Peter Frost has published a good essay in which he deals with human moral nature. The essay can be found at Does Natural Law Exist?. I vaguely anticipated this discussion in my previous essay, The Interior Richness Which Lies in a Civilized Man.
Frost defines natural law as teaching:
All people are born with a natural sense of right and wrong, and it is only later, through vice or degeneration, that some can no longer correctly tell the two apart.
There are both pagan and Christian justifications for such beliefs and, as Frost notes with obvious respect, they were once quite plausible. Despite my belief in absolute truths, I claim that natural law instincts are the result of human evolution, that is, the shaping of our ancestors in response to their environments. Any particular manifestation of natural law is the result of human being responding to our world in philosophical and theological and political and pedagogical ways. These responses are necessarily limited by the current understandings of our world and—at least to a Christian—of all of Creation. This creates the likelihood of “fighting the previous moral equivalent of war” each time that something changes drastically or each time we reach a point where small changes have built up without proper responses. We love security and stability and only start changing when forced to do so, not when change first seems plausible and desirable. This is not to deny that the understandings produced in certain ages were insightful and powerful, maybe even the best understandings possible to those ages.
In that spirit Aquinas is acknowledged by Frost as having provided:
a compromise that divided Natural Law into general precepts and secondary precepts. The former are known to all men but can be hindered “on account of concupiscence or some other passion.” The latter “can be blotted out from the human heart, either by evil persuasions [..] or by vicious customs and corrupt habits, as among some men, theft, and even unnatural vices, as the Apostle states (Rom. i), were not esteemed sinful.” [See Frost’s article for reference to quote from Thomas Aquinas.]
I’ll continue developing this theme but Frost seems to reason as if the enhancements made up to now to human understandings of our own moral natures and to the rules which might govern those natures—if such rules exist—were the only ones possible and, if they fail, will force us to deny that there is a possible understanding of absolute moral truths and a possible manifestation in our own natures.
Since I began thinking seriously about these issues, perhaps 25 years ago, I’ve had a problem with the status of natural law though I accord it the respect that Frost also accords; in addition, I think natural law reasoning—properly implemented—is the proper way to understand the `best’ which human beings can achieve. We simply have to recognize that our understanding of human moral nature and of moral truths are tentative in the same way as the physicist’s understanding of physical reality.
Frost points out, consistent with the complaints of many social conservatives, that Christian moral thought and moral action has decayed from its prior glory into a rather weak-kneed effort to avoid insulting others. After speaking of anthropologists who wish to avoid being judgmental about such behaviors as cannibalism, Frost tells us:
The noble savage is still alive and well. Strangely enough, this kind of thinking has seeped even into the missionary mindset, as I discovered during my last few years at the United Church of Canada. I was surprised to learn just how little our mission work involved teaching of Christian morality:
“Do you talk to these people about the Christian faith?”
“Not unless they specifically request it.”
“Do you at least have Christian literature on display?”
“No, we’re not allowed to do that.”
Things aren’t much better in the fundamentalist churches. I remember attending a Pentecostal presentation on “the cause of Third World Poverty.” I thought the talk would focus on cultural values. Instead, we were told that the cause is…lack of infrastructure. The Third World is poor because it doesn’t have enough roads, bridges, and buildings.
Much of the problem with modern Christians didn’t start as a loss of faith but rather, in my usual terms, as a refusal to make peace with empirical reality. As such thinkers as Melville and Hawthorne noted, this is essentially a rebellion against the Creator. This was my theme as I began to think through these issues in a more organized way 25 years ago, but I myself was having trouble making peace with metaphysics, more generally—with abstract thought. Peter Frost seems to me to have a greater respect for past accomplishments of abstract thinkers than I had but he seems to think that the recent failure to make better sense of the world after Darwin and Einstein means that it’s not possible to do again what Aristotle and Augustine and Aquinas did for their ages. Yet, he sees much with great clarity:
Christianity has been killed by its success. It has so thoroughly imposed its norms of behavior that we now assume them to be human nature. If some people act contrary to those norms, it’s because they’re “sick” or “deprived.” Or perhaps something is misleading us and they’re really acting just like everyone else.
