This article will examine (1) natural law’s and (2) naturalism’s opposing views on abortion. Their diverse philosophies determine radically divergent abortion ethics, which will be examined solely through natural reasoning.

Pertinent Thomistic Doctrines

Since embryology teaches that specifically human life begins at conception, modern natural law ethics – following the principles of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) – prohibits direct abortion at any stage, since it is the taking of innocent human life. This position is consistent with the philosophical doctrine of hylemorphism, which teaches that all physical substances are composed of matter and form. Since form determines what kind of thing a substance is, the human substantial form, or soul, determines the presence of human life. Soul determines that something is a single, unified living organism of a given species.

Embryology makes clear that a specifically human organism, distinct from the body of its mother, begins life at the moment of fertilization. “Zygote” is simply a technical name for the first single-celled human organism. That selfsame human organism lives throughout all the later stages of fetal development, birth, infancy, pubescence, adulthood, and senescence – until death.

Because the same individual human substance lives from conception to death, no change makes it suddenly become a person based on acquisition of certain properties, say, cognitive abilities. If it is a person at any later stage of life, it is a person at conception and has the same personal rights throughout life.

Rationality belongs to the human essence throughout life, even though sentient and rational faculties become active as organic functions develop. We do not become human at a certain point of development, only to later lose our human rights because of irreversible dementia. The distinction between potency and act is crucial. The human organism is always a person with rights in act, even though various human faculties may go from potency to act and even back to potency later.

Specifically human faculties (operative potencies) are not yet in act with respect to their operations – but are fully in act with respect to existence, even from the time of conception.

These faculties, which are immaterial properties of the human soul, must not be confused with mere brain organization, which, when sufficiently developed, is used for the faculties’ operations. While a certain brain organization is needed for understanding to occur, it is the intellectual faculty that actually allows the person to think. Mere physical brain activity cannot even perceive sensible images as a whole, and certainly cannot form universal concepts.

This is why faculties must be present from conception, since they have no way of later developing in the immaterial substantial form – and brain function alone can neither think nor sense. The faculties of the soul are needed, so they must begin existence when the soul does.

There has to be a distinction between the substance itself and its operative potencies (powers, faculties). Otherwise, the act of the substance (existence) would be identical to the acts of the faculties (sensing, thinking) – meaning that when not sensing or thinking a man would stop existing!

The faculties exist continuously, while they go into act and sometimes cease acting, and then, begin acting again.

For example, I can be not thinking or seeing, and then begin thinking or seeing, and then cease thinking or seeing again – all the while continuing to (1) exist as a substance and (2) possess the powers to think and to see.

Since this continuously living human organism belongs to the species of rational animal, it is what Boethius defined as a “person,” since “a person is a supposit (substance) of a rational nature. The only other such created persons are angels.

Natural Law and Abortion

Natural law ethics defines murder as the gravely immoral evil of directly taking innocent human life. Decent men recognize this as a basic moral precept. Without space to defend this precept fully, the argument begins that rights flow from obligations. God gives us life and obliges us to live it well so as to attain the Supreme Good, God himself. That obligation gives us the corresponding right to live. Because others must respect our right to live, it is immoral to violate that right by taking an innocent human life.

Abortion is such an immoral act -- evil by its very nature (intrinsically evil), since it directly attacks the most fundamental human right. Nor can such an act be justified by any utilitarian purpose, however good, since natural law forbids using an intrinsically evil means to attain a good end.

Up to half of embryos die before implantation. Could their genetic material be so defective that they do not constitute human life? Could one infer that very early stage abortion might be licit? But, those which do survive are human lives and ought not be killed. Those that do not survive either were human or not. If not, then, since they die anyway, there is no reason to kill them. But, if they were human lives, then killing them is clearly immoral. So, the objection is pointless.

But, did not St. Thomas accept the outdated successive animation theory that the human soul is not present at conception, but rather appears in the third month, after a vegetative and then sentient soul was present in the first and second months of gestation? Yes, he provisionally accepted Aristotle’s reasoning about this, because the ancients did not see how the early stages’ matter looked fit for the human form.

Modern Thomists know that the material organization of the human organism, even as a single-celled zygote, is uniquely specific to the human species, as evinced by the uniquely human DNA present in every living human cell, even in its initial stages. Hence, they now correctly insist that the human form must be present, even in the zygote.

Naturalism's Abortion Stance

Accepting neither God nor a spiritual and immortal human soul, naturalism approaches abortion’s ethics very differently. Ethical norms themselves are based, not on some transcendental metaphysics, but simply common human approbation of what is right or wrong, possibly augmented by some claim of evolutionary advantage to those who practice such norms. Absent natural law foundations, many different theories are advanced.

For example, the principle not to take innocent human life is not viewed as protective of all human organisms. Rather, criteria as to who merits the “right-to-life-conferring” designation of a “person” are considered and applied only as “warranted.”

This means that the human zygote is not considered a person because it lacks certain “personhood” properties, including sentience, self-consciousness, rationality, creativity, socialization, and so forth. Depending upon criteria selected, different stages of fetal development may or may not be granted full human status, with birth being an important event for both ethical and legal purposes.

The gaining of personhood and its corresponding right to life, then, is seen as a gradual process. Properties, such as various levels of cognitive awareness, birth giving “embodiment in the world,” and even societal acceptance, become benchmarks by which personhood is more or less arbitrarily conferred upon the developing human organisms.

Using this reasoning, various seeming paradoxes can be explained. For example, a baby born several weeks prematurely is presently considered a legal person with a right to life, whereas a full term fetus can be aborted at the moment prior to natural birth, since he is still not born – even though neurologically more fully developed than the prematurely born baby.

One explanation is that birth itself confers “embodiment into the world,” and thus establishes a claim for the premature infant that is lacking to the as yet unborn full term fetus.

For naturalists, the defining characteristic of the human person becomes the development of some brain function that enables activities which fulfill “person conferring” criteria, such as certain cognitive abilities.

Hylemorphism vs. Atomism

Central is the question of whether the human zygote is correctly described as (1) a hylemorphic unity, that is, living things are made substantially one being by having an immaterial form that unifies the matter and places it into the human species, or (2) as simply a product of biological evolution, that is, a group of synergistically interacting organic molecules with no metaphysical uniting principle.

Because naturalism ascribes no substantial form having special human powers to the human zygote, there is no basis for saying that the zygote is a “rational animal” that would fulfill Boethius’s definition of the person, or, for that matter, any other definition of person that naturalists would accept.

Naturalism rejects God’s existence, typically by espousing atomism -- the claim that all reality ultimately reduces to the smallest physical units: atoms or subatomic particles. Thus, the focus is now on atomism.

Does hylemorphism or atomism correctly describe the zygote? Several arguments show that hylemorphism prevails.

First, without hylemorphism, not only is the substantial unity of the zygote denied, but so is that of all later stages of human development. Substantial unity means that a thing is undivided in itself and distinct from other beings.

This is crucial because we do not even exist without such unity. My video, “Atheistic Materialism,” shows that Richard Dawkins does not exist – based on his own atomistic premises.

If one takes atomism seriously, the only things that really exist are whatever basic atomic or subatomic units of matter one selects as ultimate. For sake of argument, let us consider that the building blocks of organic chemistry and of organisms are atoms. And atoms combine to make larger entities, be they molecules or entire organisms.

The logic is as simple as this: When two atoms combine chemically, say, sodium and chlorine, do they become one thing (salt?), or are they really still two things (two distinct atoms), functionally associated? Atomism logically is forced to the latter position, since all that really exists is atoms, even though they may enter into temporary chemical bonds with other atoms.

The same logic must be followed all the way up through the zygote, the newborn, and the adult human being -- including Dr. Dawkins. Atomism is ontologically committed to the sole realities being atoms, despite highly-complex chemical bonding taking place in functional unities (organisms) obeying DNA dictates.

This means that zygotes are not persons, not merely because they lack certain cognitive abilities, but because they lack substantial unity.

In a word, the philosophy of atomism or naturalism may exist, but atomists and naturalists do not.

Absent some real unifying principle, such as form, atomism’s self-defeating truth is that nothing really exists above the atomic level. This is why there is no stable principle of existence on which naturalism can depend to establish a principle of “personhood.” Atomism’s most embarrassing “public secret” is that, not only is the zygote not a person (on its false premises), but there is no unified supposit, substance, thing… on which to ground the notion of personhood at all.

Even the concept of “neural networks or patterns” suffers the same problem. A certain neural pattern may exhibit cognitive activity, much like a computer with AI, but there is no “there” there to be the person having “personhood.” Just atoms exchanging outer orbit electrons. That’s all.

Atomists have abolished substantial forms. But they have also abolished themselves in the process!

The entire debate over when personhood is present, based on various cognitive or other criteria, misses the point – since the same atomism that denies full human rights to the zygote also denies the ontological basis for the substantial existence of any person at any stage of human life.

The only way to avoid this intellectual suicide is to grant that there is some principle of existential unity above the atomic level in living organisms, including the zygote. Dare we call it a “substantial form?”

What atomism lacks is a stable principle of unification for living organisms. That is why naturalists struggle to designate the point at which the “person” finally appears in fetal development.

“Personhood” never can appear in naturalism, since all that really exists is the atoms – not the atomists who believe this fantasy.

At best, the concept of personhood that atomism can support is that of a certain neural pattern that has “achieved” epiphenomenal consciousness. This functionally, but not substantially, unified neural pattern would then become the “person,” using the entire organism, brain and all, like a parasite alien invading a victim host.

Even then, the neural pattern’s consciousness could not be just material atoms, since even sense experience of the wholeness of images must be immaterial, as shown in an earlier Strange Notions piece.

Conversely, if zygotes really exist as substantial unities, hylemorphism reappears – together with continuously existing substances and powers, whose secondary cognitive activities come and go.

Naturalism lacks a continuous principle of substantial unity for the living organism. What hylemorphism has is an essential nature that is present from conception to death – a nature manifesting fully human cognitive abilities sometime after conception.

