In a recent essay, Cafeteria Catholics and Ghetto Catholics, I claimed:
From an intellectual viewpoint also simple, the problem with many traditionalist Catholics is that they don’t think in terms of a world in which new facts and knowledge emerge over time, forcing our understandings to develop over time in a “communal process” as the historian Carroll Quigley noted. They think the important truths about God’s work are already in their textbooks. Those traditionalist Catholics continue to place their full trust in their textbooks; how could we possibly come to a better understanding of Creation than what those dead guys left us? Because we now know they had wrong or incomplete ideas of life, matter, space and time, and mathematics? Phooey. Why would new knowledge of Creation affect our inherited understandings of Creation? Could it even be that new forms or properties of created being are emerging as God’s story advances or at least new forms are coming into view as human beings explore Creation more deeply and more widely? Nah!
I made very similar claims in, Reality Bites Back but Maybe It Started Nibbling Many Years Ago, the last essay I published on my website. Despite my need to write often, if repetitiously at times, of some of the most important parts of my new understanding of God’s Creation, I won’t go over that material again. Instead, I’ll go back a little to draw in one of my earlier arguments that what might be called the Lockean, or even Jeffersonian, understanding of rights is based upon a misunderstanding of human being and the general nature of relationships in God’s Creation.
I’m motivated to deal with the specific issue of human rights due to some recent, well-argued essays by Hadley Arkes, a thinker who writes often on moral issues such as contraception and abortion and sexual norms. The four essays are:
- Hobby Lobby: A Victory, So Far
- Religious Freedom in Search of Its Argument
- Religious Freedom in Search of Its Argument—Abroad
- Another Disaster for Religious Freedom in the Courts
In the first of those essays, Professor Arkes speaks of the confusion about the state of the embryo from the earliest stage:
But if this was a victory, it was a melancholy win, revealing also the edge that cuts against the religious in this country. According to Judge Tymkovich and his colleagues, the Greens assert, among their “sincere beliefs,” a “belief that human life begins when sperm fertilizes an egg.” A “belief”? That would surely come as news to the authors of all of the texts in embryology, who report that point as one of their anchoring truths.
There is certainly a major problem with a judge who can’t see a simple fact, even if that judge might well argue coherently that that particular fact doesn’t generate a “right to life,” but I’m not an activist as such but rather a Catholic thinker working on a long-term project to produce a greater understanding of all of Creation. I’m writing this essay to argue for that need for a greater understanding as a setting for all our lesser understandings, including those of human being in all its aspects. In other words, we need to come to new understandings in light of modern knowledge as well as the truths from traditional Christian thought of life and the universe and everything before we can speak coherently of the value of human life or of human rights in general.
I’ll start with an inconvenient insight of the same general field of study as those books on embryology which Arkes points to. Those books do let us know that a human life begins at conception but they also place that life in the context of evolutionary and developmental processes which have not yet been integrated into the Christian story. As a consequence, they haven’t been integrated into any Christian political thought of our age though these unresolved questions have entered the minds and souls of many in the form of a rather cloudy sort of skepticism. That sort of skepticism, as opposed to an honest and well-formed skepticism, can readily become a disease of mind, of heart, and of hands.
I’ll ignore that ugly aspect of our age in this essay, though you should keep it ever in mind when thinking about these issues of what might seem merely intellectual arguments.
Who was the first man or first woman? For simplicity, I’ll write only of the first man.
Assume, for argument’s sake, that we can identify an Adam, a first man. What biologically based argument is there for saying that Adam had `human rights’ now that we know his parents were not modern human beings and had no such `human rights’? Surely, we can’t extend human rights back to all apish creatures who were our ancestors; we wouldn’t even know if we should keep going back to our other ancestors—rat-like animals, reptile-like animals, and back to membranes filled with self-reproducing chemicals. It’s obviously absurd to think human rights can be traced back before that first hypothetical human being, who almost certainly didn’t exist. But if he did exist: by what process did he receive such rights? He had parents who weren’t fully human, cousins who weren’t, maybe siblings who weren’t. Could we claim his parents had, perhaps, 75% inalienable rights, 75% of a right to life?
