The Death of Natural Law

Pope Benedict XVI¹ was severely vexed by the refusal of the European Union to officially recognize it's Christian heritage. In his 2011 address to the German Reichstag, Pope Benedict noted:

Unlike other great religions, Christianity has never proposed a revealed law to the State and to society, that is to say a juridical order derived from revelation.

Whether or not that is an accurate portrayal of history, it does represent the aspiration of natural law, that it is accessible to any and all without resort to religious faith or revelation.

Unfortunately, natural law has fallen out of favor. Pope Benedict acknowledged this:

The idea of natural law is today viewed as a specifically Catholic doctrine, not worth bringing into the discussion in a non-Catholic environment, so that one feels almost ashamed even to mention the term.

Pope Benedict blamed Positivism and the "unbridgeable gulf" it created between 'is' and 'ought'. According to this view, modernists, following David Hume, have elevated scientific reasoning above all else holding all competing claims to tests of scientific validity.

However, modern societies are awash in competing belief systems that are rooted in nothing more than emotionalism and common agreement. We are constantly subjected to laws and regulations that have not the slightest scientific basis. Courts do not strike down laws on scientific grounds.

To give just one example among many, egalitarianism is a widely held modern ideal that has no basis whatsoever in science. Nature is decidedly inegalitarian but for egalitarians that is unacceptably Darwinian.

If Positivism truly reigned we would have none of that. Far more commonly we find modern morals are rooted in subjectivism. Subjectivism substitutes emotion for reason as a basis for morality. Something is wrong if it feels wrong.

But genuine subjectivism, too, is an incomplete answer. Raw subjectivism would be nothing less than anarchy with each person following his own intuition about right and wrong. Instead, what we encounter is a hierarchy of ideas loosely rooted in history but always evolving in ways that seem almost designed to avoid a consensus and morality plays involving various perceived injustices demanding correction.

Then, too, there is the hierarchy of thinkers centered in university social science departments giving rise to what could most charitably be called a secular magisterium complete with its own system of anathema and excommunication with public shaming of deviants. Subjectivism is given a scientific veneer by social science researchers such as Michael Ruse² and Jonathon Haidt³ in the form of moral sentimentalism which essentially claims that morality is a product of sentiment and taste, not of reason and knowledge.

To appreciate the paradox of moral sentimentalism, imagine a world in which Ruse and Haidt like chocolate so much that they are willing to have people who disagree with them executed by the state or at least thrown in jail for enjoying vanilla. They readily acknowledge that this is nothing more than a matter of taste. But their preference for chocolate is so strong that they cannot abide anyone who might disagree and choose differently. This is an indulgence of monumental proportions. Not only the indulgence of taste but an indulgence of vengeance against violations of fashion.

What leads people to abandon reason for subjective sentiment in moral reasoning? Certainly logical positivism plays a crucial role. Positivism is the sword that is wielded against moral reasoning and subjective sentiment is the shield that defends their alternative choices.

What is the modern problem with natural law? Why do natural law arguments carry so little weight in today's culture, politics, and law? It certainly doesn't help that natural law, as Catholics understand it, is rooted in medieval scholasticism and little improved since. Fundamentally the problem is that natural law requires a humility before nature and the human condition. That is, itself, intolerable to the modern mind and unsuited to perpetual political action.

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1. ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI, Reichstag Building, Berlin Thursday, 22 September 2011.
2. Michael Ruse, "Evolutionary Ethics: A phoenix arisen", 1986.
3. Jonathon Haidt, "The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment", 2001.

What Is Natural Law?

What is natural law and why does it matter?

Natural law, sometimes called natural justice or natural right, is moral law based upon human nature and the human condition. Natural law is universal at least insofar as circumstances are the same.

But let's begin with what it's not.

Natural law is not the laws of nature. The laws of nature, or scientific laws, are statements that describe and predict natural phenomena based on observation and experimentation. The laws of nature are the province of science which makes no attempt to prescribe morality. At best science will describe and predict the ethics and moralities of various cultures and civilizations.

Natural law is not civil law or positive law which are laws developed by a society through it's polity or by custom. Ideally, civil law will be based on natural law but that is not a given. Natural law precedes civil law and is based, in part, on the laws of nature.