Previously, I have shown non-material activities of sentient and intellectual substances comport with hylemorphism, but not atomism’s materialism -- specifically by pointing to (1) sentient cognitive abilities shared by lower animals to apprehend sense data as a whole (which no material device can do), and (2) spiritual intellectual abilities found in man by which he forms universal concepts. Atomism can explain none of these abilities.

Ethical and Legal Principles

Two principles pertain to abortion:

1. It is never licit to directly kill an innocent human being.
2. It is never licit to perform an action unless one is morally certain that it will not directly kill an innocent human being.

These principles have substantial acceptance, both in ethics and in law.

Regarding the first principle, it is the primary obligation of society or the state to protect the innocent human life of every human person within its jurisdiction. With respect to secondary rights, such as bodily autonomy and consent, these rights are limited insofar as they violate the more primary right to life of another human being. Autonomy and consent over my body ends when it allows me to destroy your body and life. That the right to life is more primary than any other right follows from the fact that unless one is alive, no other rights can exist.

The second principle reflects a common sense provision of law. People go to jail for shooting humans they fail to make certain were deer.

For hylemorphism, human life begins at conception and is a continuous substantial entity until death. All scientific evidence supports that the same organism present at conception is the one present in adulthood. Therefore, the same substantial form must be present from conception to death. As shown above, this includes the soul’s immaterial faculties. Since the form of the adult is clearly human and a person, the soul and human person must have been present from conception on.

Therefore abortion is always morally wrong and to be condemned. And since it is wrong by its very nature (intrinsically wrong), no set of circumstances or good intentions or outcomes can possibly justify it – for no good end can ever justify an intrinsically evil means to that end.

But what of the view of atomism?

Since neural networks capable of “human” acts, such as creativity, do not develop until a certain point in gestation, or even at birth in the case of “embodiment in the world,” atomists claim specifically human faculties are non-existent until such neural development. Thus, they can claim moral certitude (beyond a reasonable doubt) that a “person” does not yet exist, and thus, abortion violates no human rights.

But, as demonstrated above, in atomism the human organism has no substantial unity at any stage of its existence. All that exists are individual atoms. There is never a substantially unified single being to serve as a substrate for “personhood.”

At best, the “person” turns out to be a certain neural complex of atoms, developed in the human brain, having no substantial unity. Even then, no purely physical neural complex can grasp the wholeness of an extended image in a single, simple act. To do this, an immaterial form is needed, which atomism rejects.

With no immaterial “form” to unite the neural network, its existential experiences of unity and selfhood have no rational basis. Conversely, the existential experience of the self bespeaks some kind of substantial unity, which atomism cannot explain.

Legality

Never even having heard of hylemorphism, the common sense metaphysical insights of most people will lead them rightly to suspect that, if we are a single organism as adults, we must have been one as a human zygote – and that the same individual human life developed from conception into the adult we encounter as a person today.

For that reason, most citizens who follow the ethical principles enunciated above will conclude that one cannot, with moral certainty, say at which point the human organism became a person. Being uncertain of this point, they may well conclude that it would be as immoral to kill the unborn child at any point. For this reason, we should not be surprised if legislators conclude that the common ethical principles of society operate to protect the unborn.

While some will protest that society has no right to violate the autonomy and consent of women with pro-life legislation, since most people recognize that the first obligation of society is to protect the life of its innocent members, pro-life legislation may find increasing support.

This article will lay out the rational foundations of natural law ethics as well as show how they lead to implications for the philosophical science of ethics.

Everyone thinks he is an expert in ethics – or, so it seems. Just ask anyone’s opinion about any hot topic, like abortion, the homosexual agenda, the proper response to climate change, or the death penalty, and you will elicit strong judgments as to what we are obliged to do or not do. Rarely does someone say, “Who am I to judge?”

Still, depending on one’s world view, very different responses to such issues tend to follow. Those who hold that the God of classical theism exists and that man has a spiritual and immortal soul tend to hold radically diverse views from atheists, who hold man is simply the end product of material evolution.

That is why arguments about the ethical inferences of such divergent views tend, at best, to result in a respectful agreement to disagree.

It goes without saying that, if the God of classical theism does not exist, or if there is no unchanging essential human nature or spiritual afterlife, then natural law ethics is mere fantasy. On the other hand, mankind’s universal sense of conscience and compulsion to do good and avoid evil, combined with recognition that some acts are so heinous that history itself offers universal condemnation, such as the Holocaust, make some purely evolutionary explanations appear superficial.

Nonetheless, having already published articles on Strange Notions that demonstrate the existence of God and the immortality of the human soul, I hope now to show how natural law ethics, as taught by St. Thomas Aquinas, can be successfully built upon such a body of truths.

Given its necessarily short treatment here, this piece is, at best, but a scanty outline of natural law’s rational basis and essential structure.

Eternal and Natural Law

St. Thomas Aquinas defines law in general as “… an ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by him who has care of the community.”¹ Since he maintains that “… a law is something pertaining to reason,”² the natural law always pertains to the “order of reason.” It is not based on supernatural revelation.

Since God has care of all creation, St. Thomas’s definition of eternal law is “… the plan of divine wisdom in as much as it is directive of all acts and motions.”³ God implements his eternally-known plan for creatures quite naturally, that is, through the natures of things themselves. For, what is more natural to a thing than to act in accordance with its own nature?

For physical things, God is the supreme designer of the natural physical law. Physical creatures follow God’s directive insofar as each thing must operate according to its own physical nature. Thus sodium must act as its nature directs, when it combines with chlorine to form salt. No one would suggest that a natural body could somehow choose to ignore its own nature and behave like something else. So, too, is the case with all living creatures less than human beings, since, lacking free wills, their behavior is determined completely by their natures – and their natures are the result of God’s eternal plan of creation.

Thus, the central insight of natural law is that it operates in and through a creature’s very nature, where the nature is the essence of the thing viewed from the perspective of what governs all its activities. Natural law is  promulgated in virtue of its being the very principle of operation in every creature. It need not be known by the creature, since natural law automatically dictates how the creature exists and operates. Still, while non-rational creatures do share natural law in a secondary sense, natural law is primarily understood as the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law.

Man's Last End: Union with God

When it comes to the rational creature, which is man, his possession of reason and free will distinguishes his participation in natural law from that of non-intelligent creatures. This does not mean that human beings’ non-free activities are so distinguished, but that the concept of specifically human acts is restricted to those over which we have deliberate control.

Thus, our bodies are subjected to the same physical law of gravity as all non-rational bodies, so that falling from a height would be considered the act of a human, but not a specifically human act. So, too, is the case with our physically-determined biological processes. But, a deliberate choice, say, to accept a bribe – since it is under rational and free control, would be viewed as a specifically human act.

For the science of ethics, human natural law pertains solely to such freely chosen actions.

Since there is no room here for a complete treatise on natural law, I will limit my remarks to those most pertinent to man’s ethical situation. In fact, it does not concern us whether non-human agents universally exhibit final causality, since what is evident is that humans exhibit direct and deliberate actions for ends they understand and freely choose.

We actively seek ends we find fitting to our natural desires, which is why we call them “good.”⁴ St. Thomas spends the first sixty-three chapters of Book III of the Summa Contra Gentiles showing that no finite good can completely satisfy the human appetite, since (1) we can always conceive a more perfect good, and (2) even the most perfect goods in this life will be lost at death. Man is never completely happy until and unless (1) there is no greater good to be attained, and (2) the good attained can never be taken away from him.

Since philosophical psychology demonstrates that man has a spiritual and immortal soul, St. Thomas reasons that man’s true end cannot be fulfilled in this life, but only in the afterlife. Moreover, since all good things come from the Creator, God must not only have goodness as the cause of goodness in creatures, but, in light of the divine simplicity, must be Goodness itself. Since man is never satisfied as long as a greater good can be had, man’s last end must be God himself, who alone is infinite goodness.

From this, it follows that all man’s free actions should be directed toward, or certainly not opposed to, attaining God as his last end in the unending afterlife. Since the omnibenevolent God has given man his rational nature and last end, God’s own fidelity assures man that proper use of that rational nature will enable us to attain our last end, which is eternal union with the Supreme Good, which is God himself.

The Basis for Moral Obligation

But, man’s essence is to be a rational animal. Man differs from, and is superior to, lower animals by possession of reason. The proper use of reason is the measure of man’s perfection and fittingness to attain his last end. That is, God did not give us reason so as to act irrationally, but rationally. Otherwise, we become operationally a contradiction in terms: an irrational rational animal.

This extends to the use of our various natural powers, since reason dictates that they be used rationally. But the various powers are clearly understood by reason as ordered to certain ends. For example, the power of nutrition is aimed at bodily health through proper eating and drinking. Yet, eating too much or eating poison can damage our health, rendering the nutritional end of the act vitiated. The act of eating then becomes an anti-nutritional nutritional act, which is self-contradictory, and therefore contrary to rational use of the nutritive faculty.

Such behavior is irrational, and thus, contrary to man’s rational nature. Such behavior therefore leads man away from his true end, which renders such acts something we ought not do. It is a thrust away from the true nature of man. Since nature dictates the true being of man, deviating freely from our nature in this fashion is a thrust away from the fulfillment of our being: it is a thrust toward non-being. Thus, it results in a self-destructive act that leads us away from our true end or good.

We overcome the alleged is/ought dichotomy by seeing that immoral acts are committed under the penalty of self-destruction, which is something we should not chose, something we ought not do.

Just as a lame horse suffers physical evil because it lacks the fullness of its natural perfections as a horse, so, too, a man who freely rejects his natural inclination toward moral goodness suffers moral evil for which he is personally responsible.

Such self-destructive acts contradict the creative intention of God in giving us existence and the opportunity to reach our blessed last end. It is a metaphorical “slap in the face to God himself.” Natural law tells us that we are not simply “self-responsible,” as some claim, but rather are “responsible,” not merely to ourselves, but to God as the Supreme Lawgiver and Creator of our human rational natures.

