctors and nurses serve to calm concerns about eugenics, not to promote it.  Planned Parenthood denounces eugenics because we believe every person - regardless of race or income - should have the freedom to make their own decisions about their body. 

Framing access to reproductive health care and bodily autonomy as eugenics exposes a fundamental misunderstanding of the racialized gender oppression on which anti-abortionists stand. The truth is that the anti-abortion movement was born out of racist and xenophobic concerns about the falling white birth rate- which you still hear in white supremacist rhetoric.

We stand with black women and refuse to cower to the misogny and white supremacy that seeks to deny autonomy and access to the full spectrum of reproductive health care, including abortion."

See also:

Taxes | Wealth Inequality

The Wealthiest Americans Haven’t Paid Their Fair Share in Decades

Anti-Abortion Crackers In GA, AL Put American Women In Their Sights With Draconian 'Life-in-Prison' Laws

Idiotic flyer circulated by the Right's zombie anti-abortionists in 2015 after Cecil the lion was butchered by renegade hunters.

Many likely recall 4 years ago when the Right's febrile reactionaries got so worked up over "Cecil the Lion" they decried the world's  grief at his butchering by renegade hunters.  The outcry from the Right's wackos was: "So what when  hundreds of human babies are being annihilated every day?"  Leave aside for the moment the fact that no sane person in his or her right mind can possibly regard a "zygote" as a person, or a fetus as an (already born) "baby". There is simply no standard by which that passes even elemental laws or tests of logic, or science.  A child cannot be "unborn" because by definition it is already born!  Thus, we send the 'child' to school, get him to do his homework, to take his medicine, cross streets safely, respect his elders and so on. If unborn, it's a fetus, not a "child" and not a "baby",   so all those activities are preposterous. They also show the entity is not a person. Don't these ignorant twits know any better?  Did they even take basic high school biology?

A person, a human person, must have at least minimal capacity for basic cognition and rudimentary choice. It must possess a brain, at the very least, which evinces definite brain waves. Anything that doesn't is a proto-human entity, but clearly not a person. The logical error made is called the "genetic fallacy" as first described by Antony Flew ('Thinking About Thinking'). That is, arguing that because a thing is going to become something, it IS something. It would be like me picking up an acorn and claiming it's an oak tree. Nope. No way. Only an insane person would assert that!

No, not when they're on their zealot bandwagons, now trying to get anti-abortion legislation before Trump's Supreme Court in the hope of overturning Roe.  Thus, millions of women who've felt secure they could access abortion services the past 4 decades now have reason to worry. 

Last Tuesday,  the inbred crackers in the state house of Georgia passed a so-called “heartbeat” bill, scheduled to take effect in January 2020.  This egregious law would ban abortions as early as the sixth week of pregnancy, when, as anti-abortion activists argue, a fetal heartbeat can be detected. It’s a time before many women realize they are pregnant. Brian Kemp is the fourth governor to sign such a law in 2019, and the sixth overall, including the governors of Ohio, Mississippi, Kentucky, Iowa and North Dakota.

Georgia’s law, HB481, or the Living Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, is particularly extreme because it requires that the state “recognize unborn children as natural persons,” and that they “shall be included in population based determinations.” As Mark Joseph Stern writes in Slate, because Georgia is a death-penalty state, absent any added limitations, the law “would subject women who get illegal abortions to life imprisonment and the death penalty.”

Think this is odious?    The Reepo State crackers of Alabama have a near-total abortion ban in the works. Last week, that state’s House of Representatives passed HB 344, the Human Life Protection Act, by a vote of 74-3. The bill would make abortion a Class A felony, meaning Alabama doctors who perform abortions could face up to 99 years in prison.   Worse, this misbegotten law passed the AL  House without an exemption for cases of rape, although 28 representatives refused to vote. Thursday morning, the Senate also rejected the exemption, but delayed the vote on the bill until next week, according to The New York Times.