Not everyone accepts the existence of natural law. We might imagine that murder and rape are perfectly moral choices in a state of nature and that civil law exists as a compact among men in which liberties are surrendered to society and police appointed to enforce this agreement. Murder and rape, then, become bad choices only because of this enforced civil law. In this view, civil law is more or less arbitrary, whatever people happen to agree on, and varies arbitrarily across cultures where different agreements have come into practice.

Natural law is also distinct from religion and culture though, again, we would expect each to reflect it.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, natural law is not divine law. In particular, natural law does not require any religious belief. As such, it is accessible even to atheists. It should be possible to lead someone to it through reason and observation regardless of their religious or cultural background.

Of course, it is possible that natural law, as described here, does not exist. It may be that no matter how earnestly it is sought it cannot be discovered. If that is so then we are left with the two main alternatives: divine law and civil law with no way to independently evaluate the correctness of either.

There are some interesting problems that we must consider in claiming that there exists a natural law discoverable by reason and observation. First, it is not always followed. Second, we do see variation in ethics and morality across cultures and civilizations. And, third, it may not be what we expected or wanted to find.

If what is morally good is discoverable by reason and observation why is it so elusive?

One possibility is that natural law is not simple or obvious. It may require deep thought and intense study to discern. If so, this would answer the first two questions above. Saint Thomas argued that we are prone to the pursuit of apparent goods, things which seem attractive but which prove not to be so. This is hardly controversial. We can all recall times when we made choices that turned out badly. What is good is not always obvious.

If that is so then we should not be surprised to find cultural variation either. Science is a good analogy. Science is a method for describing and predicting natural phenomena. But the discovery of science was neither simple nor obvious and came to fruition first in Europe. Nobody would suggest that science is not real or that it is not universal merely for this historical fact.

However, others can learn science. We can imagine it being developed independently by different societies and we can observe it's spread and adoption as different people come to recognize it's value.

If natural law is like science, then, we would expect it to become widely adopted even if it arose uniquely. But that has not happened.

We would expect those who know and understand natural law to be in demand by those who see the value and need for it. But that has not happened.

A Conversation With Aristotle

Christianity is nominally and principally founded on Christ but, in fact, incorporates wisdom and traditions from a variety of sources. Chief among these are the pre-Christian Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. The pagan Greek and Roman influences have proven controversial, especially to Protestants, but the simple fact is that reading and understanding Holy Scripture requires, at a minimum, a basic understanding of the human condition and such an understanding was certainly available to the ancients long before the time of Christ. Revealed truth builds on natural truth.

Among these, the Hebrew influence is obvious. Jesus, the apostles, and the earliest Christians were Jews and they all referenced the Hebrew scriptures which we know today as the Old Testament.

The Roman influence is relatively straightforward. Israel was, in Jesus' time, a province of Rome. Roman law and traditions held for centuries after throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. When Israel waged two ill-fated rebellions against Rome it was utterly destroyed. Rome became the seat of Christianity and some have even go so far as to say that the Roman Catholic Church is the surviving vestige of the Roman Empire

The Greek influence, though, is far more subtle and complex. By the time of Christ Israel had been in the Greek sphere of influence for centuries. Alexander the Great had conquered the near east in 330 BC and upon his death his successors carved up his empire between them and held it until they were, in turn, conquered by the Romans. Israel fell between Egypt, ruled by Ptolemy, and Syria, ruled by Seleucid, and changed hands between them a few times. The Macabee rebellion was a war against Greek influence on Israeli society. The wealthy Sadducees were especially infatuated with Greek culture but historians argue that the Pharisees, too, were influenced as, for example, in their formal methods of analysis and argument. The diaspora Jews were even further immersed in Greek culture.

But perhaps the most important Greek influence on Christianity came from Aristotle through Saint Thomas in the middle ages. Like Saint Augustine in 5C AD, Thomas drew upon pagan sources to weld faith and reason. Faith, from Holy Scriptures, and reason primarily from Aristotle. When today you inquire as to why Christians believe something or why the Church teaches something, if the answer is not Holy Scripture or Tradition, it is very likely to be Aristotle. In particular, the Christian concept of the nature of things comes straight from him.