Since reason tells us our immoral acts are contrary to our rational nature, and thus, to God’s creative intention, we properly feel guilt, shame, and a realization that we have done something we ought not to do – something that violates the God-given gifts of our existence and rationality.

Without formal realization of the obligation imposed by natural law, all men naturally understand the obligation to do good and avoid evil. They also see to some degree the need to do things that are fitting to their nature. This natural internal compulsion manifests the existence of the natural law in an imperfect way.

Full recognition of natural law is had only by those who also realize that this internal compulsion arises because God exists to impose our nature and its natural ends upon us.

In general, human acts can be understood as morally evil if they entail either a misuse of some natural faculty or the violation of the rights of ourselves or of others. A proper understanding of our powers entails understanding their intrinsic finalities. Thus speech is the means by which truth in my mind is conveyed to another. Lying contravenes that purpose, making communication anti-communicative, and thus, irrational, which, in turn, violates the rationality of our nature.

The violation of others’ rights is also seen as irrational, since rights flow from obligations which arise from human nature. For instance, since man must live to fully express God’s intention in creating him, to kill him is to violate his right to fulfill his obligation to live so as to reach his last end in God. Equally, suicide violates the right and obligation to maintain our own God-given lives. Without detailing the morality of every act, this is the sort of reasoning which the study of natural law entails.

Clearly, full exposition of all aspects of natural law and its application would require an entire course in ethics, which is impossible in this short paper. Hopefully, some of the above explanations will serve to render clearer the coherency of natural law ethics and its application to current ethical controversies.

Sometimes, the most important questions are the basic ones. Back in 2011, I argued that the most important question in the gay-marriage debate was “What is marriage?” The next year, Robert George, Ryan Anderson, and Sherif Girgis published a book exploring just that question: What Is Marriage?: Man and Woman: A Defense. But in the face of contemporary questions of transgenderism and gender identity, it turns out that we need to ask a yet more-basic question: what are men and women, and what makes them different?

To some of you, that question might seem obvious, even asinine. Nearly all of us have a working understanding of what we mean by “men” and “women.” Ironically, even people who believe that it’s possible to be transgender still affirm this: calling a man a “trans-woman” presupposes that we know what a woman is. In other words, what does it mean to say that a biological male is a woman?

I. Bad Answers to the Men and Women Question

Bear in mind, we’re looking for what it is that makes all men unlike all women. So here are some incorrect answers to the question:

1. Using stereotypes to distinguish men from women: women may tend to be more nurturing and men more abstract-thinking, etc., but there are so many counter-examples to any stereotype that you can come up with that this is obviously not a workable answer.
2. Using social norms to distinguish men from women: things like “women wear dresses, and men wear pants” are both stereotypes (suffering the same flaw as #1) and culturally-contingent: think Scottish kilts or female dress slacks as obvious counter-examples.
3. Using hormones to distinguish men from women: men typically have higher levels of testosterone and lower levels of estrogen, than women do. But testosterone and estrogen levels vary from individual to individual, and change throughout your life.
4. Using sexual organs to distinguish men from women: This is an obvious difference, but it’s not a satisfying answer. A castrated man isn’t less of a man, after all, nor is a woman any less a woman if she’s had a hysterectomy or mastectomy. Plus, a small portion of the human family is born “intersex” (a poor term) with ambiguous genitalia.
5. Denying that such a difference exists: Obviously, the fact that we can speak coherently of men and women means that we’re somehow distinct.

Nevertheless, while all of these answers miss the mark, all of them also have an element of the truth, which makes them attractive. So what would a better answer look like?

II. A Better Answer

Here’s what I think a better answer might look like:

1. The essential distinction between men and women is genetic. All men have a Y chromosome (typically XY, although in some cases XXY or XYY), and no women have Y chromosomes. In other words, men are adult male humans and women are adult female humans.
2. This genetic difference tends to express itself in different sexual organs. In rare cases, something impedes this from happening as it is ought to, or something happens to the sexual organs. But even in the case of those borned “intersexed,” there is a genetic sex: it just may be harder to tell.
3. This genetic difference also tends to express itself in different brain chemistry, different levels of various hormones, and differences (big and small) in cognitive and behavioral development.
4. Society also plays a role, and environmental factors can even impact hormone levels. It is not always easy to determine which social behaviors are attributable to social roles, or environment, or innate genetics. But most societies amplify the differences between the sexes by creating a set of gender roles.

The chief benefits of this definition of men and women are threefold.

First, this is what we have always meant by men and women, even before we knew what genes were. There was a recognition that there were real differences between male and female humans, present from birth, and we expressed these different types of humans with the terms ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ for children and ‘men’ and ‘women’ for adults (and ‘male’ and ‘female’ on the whole). Genes explain why these differences exist (and why unusual things sometimes happen in how the genes express themselves). Second, this is how we speak about non-humans. We can coherently speak of male and female mammals using a similar genetic distinction. Finally, this definition avoids two obviously-false extremes: the idea that men and women are interchangeable, and a sort of “Rambo and Barbie” reductionism.

III. The Implications for the Transgender / Gender Identity Question

The points above are much bigger than contemporary debates over gender identity and transgender issues. A lot of the ink spilled over the last few decades on issues like feminism could be aided by everyone having a clearer understanding of women and men and the differences between them (and especially, of which of those differences are innate and universal, and which of those are socially constructed, etc.). But while it’s not reducible to that question, I think it’s helpful.

We can both affirm that there really are fundamental genetic differences between men and women, and affirm that (for example) some women act and emote in conventionally-masculine ways, and may even have higher-than-average testosterone levels, etc. So it’s no surprise that there are people who don’t “fit” the social expectations for what a man or what a woman is like. That, of itself, is nothing new – terms like “tomboy” exist to describe this reality. And our response ought to be one of compassion and support, particularly if we’re Christians.

But having a coherent definition of “man” and “woman” does show why transgenderism is a non-starter. What I mean is this. If the claim were just “I’m a man who likes feminine things,” that would be a coherent idea. But if a biological male claims to be a woman, what does that person mean by “woman”? They can’t mean that a biological male is biologically female, because that doesn’t make sense. And if their understanding of what it is to be a “woman” is rooted in any of the types of definitions we explored in Part I, you can see why those don’t work.

So there’s something a bit deceptive in all of this. A person who believes in transgenderism cannot say that men and women are the same thing (since there would be nothing to “trans” if the two genders are the same). But they also cannot affirm that men and women are essentially different, since affirming that fact would make their own claim nonsense. So “transgenderism” relies on the language of “man” and “woman,” and even relies on the idea that the two are somehow different, while emptying those words of any actual meaning and refusing to define what this new meaning of “man” and “woman” actually is.

On January 28, 1948, the BBC brought together two of the century's brightest minds for a radio debate about the existence of God. To be sure, the debaters were not just lightweight showboats, blowing off steam. The two men represented the cream of the intellectual crop.

Bertrand Russell was a renowned British philosopher, mathematician, historian, and perhaps the world's leading atheist at the time. He authored many skeptical essays and books, including the collection still popular today, Why I Am Not a Christian.

Fr. Frederick Charles (F.C.) Copleston was a Jesuit priest, philosopher, and historian of philosophy, best known for his magisterial eleven-volume History of Philosophy. He studied at Oxford and taught at many prestigious universities, including the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and in 1970 was made a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).

(Interestingly, a year after debating Russell, Copleston debated logical positivism and the meaningfulness of religious language with the influential atheist philosopher A. J. Ayer. The full debate text is not available online, but you can read a scanned book version here.)

The 1948 debate between Russell and Copleston was split into three parts:

1. The Argument from Contingency
2. Religious Experience
3. The Moral Argument

Below you'll find the entire debate text. The debate has been reprinted in several sources, but the following text was copied from Bertrand Russell on God and Religion, edited by Al Seckel.

After you finish reading, let us know:

Who do you think won each part of the debate?

NOTE: Brackets refer to missing audio. Also, in the transcript below, "C" is for Copleston and "R" is for Russell.

C: As we are going to discuss the existence of God, it might perhaps be as well to come to some provisional agreement as to what we understand by the term "God." I presume that we mean a supreme personal Being -- distinct from the world and Creator of the world. Would you agree -- provisionally at least -- to accept this statement as the meaning of the term "God"?

R: Yes, I accept this definition.

C: Well, my position is the affirmative position that such a Being actually exists, and that His existence can be proved philosophically. Perhaps you would tell me if your position is that of agnosticism or of atheism. I mean, would you say that the non-existence of God can be proved?

R: No, I should not say that: my position is agnostic.

C: Would you agree with me that the problem of God is a problem of great importance? For example, would you agree that if God does not exist, human beings and human history can have no other purpose than the purpose they choose to give themselves, which -- in practice -- is likely to mean the purpose which those impose who have the power to impose it?

R: Roughly speaking, yes, though I should have to place some limitation on your last clause.

C: Would you agree that if there is no God -- no absolute Being -- there can be no absolute values? I mean, would you agree that if there is no absolute good that the relativity of values results?

R: No, I think these questions are logically distinct. Take, for instance, G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica, where he maintains that there is a distinction of good and evil, that both of these are definite concepts. But he does not bring in the idea of God to support that contention.

C: Well, suppose we leave the question of good till later, till we come to the moral argument, and I give first a metaphysical argument. I'd like to put the main weight on the metaphysical argument based on Leibniz's argument from "Contingency" and then later we might discuss the moral argument. Suppose I give a brief statement on the metaphysical argument and that then we go on to discuss it?

R: That seems to me to be a very good plan.

PART I - The Argument from Contingency

C: Well, for clarity's sake, I'll divide the argument into distinct stages. First of all, I should say, we know that there are at least some beings in the world which do not contain in themselves the reason for their existence. For example, I depend on my parents, and now on the air, and on food, and so on. Now, secondly, the world is simply the real or imagined totality or aggregate of individual objects, none of which contain in themselves alone the reason of their existence. There isn't any world distinct from the objects which form it, any more than the human race is something apart from the members. Therefore, I should say, since objects or events exist, and since no object of experience contains within itself the reason of its existence, this reason, the totality of objects, must have a reason external to itself. And that reason must be an existent being.

Well, this being is either itself the reason for its own existence, or it is not. If it is, well and good. If not, then we must proceed further. But if we proceed to infinity in that sense, then there's no explanation of existence at all. So, I should say, in order to explain existence, we must come to a Being which contains within itself the reason for its own existence, that is to say, which cannot not exist.

R: This raises a great many points and it's not altogether easy to know where to begin, but I think that, perhaps, in answering your argument, the best point with which to begin is the question of a Necessary Being. The word "necessary" I should maintain, can only be applied significantly to propositions. And, in fact, only to such as are analytic -- that is to say -- such as it is self-contradictory to deny. I could only admit a Necessary Being if there were a being whose existence it is self-contradictory to deny. I should like to know whether you would accept Leibniz's division of propositions into truths of reason and truths of fact. The former -- the truths of reason -- being necessary.

C: Well, I certainly should not subscribe to what seems to be Leibniz's idea of truths of reason and truths of fact, since it would appear that, for him, there are in the long run only analytic propositions. [ It would seem that for Leibniz truths of fact are ultimately reducible to truths of reason. That is to say, to analytic propositions, at least for an omniscient mind. Well, I couldn't agree with that. For one thing it would fail to meet the requirements of the experience of freedom. ] I don't want to uphold the whole philosophy of Leibniz. I have made use of his argument from contingent to Necessary Being, basing the argument on the principle of sufficient reason, simply because it seems to me a brief and clear formulation of what is, in my opinion, the fundamental metaphysical argument for God's existence.

R: But, to my mind, a "necessary proposition" has got to be analytic. I don't see what else it can mean. And analytic propositions are always complex and logically somewhat late. "Irrational animals are animals" is an analytic proposition; but a proposition such as "This is an animal" can never be analytic. In fact, all the propositions that can be analytic are somewhat late in the build-up of propositions.

C: Take the proposition "if there is a contingent being then there is a Necessary Being." I consider that that proposition hypothetically expressed is a necessary proposition. If you are going to call every necessary proposition an analytic proposition, then -- in order to avoid a dispute in terminology -- I would agree to call it analytic, though I don't consider it a tautological proposition. But the proposition is a necessary proposition only on the supposition that there is a contingent being. That there is a contingent being actually existing has to be discovered by experience, and the proposition that there is a contingent being is certainly not an analytic proposition, though once you know, I should maintain, that there is a contingent being, it follows of necessity that there is a Necessary Being.

R: The difficulty of this argument is that I don't admit the idea of a Necessary Being and I don't admit that there is any particular meaning in calling other beings "contingent." These phrases don't for me have a significance except within a logic that I reject.

[ C: Do you mean that you reject these terms because they won't fit in with what is called "modern logic"?

The dogmatic position behind it seems to be this: What will not go into my machine is non-existent, or it is meaningless; it is the expression of emotion. I am simply trying to point out that anybody who says that a particular system of modern logic is the sole criterion of meaning is saying something that is over-dogmatic; he is dogmatically insisting that a part of philosophy is the whole of philosophy. After all, ] ...a "contingent" being is a being which has not in itself the complete reason for its existence. That's what I mean by a contingent being. You know, as well as I do, that the existence of neither of us can be explained without reference to something or somebody outside us, our parents, for example. A "Necessary" Being, on the other hand means a being that must and cannot not exist. You may say that there is no such Being, but you will find it hard to convince me that you do not understand the terms I am using. If you do not understand them, then how can you be entitled to say that such a Being does not exist, if that is what you do say?

[ R: Well, there are points here that I don't propose to go into at length. I don't maintain the meaninglessness of metaphysics in general at all. I maintain the meaninglessness of certain particular terms -- not on any general ground, but simply because I've not been able to see an interpretation of those particular terms. It's not a general dogma -- it's a particular thing. But those points I will leave out for the moment. ]

Well, I will say that what you have been saying brings us back, it seems to me, to the Ontological Argument that there is a being whose essence involves existence, so that his existence is analytic. That seems to me to be impossible, and it raises, of course, the question what one means by existence, and as to this, I think a subject named can never be significantly said to exist but only a subject described. And that existence, in fact, quite definitely is not a predicate.

C: Well, you say, I believe, that it is bad grammar, or rather bad syntax to say for example "T. S. Eliot exists"; one ought to say, for example, "[He,] the author of Murder in the Cathedral, exists." Are you going to say that the proposition, "The cause of the world exists," is without meaning? You may say that the world has no cause; but I fail to see how you can say that the proposition that "the cause of the world exists" is meaningless. Put it in the form of a question: "Has the world a cause?" or "Does a cause of the world exist?" Most people surely would understand the question, even if they don't agree about the answer.

R: Well, certainly the question "Does the cause of the world exist?" is a question that has meaning. But if you say "Yes, God is the cause of the world" you're using God as a proper name; then "God exists" will not be a statement that has meaning; that is the position that I am maintaining. Because, therefore, it will follow that it cannot be an analytic proposition ever to say that this or that exists. Take for example, suppose you take as your subject "the existent round-square," it would look like an analytic proposition that "the existent round-square exists," but it doesn't exist.

C: No, it doesn't, then surely you can't say it doesn't exist unless you have a conception of what existence is. As to the phrase "existent round-square," I should say that it has no meaning at all.

R: I quite agree. Then I should say the same thing in another context in reference to a "Necessary Being."

C: Well, we seem to have arrived at an impasse. To say that a Necessary Being is a being that must exist and cannot not exist has for me a definite meaning. For you it has no meaning.

R: Well, we can press the point a little, I think. A Being that must exist and cannot not exist, would surely, according to you, be a Being whose essence involves existence.

C: Yes, a being the essence of which is to exist. But I should not be willing to argue the existence of God simply from the idea of His essence because I don't think we have any clear intuition of God's essence as yet. I think we have to argue from the world of experience to God.

R: Yes, I quite see the distinction. But, at the same time, for a being with sufficient knowledge, it would be true to say "Here is this being whose essence involves existence."

C: Yes, certainly if anybody saw God, he would see that God must exist.

R: So that I mean there is a being whose essence involves existence although we don't know that essence. We only know there is such a being.

C: Yes, I should add we don't know the essence a priori. It is only true a posteriori through our experience of the world that we come to a knowledge of the existence of that Being. And then one argues, the essence and existence must be identical. Because if God's essence and God's existence were not identical, then some sufficient reason for this existence would have to be found beyond God.

R: So it all turns on this question of sufficient reason, and I must say you haven't defined "sufficient reason" in a way that I can understand -- what do you mean by sufficient reason? You don't mean cause?

C: Not necessarily. Cause is a kind of sufficient reason. Only contingent being can have a cause. God is His own sufficient reason; but He is not cause of Himself. By sufficient reason in the full sense I mean an explanation adequate for the existence of some particular being.

R: But when is an explanation adequate? Suppose I am about to make a flame with a match. You may say that the adequate explanation of that is that I rub it on the box.

C: Well, for practical purposes -- but theoretically, that's only a partial explanation. An adequate explanation must ultimately be a total explanation, to which nothing further can be added.

R: Then I can only say you're looking for something which can't be got, and which one ought not to expect to get.

C: To say that one has not found it is one thing; to say that one should not look for it seems to me rather dogmatic.

[ R: Well, I don't know. I mean, the explanation of one thing is another thing which makes the other thing dependent on yet another, and you have to grasp this sorry scheme of things entire to do what you want, and that we can't do.

C: If the word is meaningless, it can't be so very handy. In any case, I don't say that the universe is something different from the objects which compose it (I indicated that in my brief summary of the proof). ]
What I'm doing is to look for the reason, in this case the cause of the objects -- the real or imagined totality of which constitute what we call the universe. You say, I think that the universe -- or my existence if you prefer, or any other existence -- is unintelligible?

R: [ First may I take up the point that if a word is meaningless it can't be handy. That sounds well but isn't in fact correct. Take, say, such a word as "the" or "than." You can't point to any object that those words mean, but they are very useful words; I should say the same of "universe." But leaving that point, you ask whether I consider that the universe is unintelligible. ] I shouldn't say unintelligible -- I think it is without explanation. Intelligible, to my mind, is a different thing. Intelligible has to do with the thing itself intrinsically and not with its relations.

C: Well, my point is that what we call the world is intrinsically unintelligible, apart from the existence of God. You see, I don't believe that the infinity of the series of events -- I mean a horizontal series, so to speak -- if such an infinity could be proved, would be in the slightest degree relevant to the situation. If you add up chocolates you get chocolates after all and not a sheep. If you add up chocolates to infinity, you presumably get an infinite number of chocolates. So if you add up contingent beings to infinity, you still get contingent beings, not a Necessary Being. An infinite series of contingent beings will be, to my way of thinking, as unable to cause itself as one contingent being. However, you say, I think, that it is illegitimate to raise the question of what will explain the existence of any particular object.

R: It's quite all right if you mean by explaining it, simply finding a cause for it.

C: Well, why stop at one particular object? Why shouldn't one raise the question of the cause of the existence of all particular objects?

R: Because I see no reason to think there is any. The whole concept of cause is one we derive from our observation of particular things; I see no reason whatsoever to suppose that the total has any cause whatsoever.

[ C: Well, to say that there isn't any cause is not the same thing as saying that we shouldn't look for a cause. The statement that there isn't any cause should come, if it comes at all, at the end of the inquiry, not the beginning. In any case, if the total has no cause, then to my way of thinking it must be its own cause, which seems to me impossible. Moreover, the statement that the world is simply there if in answer to a question, presupposes that the question has meaning.