In terms suited to my analysis, Frost’s insight becomes:
Christians had inherited an understanding of reality, a worldview, which was well-tuned to reality—as it was known and understood around 1700 or perhaps 1800. In recent centuries, knowledge of empirical reality increased rapidly and Christian leaders, intellectual and spiritual, utterly failed to produce an updated Christian understanding of Creation. What we have is a patchwork of dissonant beliefs, the revealed truths of the Bible expressed in words whose meanings have changed over time and especially under the pressure of the modern enrichment and complexification of our knowledge of Creation along with that knowledge itself. Some of the Medieval Scholastics, including Aquinas, claimed quite plausibly that most of what we know of God comes to us through His effects in Creation or, as I prefer to state it: most of what we know of God comes through our proper sharing in the thoughts He manifested in created being.
Done properly, as Augustine and Aquinas did in their historical contexts, recovering a good understanding of Creation is a more complex process than imposing our thoughts upon Creation and more complex than simply taking our more or less direct knowledge and understandings of empirical reality as being normative or as being dismissive of the very possibility of absolute moral truths. We need to make better use of that empirical knowledge by seeing in it better knowledge of the abstract being from which the concrete is shaped. We need to see more clearly, as one example, that realm of abstract being we can sort of see in the equations of quantum mechanics and can with, far greater uncertainty, conjecture from the relationships in general relativity and in evolutionary biology and also history.
See Four Kinds of Knowledge for my understanding of the actual unity of knowledge of created being and the practical need for specialized fields of knowledge; it is that practical need which leads us to specialize as physicists or anthropologists or philosophers or retailers or plumbers. Frost is open to the goodness and truth in ways of thought outside of his field of anthropology and the closely related fields of evolutionary biology and genetics, but he has to rely upon specialists in fields such as metaphysics who have not done a good enough job of making sense of the whole ball of wax in light of the discoveries in recent centuries of biology and mathematics and so on. Those who think of themselves as modern, scientific-minding men and women don’t see that any effort to understand this universe without having a good understanding of what Christians call created being—that greater understanding being of Creation as a whole, is much like the effort of physicists and other physical scientists to understand the things of our world one by one without having an understanding of the nature of this world in its more or less purely physical aspects. It was Einstein who gave us a universe with his general theory of relativity and allowed the development of more unified and more consistent and more complete understandings of the concrete realms of Creation. It was Einstein’s work including his work, and the work of Bohr and Schrodinger and so on, in quantum mechanics which pointed to realms of more abstract being from which concrete being is shaped. We should never forget that Plato and others anticipated some of this but we should also never forget that this deeper understanding of thing-like being gave us the possibilities of more exact understandings, more convincing understandings of both concrete and abstract being.
Christian theologians and philosophers have failed to make peace with empirical reality, that is—with God’s Creation, starting with this concrete realm of thing-like being and that failure has led to utter cluelessness in any efforts to restate Christian truths and to reformulate Christian speculations so that they are consistent with what we now know of the Creator’s actual work. As a result, Christian thinkers including philosophers and theologians have turned their fields into the studies of past creative efforts and have failed to deal with our new knowledge of the thoughts which God manifested in this concrete realm of Creation, have also failed to move on to dealing with more abstract realms of Creation. Metaphysics and the higher level forms of theology which are founded upon metaphysics are effectively discounted as important parts of Christian thought.
It might seem funny to accuse theologians and philosophers of the mistake of undervaluing metaphysical thought, abstract thought in general. They seem quite comfortable with Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus and Augustine, Aquinas and maybe a good selection of modern philosophers. The problem is that Aquinas was right when he told us that the first science (metaphysics) uses the positive sciences (physics, biology, and so on). Modern empirical knowledge indicates rather strongly that, for example, matter is far richer and far more complex than the Greeks or the Medieval Scholastics or Kant and other Enlightenment philosophers thought it to be. For now, our best understanding of matter is given to us by way of quantum physics and related specialized fields. This means that even the Christian understandings of the Sacraments, in which matter play a central role, are nothing more than fairy tales, once plausible understandings kept alive by the barbarian and semi-pagan descendants of Augustine and Anselm and Aquinas and Galileo—I agree with Stanley Jaki, the Benedictine priest and polymath, who claimed Galileo to be a better Christian theologian than the Churchmen who opposed him. In any case, how can a sacramental Christian speak rationally about the Real Presence upon the alter if he doesn’t really understand what bread and wine are and has not a clue about their relationships to the ever more abstract realms of being which culminate in the truths God manifested as the raw stuff of all created being?
To me, on a quite conceptual level, moral philosophy and theology is a bit like mathematical physics or similar sorts of sciences; this is to say that moral thinking should include a respect for empirical reality but also analyses and speculations which try to draw out the abstract being from which our messy world of things was shaped. (See How a Christian Finds Metaphysical Truths in Empirical Reality for another effort to explain my thoughts on this and related issues.)