But we have learned a great deal about the nature of the cosmos since Aristotle. Now, to be fair, Thomas didn't just copy Aristotle, he built upon him. Yet Thomas, himself, was a product of the middle ages and much has transpired since then as well. Thomas' magnum opus, Summa Theologica, is generally regarded as the greatest work of Scholasticism, now an arcane field of philosophy.

So let's imagine a short conversation with Aristotle who was, by all accounts, a brilliant man. Our goal is to update him on what mankind has learned in the last couple millennia. What would be the most important ideas we would wish to convey? Would any of these ideas be news to Thomas as well?

We would begin with science. Although Aristotle deserves great credit for laying the foundation, and although his ideas held sway until relatively recently, in fact we know a lot more about how the world works and how to learn about how the world works. Science is, essentially, a marriage of reason and empiricism but the most important ingredient of science is its tentativeness. Every scientific theory is, and always will be, subject to revision upon new evidence.

Aristotle recognized that the perfect is the enemy of the good and so it is with the pursuit of certainty. Only logical deduction can achieve certainty; the Scholastic obsession with achieving certainty exaggerated the value of logic to the exclusion of empiricism.

Taking a more empirical and tentative approach, science delivered the goods principally in physics and chemistry but also in areas such as medicine and technology. But the traditional deterministic, mechanistic model of science is bounded by two relatively recent discoveries: quantum physics and chaos theory. The universe, it turns out, is fundamentally indeterministic and, even if it were deterministic, it's complexity defies prediction except in certain, simple situations.

Perhaps the single most important and relevant discovery is in the field of biology: evolution.

Aristotle proposed that all things have a nature. But what gives things their nature? In biology, the most basic answer is: natural selection and the survival of the fittest. Why do birds sing? Why do fish lay eggs? Why do lions chase gazelles? Why do humans think? Natural selection and the survival of the fittest species. The most fundamental nature of biological beings is their struggle to survive in competition for finite resources.

While the evidence for evolution is pretty strong, the concept has found broader application in more speculative fields including, especially, sociobiology. Sociobiology is based on the idea that social behavior is a product of evolution and that cultures evolve in their practices. Why are men more promiscuous than women? Why do people get married? Why do nations go to war? Natural selection of the fittest culture. The most fundamental nature of social groups is their struggle to survive in competition for finite resources.

All of this may seem a tad dark but there is another idea that would have been totally foreign to Aristotle though Thomas would have been less surprised by it: human progress. Starting around 1400 AD, a couple hundred years after Thomas, Europe experienced a social explosion unparalleled in human history.

Which brings us to the last major element of note: capitalism. Human progress was not merely academic and philosophical, it was also material. Greater wealth and longer lifespans.

The nature of capitalism is, essentially, a domesticated competition and natural selection. Both its advocates and critics recognize in it the familiar survival of the fittest. Capitalism is often denigrated as social Darwinism by the very same people who champion Darwin's theory of evolution.

Humanity prospered under capitalism and this prosperity fed the growth of science and culture in a virtuous cycle. Much as Alexander the Great had conquered the Persian Empire, so Europe set sail to conquer the world; its wealth and technological superiority enabled it to do so.

Today we see the Chinese and Indians, among others, embracing capitalism and prospering similarly from it. China, which had once been prostrate before individual European powers, is on the verge of becoming the largest economy in the world with a growing military to match.

Seeing the bounty of capitalism we can reflect back on life itself. The struggle to survive may seem harsh, even brutal, but it drives evolution and produced human beings, the most complex and reflective creatures in the cosmos.

So, to summarize, what we would tell Aristotle is that the nature of life is the struggle for survival and the nature of that which we observe is that it has found a way to flourish in that struggle to survive. This is true from the lowest organic cells to the most complex human societies. That would not be an alien idea to the ancients who were witness to frequent war and civil strife but I think Aristotle might be surprised at how much it explains and how it influences the foundations of philosophy.

Surely Aristotle would be the first to concede that his philosophy of natural law needed to be updated. We need a new Thomas to weld two millennia of human progress with Christian theology.