Democratic state Senator Bobby Singleton tagged this pathological travesty disguised as a "law" correctly:  (WSJ, May 10, p. A3):

"This is just a red meat kind of bill for the Republican party nationally.  Think about what we're about to do here in this state, and how we're going to deal with the ability of a woman to make her own choice,"

Or have sovereignty over her own body, even in cases of rape and incest.   I mean, no exemptions? Only a  gaggle of madmen could craft such a degenerate law and think they've done the pro-life crowd proud.  I mean what are these forlorn crackers going to do, prosecute nature for her even more frequent aborting of fetuses?   Recall ethicist Cheryl Mendelson's point ('The Good Life', p. 159):

"Nature sloughs off early pregnancies at a high rate and we do not hold funerals for these embryos and early fetuses.  As many as 60 to 70 percent of fertilized eggs are lost overall, usually silently - without anyone ever knowing fertilization took place. Up to 15 percent of known pregnancies miscarry in the first trimester. Were we to take seriously the morbid pseudo-moralism of the fundamentalist Right, we would recognize these countless millions of miscarried embryos and fetuses as lost lives and be sunk in a vast and permanent sea of endless mourning for the unending deaths of innocents."

My argument is that if nature-biology is an even worse offender it is senseless for the Alabama or Georgia crackers to carry on their Jacobin crusade against women if they don't address that. 

The good new is that Pro-choice activists are already gearing up for legal challenges in Georgia. In a statement after Brian Kemp signed the Georgia bill, Elisabeth Smith, chief counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, called the law “bafflingly unconstitutional.” She added, “Bans like this have always been blocked by courts. We will be suing Georgia to make sure this law has the same fate.”

Let's even go beyond all these bullshit laws and say outright that the  Right's minions don't really give a crap about life, by which I mean fully developed life - as in the already born child.

  If they were genuinely serious in their respect and extraordinary concern for the unborn - they'd show lots more concern as well as action on behalf of the already born!   Logically, on a putative  continuum of care, if one is judicious in ensuring the nurture and survival of the unborn one continues for the born.  But these sanctimonious, hypocritical assholes do not.

Truth be told,  all those screeching loudest in Alabama, Georgia and the other states mounting these vile challenges to Roe,  are happy to turn a blind eye to the needs of the already born. Thus, they are near sighted in vociferously defending unborn life be preserved but failing to stretch that concern to supporting life of actual real life humans- already born.  Thus, their hand-wringing over the "value of life in the womb"   comes up hollow. One could then ask them what they are doing:

- To provide affordable health care and proper nutrition benefits to the baby-child. (If against Obamacare and specifically contraception then they are enablers of the abortions they complain about)

- To provide state-run and paid for child care to a mom trying to get off welfare, or to be able to work.

- To provide PAID family leave for a working mom (or dad) to spend time caring for actual newborns - as opposed to fretting about using up paid sick leave or vacation time.  This contrasted with Bulgaria where 59 weeks of maternity leave is assured at 90 percent of salary.

- To provide free schooling, right through university, as Barbados and other progressive nations have done. 

If you're only pro-life to birth and not beyond, then you're a damned hypocrite, and don’t truly believe lives matter at all.  If you’re an anti-higher tax clone of Grover Norquist – or believe taxes are only for military defense and not social support, ditto.

If you're truly pro-life you have to take civic, community ownership for the child's welfare -after it is born as much as before, via appropriate legislation- enabling it, not impeding it. And further this has to be effective  all the way through that child’s dependent years.  This is unequivocally what being REALLY pro-life means.  If one is not committed to spend the tax commons for further support of the already born  then all their squawking and protests against abortion ring hollow. It's all political posturing, a big charade based more on ego, narcissism and grandstanding than moral sincerity.

In the meantime, there are some payback options that have been proposed. One, by actress Alyssa Milano, advocates women go on a "sex strike" until the crackers in those states pull those offensive anti-abortion bills.  In addition, a number of major Hollywood production companies now plan to boycott Georgia.  One hopes that AMC - which produces 'The Walking Dead' - will join that contingent and find another state to produce its top rated series.

See also:

• I guess GA will also outlaw all prenatal testing since women must give birth no matter what  

Response To Tom McLeish's Counter Arguments In Physics Today

Following my letter appearing in the June issue of Physics Today, Religionist Tom McLeish was allowed an extensive response to all the published letters - numbering six. Here I focus on his response to my letter and I rebut each of his counter arguments in turn:

McLeish writes (p. 14):

"Although religious tradition naturally requires discourse about personal and corporate encounters with divinity in order to make sense of history and experience, it is far less concerned with the supernatural than with life, hope and justice here on Earth."