And there’s the rub. Metaphysics does matter. If you’ve tried to make sense of concrete, thing-like being entirely on its own terms, you’ve missed much of what it is. Remember that protons and electron and neutrinos and so forth are manifestations of some strange, abstract sort of being which we can’t perceive but we can think about it using the equations of quantum mechanics and by trying to form concepts based upon those equations. In other words, we have to move to a realm at least one step more abstract than those equations to find a realm of created being in which the qualitative and quantitative are one. In an older essay, Shaping Our Minds to Reality, I responded to some comments made by John Polkinghorne, Anglican priest and respected physicist, on the problems modern physicists have in understanding the fundamental nature of `quantum levels of reality’, a problem basically caused by our difficulties in shaping our thoughts to reality. We try instead to force our pre-existing schemes of thought even upon strange, new facts from empirical reality.
I’m certainly not saying that moral rules can be derived by contemplation of metaphysical realms—that is one major mistake made by even some great thinkers over the centuries. It’s also a mistake to take empirical reality as being normative or anti-normative. Much of my work has turned into an effort to show the possibility of an answer which makes sense of this concrete realm as a part of a greater Creation. Human nature is embodied but our very bodies were shaped from all that concrete created being shaped in turn from abstract forms of being which we can sort of see, almost against our wills, in quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity and in the evolutionary and developmental narratives given to us by modern biology and other sciences. I use the historically proper definition of science as a disciplined field of study and so the prior statement refers also to history and the study of the human arts and even such `practical’ fields as politics and business management.
Metaphysics can guide us, even in understanding empirical reality because the concrete created being of empirical reality is shaped from more abstract forms of created being and those more abstract forms of being can be reached and somewhat understood by way of abstract reasoning, metaphysical and mathematical and logical. At the same time, we aren’t born with minds which can magically receive metaphysical or mathematical or logical truths. Because of very complex brains and bodies suited to those brains, we can shape minds by way of responses to reality. We can shape powerful and insightful minds by way of honest and courageous responses. The same can be said of moral natures.
Though human minds develop by way of responses to a messy world, they do reach truths, even truths so extraordinary as “There are infinities larger than the ordinary infinity of {1,2,3,4,…}.” Human minds have not drawn these truths out of some Platonic realm we can magically access through mind-stuff, nor have they drawn these truths out of concrete, thing-like being in a direct way. They have worked slowly, over the centuries, in response to hints of the abstract being from which rocks and rattlesnakes are shaped. They have worked recursively, applying their speculative ideas on abstract being to concrete being and starting to adjust their speculations when necessary.
As we shape our own individual and communal human beings, we create richer and more complex forms of created being. There is something new under the sun, not only with the potential of each individual human being as he develops through his life but also with the potential of each human community. We can certainly see great good which was shaped in ancient Athens, a different great good which was shaped in ancient Jerusalem, and still something different again—great and good—which was shaped in ancient Rome.
Our moral natures develop in a similar way to the parts of our minds which search for mathematical truths. Our moral natures are shaped as we respond, actively respond, to a messy world but we, through our minds and moral natures, also can reach truths which seem extraordinary to those still capable of wonder. It’s a process quite different from simply applying a pre-existing schema about proper forms of, say, sexual relationships. We are particular creatures with particular sexual natures, particular forms of care for our young, and this makes our sexual natures a bit, shall we say, empirical rather than ethereal. But, my general worldview leads me to propose our empirical sexual natures are shaped from more abstract created being, itself shaped from still more abstract created being and going right back to the truths God manifested as the raw stuff of Creation. It’s only possible to see those truths with a mind of the sort which forms by way of good training in the context of a sufficiently rich and complex human community, ideally, a civilization. Even then, things can go horribly wrong.
Some truths can be deployed as lines in a formal proof leading inevitably to a set conclusion, but the greater part of truths in this Creation, so far as I can tell, are of the sort to be shaped into rich and complex forms of complex being. An example? How about the abstract forms of being we know only through the formalisms of quantum mechanics. From such abstract forms of being are shaped the components of matter and energy. As Aquinas said, to the annoyance of many: “Things are true.” They aren’t true in the sense of being the conclusions to arguments or of being necessary or absolute. They are true in being shaped from successively more abstract realms of created being, culminating in the truths God manifested as the raw stuff of Creation.
Here are links to four essays I’ve written which deal with realms of abstract being as part of the goal of understanding human being: