BLOOD -- WTS Questions and Sound Answers 10
Is it true that the Watchtower Bible & Tract Society?s teaching on blood is medically accurate?
The WTS says:
?What medically accurate position regarding blood have Witnesses long held?**... Decades ago Jehovah?s Witnesses made their stand clear. For example, they supplied an article to The Journal of the American Medical Association (November 27, 1981; reprinted in How Can Blood Save Your Life? Pages 27-9).* That article quoted from Genesis, Leviticus, and Acts. It said: ?While these verses are not stated in medical terms, Witnesses view them as ruling out transfusions of whole blood, packed RBCs {red blood cells}, and plasma, as well as WBC {white blood cells} and platelet administration.? The 2001 textbook Emergency Care, under ?Composition of the Blood,? stated: ?The blood is made up of components: plasma, red and white cells, and platelets.? Thus, in line with medical facts, Witnesses refuse transfusions of whole blood or of any of its four primary components.? ** This is the question posed for the paragraph that follows. *Published by Jehovah?s Witnesses -- Anonymous, Be Guided By the Living God, The Watchtower, Watchtower Bible & Tract Society, Inc. 2004 6/15: 21. (Underlining added)
With those words the WTS asserts that they teach something that is medically accurate about blood. What would that be? The only implication of agreement with a medical fact is that medical science and the WTS agree that plasma, RBCs, WBCs and platelets are components of blood. So what? What does this have to do with supporting the teaching that JWs must shun fellow JWs that conscientiously accepts transfusion of a platelet agent yet JWs must respect a fellow JW that conscientiously accepts transfusion of a hemoglobin agent? What does medical science?s recognition of components of blood have at all to do with the WTS? teaching that some components of blood are forbidden and others are maybe not forbidden? Nothing whatsoever! With the above words the WTS has utilized a sly usage of hasty induction. Why is this the case?
Because medical science and the WTS views WBCs, RBCs, plasma and platelets as components of blood does not mean what the WTS teaches about those components agrees with medical science. The WTS teaches that, independently, each of those components of blood is ?blood? that must be abstained from. For example, the WTS teaches that platelets is blood and therefore it must be abstained from as ?blood? in accordance with Acts 15:29. Medical science does not agree that independent of one another the components of blood are ?blood.? That is, medical science does not suggest that platelets independent of other components of blood is ?blood.? Medical science says that blood is a composition of all those components together. Medical science and the WTS do not agree on the significance of the independent parts that blood is comprised of. It is for this reason that WTS? teaching is not medically accurate. Therefore the WTS? assertion that its recognition of blood components is medically accurate is a hasty induction.
Were the WTS to have made its assertion above as the result of a deductive argument then its fallacy would be formal, as in a non sequitur called irrelevant conclusion . But with its words above the WTS has asserted an inductive argument, and for this reason its fallacy is a hasty induction. This fallacy occurs when an argument proposes a conclusion on evidence that is too slight to make it probable. In the case above, the WTS wants its readers to think that because medical science and the WTS both recognize components of blood that both must agree on the relevance of that recognition. But the fact is that the WTS has not shown that medical science draws a parallel relevance. Language such as that quoted above is such as to induce the reader to leap to a conclusion that does not follow from the evidence presented -- it is a hasty induction.
What is blood, according to medical science? Consider:
?Although blood appears to be red liquid it is actually composed of a yellowish liquid called plasma and billions of cells. The vast majority of these cells are red cells and these give blood its red color. Besides the red cells, the blood also contains several types of infection-fighting white cells and tiny cell fragments called platelets which are essential for clotting.? -- What is Blood?, Introduction to Hematology, , 2003. http://www.psbc.org/education/hematology/blood/_frm/frm_blood.htm.
Medical science says that blood is a composition. Ironically, the material quoted by the WTS from the book Emergency Care says the same thing. As quoted by the WTS, Emergency Care says ?the blood is made up of several components.? (Underlining added) Unfortunately, the WTS does not only teach that blood is a composition of many parts, as in whole blood. As already stated, the WTS teaches that RBCs, WBCs, platelets and plasma are, independently of each other, blood.
It bears pointing out that also for theological grounds the WTS stands on precarious ground with its teaching that individual components of blood are ?blood? that must be abstained from. This is because the WTS teaches that blood represents soul. Given this teaching it then becomes impossible for the WTS to explain why it teaches that the components of soul are not ?soul" that we must abstain from taking when independent of one another, yet it turns right around and says that components of blood are ?blood? that we must abstain from taking. These diametrically opposed teachings give the lie to what the WTS teaches about what constitutes ?blood? that must be abstained from. It is not only unscientific and illogical, it is theologically bizarre.
Is it true that the Watchtower Bible & Tract Society?s teaching on blood is medically accurate? No.
Marvin Shilmer