Of course this is too clever by half and is yet another permutation of the 'No true Scotsman' fallacy. Antony Flew, in his Thinking about Thinking, first made people aware of the "No True Scotsman" Fallacy.

As he put it:

"Here we have Angus, a Glaswegian (inhabitant of Glasgow), who puts sugar on his porridge, and who is proposed as a counter-example to the claim “No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge”.

Then the ‘No true Scotsman’ fallacy would run as follows:

(1) Angus puts sugar on his porridge.

(2) No (true) Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.

(3) Therefore: Angus is not a (true) Scotsman.

And:

(4) Therefore: Angus is not a counter-example to the claim that no Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.

Thus the 'No true Scotsman fallacy' is a way of reinterpreting evidence in order to prevent the refutation of one’s position.  In this case, McLeish bids us not to look at or address the 'elephant' (actually wooly Mammoth) in the 'mind space' of religiosity - i.e. the supernatural - but to look instead at religion's emphasis on "hope, life and justice"..   In other words, the supernaturalist- bound entity I had addressed was not the "true" religious tradition but a specious one. 

Indeed, if McLeish's claim was in any way sound, the rational skeptic could simply retort: "Then if you're just invested in life, hope and justice why not dispense with the  redundant window dressing of supernatural hokum and embrace humanism?"  Of course they can't do that because the supernatural - including a supernatural divinity - is an integral part of their whole tradition.   So rather than robustly defend the supernatural as a physicist - which McLeish knows he can't - he punts and resorts to a deflecting fallacy.

McLeish again:

"So it is not right to declare a parting of the ways at the start."

Really? Then WHEN exactly are we enjoined to do so?   If there are indeed two orders or putative orders, one scientific and submitting to some form of objective inquiry, and the other (supernatural)  not, then when does one part ways? It would seem to me for clarity sake alone and to avoid obfuscation one clearly delineates the separate orders at the outset -  so there can be no ambiguity. Obviously, McLeish doesn't wish to do this because it would effectively mean 'game, set, match' and he goes home without a rejoinder.

He continues:

"Nor is it appropriate to complain that experience and exploration of God is devoid of rationality.  Stahl's presentation of two alternatives and fundamentally competing worldviews derives not from a knowledge of history or theology but ultimately from the Draper and White polemics, whose alternative history introduced that perspective. (For a more nuanced reading of history see: F. Harrison 'The Territories Of Science and Religion)."

Actually, I  have never heard of Draper or White far less their "polemics". I come at McLeish's claims from the position of reason alone, as well as from my extensive university (Loyola - run by Jesuits) exposure to comparative religion, theology, metaphysics, biblical exegesis and textual analysis.   I have also blogged on these and related matters before, for those interested, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/07/apologetics-textual-analysis-and.html


http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/04/some-basics-on-exegesis-textual.html


 No one is asserting btw, that rationality cannot be enlisted in religious explorations, say of "divinity", but we would be remiss if we didn't also acknowledge how easily such rationality can be perverted toward deformed ends.

Thus, Pope Innocent VIII summoned excellent theological reasons for issuing a Bull allowing for the wholesale pursuit and torture of witches, warlocks, familiars and others in the form of incubi or succubi.  Much of this was formalized in the Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer (Dean of Cologne University) and Jacob Sprenger (Dominican Inquisitor General of Germany). On account of this well-reasoned Bull, tens of thousands were subjected to vile tortures, including finally being crushed in the Iron Maiden or barbecued on large, heated griddles.   

Then there is the hyper rational Xtian moralist C.S.  Lewis . Recall Lewis’ rational justification for Inquisitional tortures is mind-boggling in itself  and effectively renders whatever morality he espouses as useless, and indeed dangerous!  In this case, in his book Mere Christianity, he pardons the witch burners for making a “mistake of fact”, i.e. in believing women described as witches were evil incarnate.  To quote one critic[1]:

If Lewis is willing to accept that witches do not exist, and that, while believing in them, it was right to put them to death, what other "ungodly" transgressions can we forgive as mere "mistakes of fact”?