If there was no true Adam, what is the source of our rights? From a natural standpoint, the source of our rights seems to be our reluctance, far from absolute and weaker than that of wolves and other creatures, to kill members of our own species. Even if our instincts against killing other members of the human species were stronger, it wouldn’t provide much of a justification for placing absolute value on human life, certainly not from conception. It would provide a strong justification for placing very high value on human life, but not absolute. Something has to provide a bridge from “very high” to “absolute”. Such claims can’t be justified by either the actual real-world relationships between human beings nor by anything that could conceivably be discovered about our state as unique animals descended from ancestors common also to apes and then from ancestors common also to rats and raccoons and ultimately from some sort of ancestor common also to bacteria, slime-molds, and a lot of critters not giving much sign of being possible ancestors of creatures with Lockean rights.
Arkes provides a quote from Pope Francis’ recent encyclical, Lumen Fidei:
faith was…understood either as a leap in the dark…driven by blind emotion, or as a subjective light, capable perhaps of warming the heart and bringing personal consolation, but not something which could be proposed to others as an objective and shared light which points the way.
Notice that Pope Francis doesn’t claim we have rigorous arguments that can’t be denied by this-worldly arguments. Rather do we have “something which could be proposed to others as an objective and shared light which points the way.” More specifically, I’d say we have a story based upon facts though necessarily disciplined to some preliminary understanding, itself to be clarified as the story emerges. The story which we modern Christians inherited is in bad shape. It was a story which, when it was healthier or at least more robust, was in some deep sense the foundation of Western Civilization, the Christian civilization which was the greatest of all works of mortal man. In some sense, that Christian story, that understanding of God’s Creation, was Western Civilization.
Is there a version of this story we can tell which is built only from empirical knowledge without Christian beliefs? I don’t know. If there is such a story, it might not be clear about the role of human rights or the path they’ll take in the future. Will they move closer and closer toward becoming absolute rights we should honor in all other human beings? I don’t know. I do know that it’s not possible to justify much of anything by simply taking convenient facts from modern empirical knowledge and joining them to premodern Christian understandings of Creation. Well, maybe you can join them in some sense but it could be pretty ugly. See my freely downloadable book, Four Kinds of Knowledge, for my understanding of how Christians, and maybe others, should view these issues of knowledge.
This is, as I noted in that last essay, Reality Bites Back but Maybe It Started Nibbling Many Years Ago,
a world where stuff is ephemeral, is created by relationships and can be shaped or reshaped by relationships. This is where quantum physics meets the school of thought associated with St John the Apostle.
We have fallen from a world of tightly defined categories subject to syllogistic reasoning or any other forms of classical logic. We have fallen into a Darwinian and Einsteinian world in which reality tells us what reality is and we have to understand it in various ways. First, we must try to understand the stuff and space and time and concrete entities and relationships. Then, we must make some greater sense of it in light of all the developmental and evolutionary processes which dominate, that is, we must try to tell a story of the universe and a story of life on earth which includes a story of the human species.
We need to see rights evolving and developing over time, probably parallel to the evolution and development of complex social and political relationships mediated by common stories, such as the Homeric stories. Such a story can be found in my freely downloadable book, Human Rights: An Evolutionary and Christian Perspective, but it is in the context of Christian beliefs. I’ll reprint the entire short chapter, Introduction.
I want others to respect me by not taking my life and by not placing constraints upon my other rights as generally recognized in the Anglo-American traditions. I certainly want powerful institutions to also honor those rights won by historical accident but also by hard work and sacrifice on the part of our ancestors, some of whom were working for other purposes — such as the noblemen who sought to secure their own rights when they forced King John to sign the Magna Carta which was gradually extended to all Englishmen.