C: Well, I can't see how you can rule out the legitimacy of asking the question how the total, or anything at all comes to be there. Why something rather than nothing, that is the question? The fact that we gain our knowledge of causality empirically, from particular causes, does not rule out the possibility of asking what the cause of the series is. If the word "cause" were meaningless or if it could be shown that Kant's view of the matter were correct, the question would be illegitimate I agree; but you don't seem to hold that the word "cause" is meaningless, and I do not suppose you are a Kantian. ]

R: I can illustrate what seems to me your fallacy. Every man who exists has a mother, and it seems to me your argument is that therefore the human race must have a mother, but obviously the human race hasn't a mother -- that's a different logical sphere.

C: Well, I can't really see a parity. If I were saying "every object has a phenomenal cause, therefore, the whole series has a phenomenal cause," there would be a parity; but I'm not saying that; I'm saying, every object has a phenomenal cause if you insist on the infinity of the series -- but the series of phenomenal causes is an insufficient explanation of the series. Therefore, the series has not a phenomenal cause but a transcendent cause.

R: Well, that's always assuming that not only every particular thing in the world, but the world as a whole must have a cause. For that assumption I see no ground whatever. If you'll give me a ground I will listen to it.

C: Well, the series of events is either caused or it's not caused. If it is caused, there must obviously be a cause outside the series. If it's not caused then it's sufficient to itself, and if it's sufficient to itself, it is what I call necessary. But it can't be necessary since each member is contingent, and we've agreed that the total has no reality apart from the members, therefore, it can't be necessary. [ Therefore, it can't be -- uncaused -- therefore it must have a cause. ] And I should like to observe in passing that the statement "the world is simply there and is inexplicable" can't be got out of logical analysis.

[ R: I don't want to seem arrogant, but it does seem to me that I can conceive things that you say the human mind can't conceive. As for things not having a cause, the physicists assure us that individual quantum transitions in atoms have no cause.

C: Yes, I agree, some scientists -- physicists -- are willing to allow for indetermination within a restricted field. But very many scientists are not so willing. I think that Professor Dingle, of London University, maintains that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle tells us something about the success (or the lack of it) of the present atomic theory in correlating observations, but not about nature in itself, and many physicists would accept this view. In any case, I don't see how physicists can fail to accept the theory in practice, even if they don't do so in theory. ]

I cannot see how science could be conducted on any other assumption than that of order and intelligibility in nature. The physicist presupposes, at least tacitly, that there is some sense in investigating nature and looking for the causes of events, just as the detective presupposes that there is some sense in looking for the cause of a murder. The metaphysician assumes that there is sense in looking for the reason or cause of phenomena, and, not being a Kantian, I consider that the metaphysician is as justified in his assumption as the physicist. When Sartre, for example, says the world is gratuitous, I think that he has not sufficiently considered what is implied by "gratuitous."

R: I think -- there seems to me a certain unwarrantable extension here; the physicist looks for causes; that does not necessarily imply that there are causes everywhere. A man may look for gold without assuming that there is gold everywhere; if he finds gold, well and good, if he doesn't he's had bad luck. The same is true when the physicists look for causes. As for Sartre, I don't profess to know what he means, and I shouldn't like to be thought to interpret him, but for my part, I do think the notion of the world having an explanation is a mistake. I don't see why one should expect it to have... [ and I think you say about what the scientist assumes is an over-statement.

C: It may be that the scientist doesn't hope to obtain more than probability, but in raising the question he assumes that the question of explanation has a meaning. ]

But your general point then, Lord Russell, is that it's illegitimate even to ask the question of the cause of the world?

R: Yes, that's my position.

C: Well, if it's a question that for you has no meaning, it's of course very difficult to discuss it, isn't it?

R: Yes, it is very difficult. What do you say -- shall we pass on to some other issue?

PART II - Religious Experience

C: Let's. Well, perhaps I might say a word about religious experience, and then we can go on to moral experience. I don't regard religious experience as a strict proof of the existence of God, so the character of the discussion changes somewhat, but I think it's true to say that the best explanation of it is the existence of God. By religious experience I don't mean simply feeling good. I mean a loving, but unclear, awareness of some object which irresistibly seems to the experiencer as something transcending the self, something transcending all the normal objects of experience, something which cannot be pictured or conceptualized, but of the reality of which doubt is impossible -- at least during the experience. I should claim that cannot be explained adequately and without residue, simply subjectively. The actual basic experience at any rate is most easily explained on the hypotheses that there is actually some objective cause of that experience.

R: I should reply to that line of argument that the whole argument from our own mental states to something outside us, is a very tricky affair. Even where we all admit its validity, we only feel justified in doing so, I think, because of the consensus of mankind. If there's a crowd in a room and there's a clock in a room, they can all see the clock. The face that they can all see it tends to make them think that it's not an hallucination: whereas these religious experiences do tend to be very private.

C: Yes, they do. I'm speaking strictly of mystical experience proper, and I certainly don't include, by the way, what are called visions. I mean simply the experience, and I quite admit it's indefinable, of the transcendent object or of what seems to be a transcendent object. I remember Julian Huxley in some lecture saying that religious experience, or mystical experience, is as much a real experience as falling in love or appreciating poetry and art. Well, I believe that when we appreciate poetry and art we appreciate definite poems or a definite work of art. If we fall in love, well, we fall in love with somebody and not with nobody.

R: May I interrupt for a moment here. That is by no means always the case. Japanese novelists never consider that they have achieved a success unless large numbers of real people commit suicide for love of the imaginary heroine.

C: Well, I must take your word for these goings on in Japan. I haven't committed suicide, I'm glad to say, but I have been strongly influenced in the taking of two important steps in my life by two biographies. However, I must say I see little resemblance between the real influence of those books on me and the mystic experience proper, so far, that is, as an outsider can obtain an idea of that experience.

R: Well, I mean we wouldn't regard God as being on the same level as the characters in a work of fiction. You'll admit there's a distinction here?

C: I certainly should. But what I'd say is that the best explanation seems to be the not purely subjectivist explanation. Of course, a subjectivist explanation is possible in the case of certain people in whom there is little relation between the experience and life, in the case of deluded people and hallucinated people, and so on. But when you get what one might call the pure type, say St. Francis of Assisi, when you get an experience that results in an overflow of dynamic and creative love, the best explanation of that it seems to me is the actual existence of an objective cause of the experience.

R: Well, I'm not contending in a dogmatic way that there is not a God. What I'm contending is that we don't know that there is. I can only take what is recorded as I should take other records and I do find that a very great many things are reported, and I am sure you would not accept things about demons and devils and what not -- and they're reported in exactly the same tone of voice and with exactly the same conviction. And the mystic, if his vision is veridical, may be said to know that there are devils. But I don't know that there are.

C: But surely in the case of the devils there have been people speaking mainly of visions, appearance, angels or demons and so on. I should rule out the visual appearances, because I think they can be explained apart from the existence of the object which is supposed to be seen.

R: But don't you think there are abundant recorded cases of people who believe that they've heard Satan speaking to them in their hearts, in just the same way as the mystics assert God -- and I'm not talking now of an external vision, I'm talking of a purely mental experience. That seems to be an experience of the same sort as mystics' experience of God, and I don't seek that from what mystics tell us you can get any argument for God which is not equally an argument for Satan.

C: I quite agree, of course, that people have imagined or thought they have heard of seen Satan. And I have no wish in passing to deny the existence of Satan. But I do not think that people have claimed to have experienced Satan in the precise way in which mystics claim to have experienced God. Take the case of a non-Christian, Plotinus. He admits the experience is something inexpressible, the object is an object of love, and therefore, not an object that causes horror and disgust. And the effect of that experience is, I should say, borne out, or I mean the validity of th experience is borne out in the records of the life of Plotinus. At any rate it is more reasonable to suppose that he had that experience if we're willing to accept Porphyry's account of Plontinus' general kindness and benevolence.

R: The fact that a belief has a good moral effect upon a man is no evidence whatsoever in favor of its truth.

C: No, but if it could actually be proved that the belief was actually responsible for a good effect on a man's life, I should consider it a presumption in favor of some truth, at any rate of the positive part of the belief not of its entire validity. But in any case I am using the character of the life as evidence in favor of the mystic's veracity and sanity rather than as a proof of the truth of his beliefs.

R: But even that I don't think is any evidence. I've had experiences myself that have altered my character profoundly. And I thought at the time at any rate that it was altered for the good. Those experiences were important, but they did not involve the existence of something outside me, and I don't think that if I'd thought they did, the fact that they had a wholesome effect would have been any evidence that I was right.

C: No, but I think that the good effect would attest your veracity in describing your experience. Please remember that I'm not saying that a mystic's mediation or interpretation of his experience should be immune from discussion or criticism.

R: Obviously the character of a young man may be -- and often is -- immensely affected for good by reading about some great man in history, and it may happen that the great man is a myth and doesn't exist, but they boy is just as much affected for good as if he did. There have been such people. Plutarch's Lives take Lycurgus as an example, who certainly did not exist, but you might be very much influenced by reading Lycurgus under the impression that he had previously existed. You would then be influenced by an object that you'd loved, but it wouldn't be an existing object.

C: I agree with you on that, of course, that a man may be influenced by a character in fiction. Without going into the question of what it is precisely that influences him (I should say a real value) I think that the situation of that man and of the mystic are different. After all the man who is influenced by Lycurgus hasn't got the irresistible impression that he's experience in some way the ultimate reality.

R: I don't think you've quite got my point about these historical characters -- these unhistorical characters in history. I'm not assuming what you call an effect on the reason. I'm assuming that the young man reading about this person and believing him to be real loves him -- which is quite easy to happen, and yet he's loving a phantom.

C: In one sense he's loving a phantom that's perfectly true, in the sense, I mean, that he's loving X or Y who doesn't exist. But at the same time, it is not, I think, the phantom as such that the young man loves; he perceives a real value, an idea which he recognizes as objectively valid, and that's what excites his love.

R: Well, in the same sense we had before about the characters in fiction.

C: Yes, in one sense the man's loving a phantom -- perfectly true. But in another sense he's loving what he perceives to be a value.

PART III - The Moral Argument

R: But aren't you now saying in effect, I mean by God whatever is good or the sum total of what is good -- the system of what is good, and, therefore, when a young man loves anything that is good he is loving God. Is that what you're saying, because if so, it wants a bit of arguing.