Interestingly, Lewis’  "rational" pseudo-morality could easily have been incorporated into the Third Reich’s justifications for genocide. I mean, the Nazis really believed the Jews were “vermin” – as so much of their propaganda portrayed- so by Lewis’ standards they’d be excused for making a “mistake of fact”.  Lewis might well reply here that the Nazis really knew better than that so their actions were inexcusable. But how do we know there were also not more percipient Inquisitors who also knew better than to believe more than a quarter million women burned as witches did not really embody evil or have pacts with “Satan”? It amounts to mere question begging.

McLeish continues:

"Stahl's letter also manages to capture the misinformed philosophy of most late modern confusions, especially neo-atheist ones, about the nature of deity."

Actually, in my book, Beyond Atheism, Beyond God, I had been highly critical of the "neo atheists" (cf. The Problem For Hard Core Atheist Reductionism, Ch. XII, p. 294))  - not that McLeish would have read it any more than I'd have read his referenced text, 'Atheist Delusions' by David Bentley Hart.   Regarding the latter, one reviewer's take on it is especially noteworthy, e.g.:

"Atheist Delusions is a misleading title: this book is really, as the author says in his introduction, a historical essay, only tangentially related to these delusions. It is not, or only as the argument demands, concerned with philosophy, metaphysics or theology."

So why does McLeish commend it as capturing a "misinformed philosophy"? Who knows? Again, it may most likely be merely a 'hail Mary' tossed out so he can muster some kind of weak retort, even if irrelevant.  And before McLeish gets too high on his high horse about "atheist delusions" one wonders if he is at all familiar with the work 'Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief' wherein the authors (Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili) trace the God concept directly to an area of the brain- the OAA or orientation association area. 

The authors’ investigation of how the brain’s OAA translates an image into a religious reality is also described in detail[2].This is in connection with a person given an image of Christ and asked to focus on it. Within minutes, neurological measurements, i.e. from PET and SPECT scans[3], showed electrical discharges spiraling down from the right attention area (right OAA) to the limbic system and hypothalamus “triggering the arousal section of the structure”. The authors’ test results and measurements revealed the activation of both the left and right association regions as their subjects focused on an image of Christ. As assorted cortical thresholds were crossed, a maximal stimulation (given by spikes in the SPECT scans) produced a neural “flood” that generated feedback to the attention association area.

To make a long story short, the visual attention area of the OAA was seen to begin to deprive the right orientation area (responsible for balance)  of all neural input not originating with the contemplation of Jesus. In order to compensate, and thereby preserve the neuro-spatial matrix (in which the self could still exist) the right orientation area had to default to the attention area focusing on “Jesus”.  As the authors describe the situation: [4]:

It has no choice but to create a spatial matrix out of nothing but the attention area’s single-minded contemplation of Jesus

Newberg and D’Aquili note that as the process of re-cerebralization continues, all irrelevant neural inputs are stripped away until the only reality left is Jesus. That reality (actually a pseudo-reality confected by the right attention area) thereby takes over the entire mind. Or, in the words of the authors, “it is perceived by the mind as the whole depth and breadth of reality.”   This is a profound insight, and fully explains why it is essentially impossible to wean believers away from their objects of worship or devotion based on logic and reason alone. What has happened, in other words, is the subject’s whole existence and identity has become bound up with the focus of his brain’s OAA-  or more specifically – the right attention area’s focus which channels nearly all neural inputs to that region.More to the point here, is that such a brain is singly directed to craft its own version of rationality to support its ideations.Hence, we simply cannot trust the rational expressions of believers, or those like McLeish who defend religious accommodation. Their brains are likely hijacked in the service of the OAA.

McLeish's next move is to invoke Aquinas:

"Everything has a cause", says Stahl, quoting Paulos….He omits the reminder that the argument of no infinite causal recursions was used by Aquinas who ran it in reverse as an argument for theism."

I was aware of Aquinas' trick - of course- but there are limits of space for letter writers in PT. I did address it in my book, Beyond Atheism, Beyond God. 