What Is the Purpose of Life?

In the Christian tradition, baptism wipes away original sin and the Catholic practice is to baptize infants as soon as practical. Upon baptism, a infant is absolutely sinless and ready for heaven (and even absent baptism an infant is destined for what was once called limbo, not heaven but certainly better than hell).

Beyond that, things get complicated and dangerous.

Live after baptism is, essentially, a hell hazard entailing a series of moral risks. Errors in judgment are almost inevitable. Such moral errors can be forgiven but not only is there a risk of dying with unforgiven mortal sin but even those sins forgiven require atonement in purgatory.

The moment after baptism is the pinnacle of our mortal existence; after that, life is a downward spiral. At best, a saint will achieve something close to what he had in that moment. The rest of us do even worse.

So wouldn’t we be better off to die immediately after Baptism. Where is the upside of mortal life? What is the purpose of it

Goethe offers one possible answer:

Just as Goethe's Mephistopheles is no garden variety corrupter and collector of souls, so Goethe's God is no smiling savior of obedient spirits and pious do-gooders. Neither the Hebrew God, who demands subservience, nor the Christian God, who requires faith and love, Goethe's God values something else. He prizes action, striving, risk. "Man errs so long as he will strive," God tells Mephistopheles in the "Prologue in Heaven" that precedes the play. Human error or corruption or sin or whatever you want to name it is incidental. Error is the cost of striving, of action. And so Goethe's God readily forgives it. What counts is exertion, deeds, doing something rather than nothing.[1]

Is Goethe right? Is there something in mortal life worth the risk of eternal damnation?

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1. Worldly Wisdom: Great Books and the Meanings of Life by James Sloan Allen

In The World, Not of It

I often ask atheists what is the worst contradiction in the Bible. A variety of answers are possible but they tend to fall into one of three broad categories:

1. internal contradictions (e.g. the order of creation in the two Genesis accounts or the moral codes of Leviticus vs. the New Testament),
2. contradicting modern science (e.g. Genesis vs. modern cosmology and biology), and
3. contradicting modern moral sentiment (e.g. the Bible vs. GLAAD).

(One can easily find many lists of Biblical contradictions.)

Before exploring this issue further it's worth noting, in passing that one thing atheists have in common with Christian Fundamentalists is the inclination to read the Bible literally. While there exist a variety of ways to read the Bible, listing contradictions rests entirely upon a literal reading. If, for example, you were to read the Bible as a compilation of literature from various authors over the span of centuries one would hardly be shocked to find them saying different, perhaps even contradicting each other. These would not be contradictions in the logical sense anymore than the collected works of biologists over a comparable period of time.

Of course, logical contradictions are impossible by definition. What we are dealing with are apparent contradictions. And the question, then, is how best to resolve such apparent contradictions. Atheists will insist that the best way to resolve them is to treat the Bible as a work of mythology just as we do those of the Greek, Roman, and other ancient and primitive cultures.

Still, there is something to this idea of contradiction that is worth exploring further. For my money, the most significant contradiction in the Bible is this:

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. [John 3:16]

Vs.

Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. [1 John 2:15-16]

One the one hand, John is telling us that God loved the world. And, on the other hand, John is telling us that we must not love the world for it is nothing but a den on iniquity.

This apparent contradiction is significant for several reasons. First, it is not Old Testament vs. New Testament or the Bible vs. modern knowledge. It is not one author vs. another author. In both cases, according to Tradition, this is the Apostle John.

But this contradiction is also significant because it touches on one of the main criticisms that atheism levels against Christianity: that it is so concerned with the next life that it ignore and denigrates this life. (Judaism offers a similar criticism.) God may love the world bet we are told to reject it. As John later says:

If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. [John 15:19]

Before we dismiss this apparent contradiction as a matter of context, let us note that there is a definite tradition within Christianity of rejecting the world. It is best exemplified by the monastery but has its roots in pre-Christian Jewish society (and ancient society generally), the prophets in sack cloth, the Essenes, even Jesus' own wanderings in the desert.

(I will mention, in passing, that one way to interpret John is to regard the command to reject the world as limited to sin and those who practice sin, the generality of the verse notwithstanding.)