C: I don't say, of course, that God is the sum-total or system of what is good in the pantheistic sense; I'm not a pantheist, but I do think that all goodness reflects God in some way and proceeds from Him, so that in a sense the man who loves what is truly good, loves God even if he doesn't advert to God. But still I agree that the validity of such an interpretation of a man's conduct depends on the recognition of God's existence, obviously.

R: Yes, but that's a point to be proved.

C: Quite so, but I regard the metaphysical argument as probative, but there we differ.

R: You see, I feel that some things are good and that other things are bad. I love the things that are good, that I think are good, and I hate the things that I think are bad. I don't say that these things are good because they participate in the Divine goodness.

C: Yes, but what's your justification for distinguishing between good and bad or how do you view the distinction between them?

R: I don't have any justification any more than I have when I distinguish between blue and yellow. What is my justification for distinguishing between blue and yellow? I can see they are different.

C: Well, that is an excellent justification, I agree. You distinguish blue and yellow by seeing them, so you distinguish good and bad by what faculty?

R: By my feelings.

C: By your feelings. Well, that's what I was asking. You think that good and evil have reference simply to feeling?

R: Well, why does one type of object look yellow and another look blue? I can more or less give an answer to that thanks to the physicists, and as to why I think one sort of thing good and another evil, probably there is an answer of the same sort, but it hasn't been gone into in the same way and I couldn't give it [to] you.

C: Well, let's take the behavior of the Commandant of Belsen. That appears to you as undesirable and evil and to me too. To Adolf Hitler we suppose it appeared as something good and desirable, I suppose you'd have to admit that for Hitler it was good and for you it is evil.

R: No, I shouldn't quite go so far as that. I mean, I think people can make mistakes in that as they can in other things. if you have jaundice you see things yellow that are not yellow. You're making a mistake.

C: Yes, one can make mistakes, but can you make a mistake if it's simply a question of reference to a feeling or emotion? Surely Hitler would be the only possible judge of what appealed to his emotions.

R: It would be quite right to say that it appealed to his emotions, but you can say various things about that among others, that if that sort of thing makes that sort of appeal to Hitler's emotions, then Hitler makes quite a different appeal to my emotions.

C: Granted. But there's no objective criterion outside feeling then for condemning the conduct of the Commandant of Belsen, in your view?

R: No more than there is for the color-blind person who's in exactly the same state. Why do we intellectually condemn the color-blind man? Isn't it because he's in the minority?

C: I would say because he is lacking in a thing which normally belongs to human nature.

R: Yes, but if he were in the majority, we shouldn't say that.

C: Then you'd say that there's no criterion outside feeling that will enable one to distinguish between the behavior of the Commandant of Belsen and the behavior, say, of Sir Stafford Cripps or the Archbishop of Canterbury.

R: The feeling is a little too simplified. You've got to take account of the effects of actions and your feelings toward those effects. You see, you can have an argument about it if you can say that certain sorts of occurrences are the sort you like and certain others the sort you don't like. Then you have to take account of the effects of actions. You can very well say that the effects of the actions of the Commandant of Belsen were painful and unpleasant.

C: They certainly were, I agree, very painful and unpleasant to all the people in the camp.

R: Yes, but not only to the people in the camp, but to outsiders contemplating them also.

C: Yes, quite true in imagination. But that's my point. I don't approve of them, and I know you don't approve of them, but I don't see what ground you have for not approving of them, because after all, to the Commandant of Belsen himself, they're pleasant, those actions.

R: Yes, but you see I don't need any more ground in that case than I do in the case of color perception. There are some people who think everything is yellow, there are people suffering from jaundice, and I don't agree with these people. I can't prove that the things are not yellow, there isn't any proof, but most people agree with him that they're not yellow, and most people agree with me that the Commandant of Belsen was making mistakes.

C: Well, do you accept any moral obligation?

R: Well, I should have to answer at considerable length to answer that. Practically speaking -- yes. Theoretically speaking I should have to define moral obligation rather carefully.

C: Well, do you think that the word "ought" simply has an emotional connotation?

R: No, I don't think that, because you see, as I was saying a moment ago, one has to take account of the effects, and I think right conduct is that which would probably produce the greatest possible balance in intrinsic value of all the acts possible in the circumstances, and you've got to take account of the probable effects of your action in considering what is right.

C: Well, I brought in moral obligation because I think that one can approach the question of God's existence in that way. The vast majority of the human race will make, and always have made, some distinction between right and wrong. The vast majority I think has some consciousness of an obligation in the moral sphere. It's my opinion that the perception of values and the consciousness of moral law and obligation are best explained through the hypothesis of a transcendent ground of value and of an author of the moral law. I do mean by "author of the moral law" an arbitrary author of the moral law. I think, in fact, that those modern atheists who have argued in a converse way "there is no God; therefore, there are no absolute values and no absolute law," are quite logical.

R: I don't like the word "absolute." I don't think there is anything absolute whatever. The moral law, for example, is always changing. At one period in the development of the human race, almost everybody thought cannibalism was a duty.

C: Well, I don't see that differences in particular moral judgments are any conclusive argument against the universality of the moral law. Let's assume for the moment that there are absolute moral values, even on that hypothesis it's only to be expected that different individuals and different groups should enjoy varying degrees of insight into those values.

R: I'm inclined to think that "ought," the feeling that one has about "ought" is an echo of what has been told one by one's parents or one's nurses.

C: Well, I wonder if you can explain away the idea of the "ought" merely in terms of nurses and parents. I really don't see how it can be conveyed to anybody in other terms than itself. It seems to be that if there is a moral order bearing upon the human conscience, that that moral order is unintelligible apart from the existence of God.

R: Then you have to say one or other of two things. Either God only speaks to a very small percentage of mankind -- which happens to include yourself -- or He deliberately says things are not true in talking to the consciences of savages.

C: Well, you see, I'm not suggesting that God actually dictates moral precepts to the conscience. The human being's ideas of the content of the moral law depends entirely to a large extent on education and environment, and a man has to use his reason in assessing the validity of the actual moral ideas of his social group. But the possibility of criticizing the accepted moral code presupposes that there is an objective standard, and there is an ideal moral order, which imposes itself (I mean the obligatory character of which can be recognized). I think that the recognition of this ideal moral order is part of the recognition of contingency. It implies the existence of a real foundation of God.

R: But the law-giver has always been, it seems to me, one's parents or someone like. There are plenty of terrestrial law-givers to account for it, and that would explain why people's consciences are so amazingly different in different times and places.

C: It helps to explain differences in the perception of particular moral values, which otherwise are inexplicable. It will help to explain changes in the matter of the moral law in the content of the precepts as accepted by this or that nation, or this or that individual. But the form of it, what Kant calls the categorical imperative, the "ought," I really don't see how that can possibly be conveyed to anybody by nurse or parent because there aren't any possible terms, so far as I can see, with which it can be explained. it can't be defined in other terms than itself, because once you've defined it in other terms than itself you've explained it away. It's no longer a moral "ought." It's something else.

R: Well, I think the sense of "ought" is the effect of somebody's imagined disapproval, it may be God's imagined disapproval, but it's somebody's imagined disapproval. And I think that is what is meant by "ought."

C: It seems to me to be external customs and taboos and things of that sort which can most easily be explained simply through environment and education, but all that seems to me to belong to what I call the matter of the law, the content. The idea of the "ought" as such can never be conveyed to a man by the tribal chief or by anybody else, because there are no other terms in which it could be conveyed. It seems to me entirely....

R: But I don't see any reason to say that -- I mean we all know about conditioned reflexes. We know that an animal, if punished habitually for a certain sort of act, after a time will refrain. I don't think the animal refrains from arguing within himself, "Master will be angry if I do this." He has a feeling that that's not the thing to do. That's what we can do with ourselves and nothing more.

C: I see no reason to suppose that an animal has a consciousness or moral obligation; and we certainly don't regard an animal as morally responsible for his acts of disobedience. But a man has a consciousness of obligation and of moral values. I see no reason to suppose that one could condition all men as one can "condition" an animal, and I don't suppose you'd really want to do so even if one could. If "behaviorism" were true, there would be no objective moral distinction between the emperor Nero and St. Francis of Assisi. I can't help feeling, Lord Russell, you know, that you regard the conduct of the Commandant of Belsen as morally reprehensible, and that you yourself would never under any circumstances act in that way, even if you thought, or had reason to think, that possibly the balance of the happiness of the human race might be increased through some people being treated in that abominable manner.

R: No. I wouldn't imitate the conduct of a mad dog. The fact that I wouldn't do it doesn't really bear on this question we're discussing.

C: No, but if you were making a utilitarian explanation of right and wrong in terms of consequences, it might be held, and I suppose some of the Nazis of the better type would have held that although it's lamentable to have to act in this way, yet the balance in the long run leads to greater happiness. I don't think you'd say that, would you? I think you'd say that sort of action is wrong -- and in itself, quite apart from whether the general balance of happiness is increased or not. Then, if you're prepared to say that, then I think you must have some criterion of feeling, at any rate. To me, that admission would ultimately result in the admission of an ultimate ground of value in God.

R: I think we are perhaps getting into confusion. It is not direct feeling about the act by which I should judge, but rather a feeling as to the effects. And I can't admit any circumstances in which certain kinds of behavior, such as you have been discussing, would do good. I can't imagine circumstances in which they would have a beneficial effect. I think the persons who think they do are deceiving themselves. But if there were circumstances in which they would have a beneficial effect, then I might be obliged, however reluctantly, to say -- "Well, I don't like these things, but I will acquiesce in them," just as I acquiesce in the Criminal Law, although I profoundly dislike punishment.

C: Well, perhaps it's time I summed up my position. I've argued two things. First, that the existence of God can be philosophically proved by a metaphysical argument; secondly, that it is only the existence of God that will make sense of man's moral experience and of religious experience. Personally, I think that your way of accounting for man's moral judgments leads inevitably to a contradiction between what your theory demands and your own spontaneous judgments. Moreover, your theory explains moral obligation away, and explaining away is not explanation.