As I noted, asserting "God is a first cause" is actually and technically unprovable within an axiomatic system based on cause.  This follows from Kurt  Gödel's  1st and 2nd Incompleteness theorems.  Say C₁  ->  Z is equivalent to saying "C₁ is the first cause of all Z". But consider:  if C₁  ->  Z is really provable-in-the-system of axioms, we’d have a contradiction. If it were provable in-the-system, then it would not be unprovable-in-the-system.  Hence,  asserting: " C₁  -> Z is unprovable-in-the-system" would be false. Again, it can't be provable in the system since C₁ is an element from a presumed causal set. So, the statement “C₁  ->  Z is unprovable-in-the-system” is not provable-in-the-system (Z), but unprovable-in-the-system (Z). Technically, one would require a meta-set such that Z' = Z + k', e.g. including k’ as the uncaused element, i.e. with Z purged of it. However, it can be shown that invoking such a meta-set leads to an infinite regression.

This shows why, before one interjects first causes (or invokes Aquinas' trick), he had first better be sure Kurt Gödel isn't looking over his shoulder!  Of course, Gödel's Incompleteness theorems didn't exist at the time of Tommy Aquinas so he couldn't have known his arguments were basically hollow mush. Alas, Kurt Gödel and his Incompleteness Theorem(s) isn’t the only daunting challenge to the naïve God-thinker. 

Quantum acausality will also have a role in tempering the naïve believer’s simple causality propositions and claims .  See e.g.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.1.20180328a/full/

An excellent way out of the causal morass is to consider necessary and sufficient conditions.  Say if a religious rationalist is proposing support for his divinity -then he must show the necessary and sufficient conditions for it to exist.  Robert Baum, in his textbook, LOGIC, p. 469-70, correctly observes that n-s conditions are practical replacements (in logic) for causes. In other words, instead of saying or asserting "x caused y", one stipulates that a, b are necessary conditions for x to exist at all, and c, d are sufficient conditions for y to have been the sole effect of cause x.
  

A necessary condition is one which, if absent, the entity cannot exist. A sufficient condition is one which, if present, the entity must exist. For example, a sufficient condition for the existence of a hydrogen emission nebula in space would be proximity of the nebula to a radiating star. The necessary condition is the nebula exists in the first place. Baum’s reasoning is clear (ibid.): because “cause” (generic) can be interpreted as proximate or remote, or even as the “goal or aim of an action” and is therefore too open-ended, ambiguous and construed in too many different ways. 

 Thus, “cause” is too embedded in most people’s minds with only one of several meanings, leaving most causality discussions unproductive and confused. If my “cause” and your ‘cause” in a given argument diverge, then we will not get very far. Also, if we confront a disjunctive plurality of causes, we may be at moot dead ends using a naïve causal paradigm.

 
McLeish's final parry is against the notion that religious traditions harbor any superstition, by appeal to the venerable Bede, e. g.

As  for "superstition",  8th century English Christian scholar Bede advocated the study of science as a God-given faculty to counter superstition!

Note the exclamatory emphasis here, as if, to suggest:  'How can Stahl have the temerity to even suggest this?'  But according to Frederick Harrison , in his book Medieval Man:

"Yet even Bede believed that storms could be raised by witches. He records that the ship in which Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, and Lupus, Bishop of Troyes, were voyaging home was driven out of its course by demons, who, however, dispersed when the two holy men bade them, in the Name of the Trinity, depart. Then the storm ceased."

Witches raising storms? Demons driving ships off course?  Sorry, McLeish, but if a person - even in the 8th century (we make NO allowances because of era lived) embraces or invokes demons and witches, then they ARE purveyors of superstition.  Incredibly, McLeish via his absurd and irrelevant   arguments and citations, would have us interject even more of supernaturalism and superstition into our science.  But thankfully most physicists are dedicated physicalists so this misplaced agenda is not likely to get very far. And I am confident most physicists will not sacrifice their principles to being bought out by the Templeton Foundation.

---

[1] Inniss: The Secular Humanist Newsletter, (Spring, 1998), 1

[2] Newberg and D’Aquili., pp.  121-22.

[3] PET = positron emission tomography, SPECT = single photon image tomography.

[4] Ibid.