And perhaps the most extreme example of rejecting the world was Gnosticism which held the physical world to be fundamentally flawed, an error, something from which escape is to be sought. The radical dualism of Manichaeism borrowed from Zoroastrianism the idea that good and evil were coequal powers.

Although mainstream Christianity rejected these ideas as heresy, the idea that the world is inherently and unalterable corrupt has survived. Although nobody can literally remove themselves from the world except by suicide, it remains the case that those who distance themselves from it in one way or another are regarded as holier than those who adapt to it, much less those who love the world and indulge in and exploit the things in it.

'Worldly' and 'holy' are practically antonyms.

Ultimately this question of whether to love or reject the world is yet another manifestation of the problem of evil.

The Success and Failure of Modern Science

The invention of logic and deduction by the Greeks is generally regarded as a watershed in western civilization. Less appreciated is how it retarded the discovery of science. Although the Greeks, like the Indians and Chinese, had made many astounding scientific discoveries, they never made the leap to the scientific method.

Throughout the medieval period, scholars held Aristotle and Ptolemy in near reverence and logical deduction was almost the exclusive tool of intellectual inquiry culminating with the Scholastics. Although the components of the scientific method were in long development, they did not really come together until around the 16th century. Methodological science would have to wait more than a millennium. Then human discovery and knowledge practically exploded.

Science, in its essence, is a marriage of logic and empiricism. There was no science so long as the former held primacy over the later. It did not occur to medieval scholars to test their logical deductions against observations and adjust them accordingly. The success and adoration of logic retarded the discovery of science.

Today we see something similar in the success of science. Scientists are disproportionately atheist, either formally or functionally. And most atheists base their convictions on science.

The success of science has crowded out faith and religion.

But faith, properly understood, is an essential ingredient of life. Science, itself, relies on faith and atheists can rightly be said to have placed their faith in the progress of science. Belief in science and materialism is not scientific.

Because we live in an uncertain world in which we are presented with choices that cannot await certainty we must speculate about the unknown in order to make the best decision that we can. We rely on our senses and on the knowledge of others including those who came before us.

Unlike science, religion is a philosophy that openly deals with the great unknowns, the big questions of life. Religion speculates. But it does so in a formal, methodological manner. Typically, atheists fail to appreciate religion because they imagine it to be in competition with science offering alternative explanations of the world.

The problem is that when religion is denied formally it doesn't go away, it simply hides. Scientism, the blind faith in science, rests on an unacknowledged faith in knowability of universe. The refusal to acknowledge the speculative nature of scientism places it outside the realm of reason. It becomes just another superstition.

Refusing to acknowledge the role of religion is not just dishonest, it is intellectually stunting.

Who knows what great discoveries away the proper integration of science and religion.

What Is Supernatural?

Giordano Bruno is generally credited with being the first to put forward the cosmology that we are all familiar with today. Bruno relied mainly on intuition but Galileo's discoveries using his telescope largely confirmed and began the popularization of the modern cosmological view.

Before Bruno and Galileo, the Aristotelian/Biblical Cosmology held that the universe was divided between heaven and earth. While we no longer divide the cosmos in this fashion, pretty much everyone still thinks in terms of the natural and the supernatural. Even atheists who deny the existence of the supernatural.

But what is supernatural?

Christianity holds that God created the cosmos. God is not, therefore, part of the cosmos. But God did create all manner of spiritual beings, angels and souls for example.

Science, on the other hand, concerns itself with what it can observe and predict. So it might seem that natural and supernatural can be so divided: that which can be observed and predicted is natural and the supernatural that which is attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.

But there are problems there too.

First, what is observable and predictable varies over time. Did the planets become natural when they became predictable or when we realized that they consisted of the same matter as the earth? Can we know what we might be able to observe and predict in the future?

Second, and perhaps as importantly, Christianity holds that human beings have observed the supernatural. Most plainly in the person of Jesus but others who have experienced the supernatural  include Abraham and Moses not to mention all who have witnessed miracles of one sort or another. Granted, human experience of the supernatural is rare and fleeting but if the supernatural were truly imperceptible there would be no Christianity.