As regards the metaphysical argument, we are apparently in agreement that what we call the world consists simply of contingent beings. That is, of beings no one of which can account for its own existence. You say that the series of events needs no explanation: I say that if there were no Necessary Being, no being which must exist and cannot not-exist, nothing would exist. The infinity of the series of contingent beings, even if proved, would be irrelevant. Something does exist; therefore, there must be something which accounts for this fact, a being which is outside the series of contingent beings. If you had admitted this, we could then have discussed whether that being is personal, good, and so on. On the actual point discussed, whether there is or is not a Necessary Being, I find myself, I think in agreement with the great majority of classical philosophers.

You maintain, I think, that existing beings are simply there, and that I have no justification for raising the question of the explanation of their existence. But I would like to point out that this position cannot be substantiated by logical analysis; it expresses a philosophy which itself stands in need of proof. I think we have reached an impasse because our ideas of philosophy are radically different; it seems to me that what I call a part of philosophy, that you call the whole, insofar at least as philosophy is rational.

It seems to me, if you will pardon my saying so, that besides your own logical system -- what you call "modern" in opposition to antiquated logic (a tendentious adjective) -- you maintain a philosophy which cannot be substantiated by logical analysis. After all, the problem of God's existence is an existential problem whereas logical analysis does not deal directly with problems of existence. So it seems to me, to declare that the terms involved in one set of problems are meaningless because they are not required in dealing with another set of problems, is to settle from the beginning the nature and extent of philosophy, and that is itself a philosophical act which stands in need of justification.

R: Well, I should like to say just a few words by way of summary on my side. First, as to the metaphysical argument: I don't admit the connotations of such a term as "contingent" or the possibility of explanation in Father Copleston's sense. I think the word "contingent" inevitably suggests the possibility of something that wouldn't have this what you might call accidental character of just being there, and I don't think is true except int he purely causal sense. You can sometimes give a causal explanation of one thing as being the effect of something else, but that is merely referring one thing to another thing and there's no -- to my mind -- explanation in Father Copleston's sense of anything at all, nor is there any meaning in calling things "contingent" because there isn't anything else they could be.

That's what I should say about that, but I should like to say a few words about Father Copleston's accusation that I regard logic as all philosophy -- that is by no means the case. I don't by any means regard logic as all philosophy. I think logic is an essential part of philosophy and logic has to be used in philosophy, and in that I think he and I are at one. When the logic that he uses was new -- namely, in the time of Aristotle, there had to be a great deal of fuss made about it; Aristotle made a lot of fuss about that logic. Nowadays it's become old and respectable, and you don't have to make so much fuss about it. The logic that I believe in is comparatively new, and therefore I have to imitate Aristotle in making a fuss about it; but it's not that I think it's all philosophy by any means -- I don't think so. I think it's an important part of philosophy, and when I say that, I don't find a meaning for this or that word, that is a position of detail based upon what I've found out about that particular word, from thinking about it. It's not a general position that all words that are used in metaphysics are nonsense, or anything like that which I don't really hold.

As regards the moral argument, I do find that when one studies anthropology or history, there are people who think it their duty to perform acts which I think abominable, and I certainly can't, therefore, attribute Divine origin to the matter of moral obligation, which Father Copleston doesn't ask me to; but I think even the form of moral obligation, when it takes the form of enjoining you to eat your father or what not, doesn't seem to me to be such a very beautiful and noble thing; and, therefore, I cannot attribute a Divine origin to this sense of moral obligation, which I think is quite easily accounted for in quite other ways.

(Transcript credit: Reason Broadcast)

Back in April, Gail Dines, a sociologist at Wheelock College in Boston, wrote a Washington Post piece arguing that pornography is a public health threat, regardless of its (im)morality:

The thing is, no matter what you think of pornography (whether it’s harmful or harmless fantasy), the science is there. After 40 years of peer-reviewed research, scholars can say with confidence that porn is an industrial product that shapes how we think about gender, sexuality, relationships, intimacy, sexual violence and gender equality — for the worse.

Dines argued that instead of focusing on the moral question, we should take “a health-focused view of porn and recognizing its radiating impact not only on consumers but also on society at large.” Fittingly, the piece is entitled “Is porn immoral? That doesn’t matter: It’s a public health crisis.” On the one hand, I’m certainly glad that sociologists, legislators, and others are recognizing the serious social harm caused by pornography. On the other hand, it’s clear that Dines and her ilk have a serious misunderstanding of morality.

I. What Morality Isn’t

Frequently, morality is spoken of as something akin to the offside rule in soccer: an arbitrary rule imposed by a higher authority that keeps up from getting to do what would make us happy. Let me unpack what I mean by each part of that description:

• According to this (faulty) view, moral laws are just arbitrary rules. It’s immoral to have sex before marriage; it could just as well have been immoral to have sex after marriage, or on Wednesdays, or during reruns of The Price is Right. But if morality is arbitrary, where do these rules come from?
• Moral laws are primarily external and imposed by an authority. Usually these people speak of morality as a rule issued by a higher authority: society or (especially) God. So we follow the rules either out of fear, respect, or love, or else to win a prize (like Heaven) or avoid a punishment (like hell). But even though we may follow the rules, that doesn’t make the rules any less arbitrary and irrational.
• The third element is that they keep us from doing what would make us happy. It’s this conception of morality that Billy Joel lambasts in “Only the Good Die Young” when he sings, ‘I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.’ In the case of sexual mores, the idea is that “moralistic” people “hate pleasure.” In other areas, this idea is more subtle, but the general idea is that rule-following is on one side, and having a good time is on the other. So we exchange happy, pleasure-filled lives for drab and dreary, orderly lives, in the hopes that our unhappiness now will result in our happiness hereafter.

In fairness to non-Christians, this conception of morality is disturbingly common, even amongst Christians. Victorian morality is replete with this idea that such-and-such an activity would make me happy, but I’ll forgo it so that God will reward me with Heaven later. And this spills over into the public square: if I can’t enjoy such-and-such, then my neighbor darn well better not be able to enjoy it, either.

It’s important to recognize two things. First, that this is how “moral talk” often looks and sounds from the outside (and depending upon who you’re talking to, from the inside, as well). Second, that this conception of morality is fundamentally wrong and can be pretty awful. At most, it can serve as a workable starting place for the moral life. It’s something that we need to grow out of.

II. What Morality Is

If you have small children, you’re surely familiar with the insane rules that you have to create for their own benefit: things like “don’t put a fork in the electrical socket.” To the toddler, that looks exactly like the ban on pornography looks to many adults: someone bigger than me, with the authority and ability to punish me, won’t let me do the thing that I really want to do. And maybe that’s enough to cultivate obedience (although in moments of weakness, maybe not).

But a mature perspective sees what the toddler’s view is missing. You’re not imposing this rule because you’re power-hungry, but because you know better than your stupid kid what will make him happy and what will electrocute him. That is, this rule (undoubtedly frustrating and tempting for the toddler in the moment!) is really born out of love.

So it is with the moral law. To see this, consider a few things. First, everything that you intentionally do is done (a) according to your human nature, and (b) in pursuit of our good. If you don’t believe me, just carefully consider why you do anything that you do: why did you set an alarm last night, why did you eat breakfast this morning, why did you yell when you were frustrated? In each case – whether you made a good decision or a bad one – you acted because you wanted to achieve something positive (health, pleasure, etc.) or avoid some negative (pain, etc.). And if you were to consider further, “well, why do I want to be healthy?” or “why don’t I want to lose a finger in the bread slicer?” you would eventually come to a dead end of sorts,.

That dead end – the ultimate motivation for all intentional human activity – could be summarized as something like “I want to be permanently happy.” But notice that you desire this as a human. You want good, but your good. An anteater might be ecstatic to spend all day with a colony of fire ants. You would likely be less happy in such a situation. So you’re acting according to what appears good to you as a human person.

But of course, there’s another aspect to consider as well. As I mentioned, every intentional human action (so leaving aside things like falling down the stairs) can be described this way. Every single time we intentionally act, we’re trying to achieve our good. But obviously, not all of our actions are successful in this regard. Sometimes, what we think will make us happy (especially the things we chose in the moment, like yelling at the person who frustrated us) don’t make us happy.

Look within yourself: if you ate everything you had the impulse to eat, would you truly be happy? If you slept with everyone you had the impulse to sleep with, would that make you happy? Or would you not instead be lonely and gluttonous and broken? If you can’t figure that out from looking within, try looking around you. So some of our desires should be listened to, and help to make us happy. Others of our desires are dangerous, and need to be moderated or entirely ignored. If only there were some way to know which was which; if only someone who could show us how to “human” better…

Of course, this is exactly why we have to consider God’s role in morality. Before you start to think of God as Divine Lawgiver, remember that He is Creator. That’s literally the first thing we know about Him from the order of the world, and it’s the first thing He reveals about Himself in Scripture (Genesis 1). That means that He created you: He knows you infinitely better than you know yourself. He understands how you tick, because He’s the reason that you tick. And He knows exactly what will make you truly happy… and which things won’t.

So with that in mind, let me suggest three elements of a better view of the moral law:

• Moral laws aren’t arbitrary. They’re rooted in our human nature. Pornography, murder, gluttony, greed, and the rest are forbidden for the same reason as putting a fork in the electrical socket. Those kinds of behaviors hurt other people, but they also hurt you, the moral actor, as a human person.
• As a result, moral laws are primarily internal. God doesn’t stand outside of Creation like a referee; He’s the ground of all being. The primary role of God’s law-giving isn’t imposing some new obligation upon us, but revealing us to ourselves. When He says “X is good” and “Y is bad” it’s not like a divine game of Simon Says. It’s more like when a doctor says “eggs are good for you” or “eggs are bad for you” (whichever it is). The Author of the universe is showing you a road-map to happiness and Heaven, and a map of your own soul.
• Finally, following the moral law is key to happiness. I don’t mean here that happy people never sin or that sinners are never happy. But I do mean that the Saint is a great deal happier and more joyful, a great deal more fulfilled as a human being, than the person spending hours a day watching pornography. This is clear when you consider the person who has completely given themselves to virtue and the person who has completely given themselves to vice. The former is aflame with love; the latter is mired in addiction and darkness. It’s not just that the afterlife is better for the Saint; it is frequently the case that this life is better for the Saint as well.

