A Response to “Losing Our Religion” on “Science & Theology” Website

This article states the obvious truth about our moral confusion and makes the valid distinction between ends and means. Americans have always been confused about this distinction, often because of the domination of practical reasoning in the American mind. As I point out in my book “To See a World in a Grain of Sand: Reconciling the Saints to Darwin and Einstein, Divorcing the Saints from Smith and Lincoln”, three serious American thinkers in the 1800s were already fearing that Emerson was a typical American in his moral insanity — a form of spiritualized materialism and excessive concern for safety and comfort in Herman Melville’s view. Captain Ahab, “My means are sane, it is my ends which are mad,” was a more courageous Emerson. Hawthorne and Henry James, Sr. were in substantial agreement with Melville on this issue.

More importantly, as St. Thomas Aquinas pointed out in “The Summa Contra Gentiles” — and elsewhere — metaphysics uses the specific sciences. General reasoning — the principles of which are more like created facts than most Christians would like to believe — can do little without real-world facts. Ultimately, real-world facts and the abstract truths which we can know are intertwined in my version of Thomistic existentialism because the physical universe was shaped from a Primordial Universe which is a manifestation of the particular body of abstract truths which God selected for His Creation. Some might object: “But the great moral truths come from the Biblical laws and the thoughts of the great moral thinkers of the West. And those truths are absolute.”
The Bible is a source of two types of truth, codified truths drawn from experience and revelations of God. Much of the moral teaching of the Bible, Old Testament and St. Paul alike, involves reasoning about man the physical animal. It is an early form of sociobiological reasoning subjected to those revelations of God which tell us His purposes for us and for this world. Moreover, a reading of the works of St. Thomas will reveal that he was a clear-headed sociobiologist, even comparing the morality of human fatherhood to that of birds. In fact, the moral traditions of the West are sociobiological reasoning subjected to the revealed purposes of God, purposes which have to be accepted upon faith. Any given moral thinker was more or less accurate in his understanding of the human animal and more or less limited by his particular acceptance of God’s revelations, those He made to the Hebrew prophets and those which we find in the very Person of Jesus Christ.
As for other moral traditions in the West… Let’s take Aristotelian moral philosophy. Since Aristotle didn’t accept revealed knowledge,even in principle, his version of moral philosophy — a natural law reasoning — was no more than an abstraction from ancient Greek sociobiological knowledge. Much of the subsequent work in natural law reasoning in Western history is an ongoing word-play using abstractions from ancient Greek understandings of the human animal. From this viewpoint, a natural law thinker, and James Q. Wilson is one, has made some sort of legitimate progress if he at least tries to update the biological foundations of his moral knowledge. He has advanced from being an ancient sociobiologist to being a modern sociobiologist.
The body of knowledge labeled ‘sociobiology’ is not enough but it is a necessary part of human self-understanding. It provides knowledge of the means by which we can reach morally valid ends. And, so, I would claim: The problem is not with sociobiological reasoning, but rather with the lack of distinction between between ends and means. One might say: “The Origin of Species” tells us how we came to be what we are and the Bible tells us what we can be and what God will help us to be. Sociobiology tells us what we have to work with and God has told us what He wishes us to be and will help us to be.
Still more importantly, we don’t need a religious revival, a revival which would take its primary form in institutions and political/economic behavior. We need a rebirth of our faith in God, our love for God, and our desire to serve God. And that would be a very dangerous rebirth from the viewpoint of those who place great value on any form of what might be called ‘the American Project’. At the very beginning, it would reveal the truth: The United States has never been a God-centered country no matter how great our religiosity. A rebirth of our faith in God would make us a new country, but it’s unlikely to happen just because the tendency to determine ends which suit our means and our short-term desires is a basic part of our national character. It’s more obvious in the sociobiological thinkers only because they are more clear-headed and more honest than the vast majority of Americans, including far too many who consider themselves to be religious or moral thinkers of one sort or another.
It is perhaps to the point that European civilization was at a very low point 800 years. A revival came, as the by-product of the efforts of two men who were concerned with God and with saving souls, not with economic or political matters. Those two men were St. Francis and St. Dominic. St. Francis didn’t even have the sort of mind that could have handled abstract moral or political reasoning.