There is a related problem: even within what we casually refer to as the natural world there is unobservability and unpredictability. We cannot, for example, observe the past or the future and despite the advance of science most of our daily experience involves the unpredictable. It is impossible, for example, to predict the stock market in part because any such prediction would affect it. We live in a very unpredictable cosmos.

Some atheists postulate a hard reductionist, materialist determinism operating through causality. According to this view, the cosmos operates like a giant mechanism (often a clock analogy is used). If we only knew the starting point and momentum for each particle we could predict the future with 100% reliability. But this theoretical view has been largely undermined by quantum and chaos theory. The cosmos is no longer regarded as even theoretically knowable or predictable.

The traditional Catholic solution is to make two separate distinctions. God is supernatural and all creation, including angels and souls, are natural. Additionally, the cosmos is divided between the spiritual and the material. God, angels and souls are spiritual but souls are joined to material bodies.

Using the terms this way, the scientific field of psychology, for example, can be said to be concerned with observing and predicting the spiritual as well as the material since human behavior is, in the Catholic concept, a manifestation of both the physical body and the spiritual soul.

The Falsifiability of Christianity

Is Christianity falsifiable?

One of the ways that religion is distinguished from science is the claim that scientific claims are falsifiable while religious claims are not. In theory at least, every scientific claim is open to refutation by new evidence. Science proceeds, more or less, by the constant refutation of wrong theories leaving only those that are right, or better, or at least not yet refuted. It is critical, in science, to state hypotheses and theories in such a way that they are falsifiable.

A belief which is not open to refutation, which is not falsifiable, is not scientific. But it may be religious. For example, you might have faith that God exists but lacking any way to test that belief it is not falsifiable. There is no conceivable evidence that could be presented which would refute your belief in God.

It is often assumed, therefore, that religion, in general, is not falsifiable and that this is what distinguishes it from science.

However, there does exist at least one test of Christianity. Among the most fundamental claims of Christianity is that Christ is risen. Saint Paul wrote, "And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith." [1 Corinthians 15:14]

If it were to be shown that Christ were not risen Christianity would be essentially refuted. And one way to show that would be to find his burial ossuary. This is a claim that has been made at least once already, see the Lost Tomb of Jesus.

My point is not to debate this particular find but to simply challenge the conventional assumption that religion, and Christianity particularly, is not falsifiable.

Introduction

Welcome to Modern Heterodoxy.

My purpose here is to explore ideas at the intersection of religion and science treating both as serious and worthy subjects of intellectual inquiry.

I decided to write this blog in part out of frustration with other avenues of discourse. Opinion on religion and science form something of a barbell in two interesting ways. First, there is the distribution of adherents, most people identify themselves as primarily religious or scientific, often dismissing the other entirely. And, second, beginning roughly with the Enlightenment, religion and science had come into conflict and one of the most popular resolutions of that conflict was to treat them as separate domains of specialized knowledge, or knowledge systems.

Thus, today, scientists are loathe to involve themselves in religious matters and clerics generally steer clear of scientific debates. Even when scientists acknowledge a religious faith, they tend to compartmentalize their views.

This division can be expressed in many other ways: faith vs. reason, revelation vs. observation, morality vs. ethics, salvation vs. survival and happiness, divine knowledge vs. worldly wisdom.

Of course, there are, and have always been, dissenters from this truce.

Count me among them.

It's worth noting that the division is not only between science and religion. Religion, itself, is a broad subject encompassing many competing faiths. The very fact that competition in faith is so different from competition in science is, itself, revealing.

For the sake of simplicity, I will primarily explore this intersection of science and religion with reference to Roman Catholicism, the religion on which I was raised, though I will freely make reference both to Judaism and Protestantism.

As the title of this blog implies, however, I will not be hewing to orthodoxy. Most topics will entail heterodoxy, opinions or doctrines at variance with an official or orthodox position. And, arguably, many will be heretical, directly conflicting. My main concern is the pursuit of truth, wherever it leads.

I invite your comments and will do my best to address them either in reply or in future posts. If you post an article on a related subject, or in reply to mine, do link to it in the comments.