I want to be safe not only from attacks mounted by American and foreign criminals but also from attacks mounted by American politicians and government employees who would gain prestige, power, and money by restricting my rights and those of my fellow-citizens. I want to know that if I’m accused of a crime, I’ll be treated with respect by police and court officials, that I’ll be allowed competent legal counsel, that I would get a fair trial if it came to that. I would like to think I could receive justice if I were wronged by even the richest of financiers or the most powerful of corporations.
I would like to have my rights to life, liberty, and property guaranteed against the inroads of greedy bankers, ambitious politicians, or self-righteous religious leaders.
I also believe this world to be a narrative, a rich and complex story being told by God. As a Christian who has tried to respond to God’s Creation in the context of the most basic Christian beliefs as summarized in the various versions of the traditional creeds of the early Christian Church. I think this world to be centered upon the Crucifixion of Christ, the willing self-sacrifice of the Son to His Father. The story is so complex because of the creaturely nature taken on by the Son of God — human by accident though not by necessity nor was this foreordained in any way understandable by the mind of a creature. Being human as well as God, Jesus Christ has a creaturely nature, a nature of a social being, an apish creature made for life in an overlapping complex of human communities.
Some human beings will be resurrected to part of the complex of human communities which we call the Body of Christ, the home or social environment, if you will, for the Son of God. This Body of Christ is not something that will form only in the world of the resurrected, just as the members of that Body will not form only in that world of the resurrected. Where will those members come from? They are us, at least some of us, members of the human race in this mortal realm. In parallel with that, I conjecture the entire Body is under formation in this world and that raises some interesting possibilities for the members of that Body.
In Part I, Natural Human Rights: Reality or Dream?, I develop a sketchy view of man as a mere creature, and mere as well as creature is what man is, what he is born to be. I deny that human rights can be well-founded by the usual ways of modern liberalism, including the loose, question-begging language found in the American Declaration of Independence.
In Part II, Can We Find a True Foundation for Human Rights?, I move on to claim that we, at least we Christians, are warranted in speculating about rights appearing as the Body of Christ develops in this world of evolutionary and developmental processes.
In Part III, Created Being and the Foundations of Human Rights, I provide some of my weblog essays. These are but a sampling of the work I’ve produced to establish a new understanding of created being, a foundation which allows me to speak, in the way of radical understandings of quantum physics and St John the Apostle’s understanding of God the Creator, of relationships being primary over substance, of relationships bringing stuff into existence and shaping it. This provides the justification for speaking of the Body of Christ as forming in this mortal realm and of developing the sorts of relationships not to be perfected nor completed on this side of the grave. Human rights are one aspect of those relationships proper to the members and organs and entirety of the Body of Christ…
The task for those who think it possible, or at least desirable, to treat human rights as being absolute but not founded upon “beliefs”, is to secularize these or similar arguments, which means they become indeterminate, `scientific’ arguments. This is to say, we can extrapolate from what has happened so far inside of this world, but I don’t see how we can extrapolate far enough to reach absolute truths, absolute prohibitions against killing other human beings as one example. I’m not sure there would even be any absolute truths to reach if this is a world fully understandable by secular thought. Any effort to secularize our arguments so that they can be fully acceptable to non-believers would likely lead to a repeat of a cycle from robust believer to deist to pagan or atheist. We’ve done that once, and one reason we went through it, was the failure of Catholic intellectuals and Church leaders to courageously deal with the many questions raised by all this new empirical knowledge. It’s about time to deal with those questions and move on with a new Christian understanding of Creation.
As I see matters, that natural law theories of human rights were set in the context of Western Civilization. This was, so to speak, a Christian sea and even the Deists such as Locke and Jefferson were like fish swimming in a water which was invisible to them. They, and far too many Trinitarian Christians then and now, thought their beliefs to be truths of a world transparent in such a way that truth and values can be seen without the aid of what I call a story, a morally purposeful narrative understanding of this world or even of all of Creation.
And so came the true fall of man, the acceptance of the illusion that human rights could be stated in a way that depended upon human reason independent of the influence of human beliefs.