I should add an important caveat to this: in the moment, the wrong thing often feels right and pleasurable. If it didn’t, we probably wouldn’t do it. But that’s exactly why we need moral instruction. Ultimately, we don’t just want a moment of happiness but a lifetime, even an eternity, of it.

This, by the way, is why atheists can frequently be more moral than Christians. Even if they don’t have the assistance of a Divine road-map of the soul, they can often figure out big chunks of the moral law simply from life experience and wisdom (and conscience and the hidden workings of the Holy Spirit within, shhh). If the moral law really were the way Gail Dines and Billy Joel described it (as something arbitrary; external / imposed; and either unrelated to, or antithetical to, our happiness) it would be impossible for someone to arrive at it without revelation. Moral atheists are one of the clearest proofs, then, that the moral law is intimately linked to our human natures and happiness.

With that in mind, let’s circle back to the Dines piece on pornography. She says it “doesn’t matter” if pornography is immoral, because it can be scientifically shown to be destructive to ourselves and to society. That’s a bit like saying that it doesn’t matter if it is raining, because there’s water falling from the sky: if she understood what sin was, she would realize she’s describing it. Another seminarian lamented that it would be nice “if the author recognized that it hurts us BECAUSE it’s immoral.” But the truth is maybe more accurately the reverse: pornography is immoral BECAUSE it hurts us.  And the same can be said for all forms of sin.
 
 
(Image credit: AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

Early in this review series, I mentioned how Sean Carroll's new book, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (Dutton, 2016), gradually becomes weaker as you move through the chapters. It starts off strong and invigorating as he talks about cosmology and fundamental physics, his specialities. But as he moves into the philosophy of mind, meaning, and morality, he gets a bit wobbly.

Moving From Ought to Is

That's evident especially in his chapter on "What Is and What Ought To Be." The chapter starts off fine. Carroll agrees with David Hume, the famous skeptic whom Carroll deems a "forefather of poetic naturalism", that we can never derive an "ought" from an "is." In other words, we can never take a description of the world (how the world is) and logically deduce a prescription (how we ought to behave in response.) Why? Because for naturalists like Carroll and Hume, "is" is all there is. There's nothing outside the natural world to tell us how we ought to behave in response to the natural world. But maybe the natural world itself can offer guidance? Unfortunately no, says Carroll. He writes, "The natural world doesn't pass judgment; it doesn't provide guidance; it doesn't know or care about what ought to happen" (396).

Some atheists disagree, such as Sam Harris. Harris tries to defend objective morality on scientific grounds, suggesting that moral acts ("oughts") are those which bring about the flourishing of sentient creatures. In other words, we ought to do things that bring about the most flourishing. And on this view, it's true that science can tell us what brings about the most flourishing (at least some types of flourishing, that is.) But bracketing the vaguely defined concept of "flourishing" (who decides what counts as flourishing?) the big problem with Harris' view is the hidden premise that we ought to prefer and promote the flourishing of sentient creatures. On what authority does this rest? Is it an objective principle or just Harris' personal belief, one that many people may share, but not all?

Science can only provide us guidance about what to do if we want to attain a specific goal (e.g., sentient flourishing). But science can never reveal moral values or duties suggesting we ought to pursue those specific goals. This is a major reason why Harris' proposal fails.

Carroll understands all of this. He denies that morality can be grounded within science. However, he does think we can discover moral duties using the "tools of reason and rationality" (401).

“Be Excellent to Each Other”

Here's where things get a little wonky. Strangely, Carroll quotes (approvingly) a moral axiom from the 1989 cult classic, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure: "Be excellent to each other." Carroll writes, "As foundational precepts for moral theorizing go, you could do worse" (402). But not much, I would add. It's not clear who determines what "excellent" means. Is abortion excellent? Is murdering one person to save five more excellent? Is it excellent to leave your spouse if you find a more appealing partner?

Another problem with the Bill and Ted morality is why we should obey it. Even if we determined precisely what excellent behavior entails, why should pursue this standard of excellence? Who or what says we ought to follow this axiom? Whether it's Bill, Ted, or Sean Carroll, why should we follow their moral beliefs?

Although Carroll perhaps quoted this line as a joke—though I don't think he did, given his commentary above—it displays the same problems that Hume identified over a century ago.

Other Moral Theories

Throughout the chapter, Carroll surveys several other moral theories, seeming to settle on a form of moral relativism. He says:

"Hume was right. We have no objective guidance on how to distinguish right from wrong: not from God, not from nature, not from the pure force of reason itself....Morality exists only insofar as we make it so, and other people might not pass judgments in the same way we do." (411)

Many people would find this conclusion troubling, and Carroll doesn't shy away from its implications:

"The lack of an ultimate objective scientific grounding for morality can be worrisome. It implies that people with whom we have moral disagreements—whether it's Hitler, the Taliban, or schoolyard bullies who beat up smaller children—aren't wrong in the same sense that it's wrong to deny Darwinian evolution or the expansion of the universe....But that's how the world is." (402)

This chilling quote suggests that Carroll does not believe Hitler or the Taliban were objectively wrong in their actions. It seems he just personally disagrees with their actions because has has a different opinion of how to "be excellent". Moral relativists like Carroll have no objective basis to condemn obviously immoral acts like the Holocaust or 9/11. They're only left with strongly felt and loudly expressed opinions.

A More Judgemental Moral Relativist

It's worth noting Carroll's contention that poetic naturalists are not moral relativists, but instead moral constructivists. The primary difference, according to Carroll, is that relativists don't feel enabled to critically judge the moral decisions of others (especially those deriving from other cultures), whereas constructivists are perfectly happy to do so, even while admitting their moral frameworks are only attempts to systematize their own personal/cultural intuitions about how to act.

But in my mind, this doesn't separate moral constructivism from moral relativism; it just makes the moral constructivist a type of moral relativist. He's still a relativist, but one that is just more judgmental and critical than other relativists.

It's also worth noting that despite examining several different moral theories in his book, from constructivism, to instrumentalism, to consequentialism, to virtue-ethics, to utilitarianism, Carroll never gives serious consideration to the theistic view. He never considers God to be the objective ground of morality. This is likely because Carroll presumes poetic naturalism is true, and thereby precludes God from the outset.

But that would only enforce my earlier criticism, that Carroll's cosmic picture is not big, as his book title suggests, but is in fact too small. In his moral exploration, he fails to find a satisfying answer in part because he needlessly restricts his pool of options!

In the next post we'll wrap up this series with a look at Sean Carroll's “Ten Considerations” for naturalists. Stay tuned!

Last week, I wrote about the longstanding Catholic drive to reinterpret the philosophy of Plato as realist. In actuality, Aristotle’s philosophy perfected Plato’s by connecting the material to the formal world—two separated domains which, in Plato, remain wholly alien to one another. Accordingly, it is quite a “stretcher,” I suggested, when Catholics talk about Plato as a realist. Any philosophy which divorces the material and the formal qualifies as anti-realism, because matter’s interaction with form is the very thing that constitutes intelligibility. (More on that below…)

As predicted, the article’s “combox” bore out my very thesis: Catholics and other Westerners (including some atheists) remain so strongly accustomed to just such an unduly charitable characterization of Plato that they startle to hear otherwise.

But here’s the real rub: such a distinction between the two ancient philosophers matters only because we live in a more violently anti-realist Modern era, which put to death (in popular thought) the Natural Law of Aristotle and of the Church’s Scholastic philosophy. Plato’s errors would not matter nearly so much if we were pre-Moderns.

As mentioned in last week’s article, living in the “Modern era” means inhabiting the centuries after the Sixteenth. Two moments of that most unfortunate century are directly insinuated here: the Protestant Reformation and the secularist Enlightenment. They are equal but opposite rejections of the Natural Law.

Today, in English-speaking countries, the faithful grandchildren of the Reformation are usually thought of as “the religious right,” while the intellectual progeny of the Enlightenment comprise “the secular left.” It so happens, as one of history’s bitterest ironies, that in countries like America and England, a giant, sustained food fight erupted between the two sets of grandchildren...who were once fellow travelers! We are all familiar with these skirmishes, of course, comprising the so-called “culture war” between two shouting, red-faced fundamentalisms: Protestant Biblicism versus Enlightenment Scientism in all its many vestiges.

The narrative not falsely goes that these two camps despise one another.

They do…today. But as aforementioned, it was not always so. One is surprised to find that together, each half of Prot-Enlight originally teamed up with the other against the Natural Law of Aristotle and of the Catholic Church. Together, each camp strove cooperatively to make the sixteenth century Catholic view of nature, the Natural Law, seem outdated. Together, both parties asserted an aggressive new anti-realist dichotomy for the supposedly new times: form versus matter, faith versus science, even faith versus reason.

Ironically, the two sides cooperated steadily against the Church during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in order to create these false dichotomies, only to spend the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries arguing ceaselessly about them!

Whether or not the reader accepts Plato’s role in this Modernist overturn of the Natural Law, it is far more important—and leagues more undeniable—to a clear conception of our world that we come to terms with the primary role played by Prot-Enlight. Plato’s role was mere prefigurement to that of the Prot-Enlight philosophies. The Prot-Enlight philosophies set the goal as the complete eradication of the Natural Law.

Prot-Enlight and the Three Prongs of the Natural Law

The two halves of Prot-Enlight Modernism altered the prevailing Western notion not so much of God, counterintuitively, as of nature. That is, any pop-theological changes wrought by the Reformation or the Enlightenment were actually secondary, in pervasiveness, to the harmful amendments Prot-Enlight made to the popular Western view of the world, or reality, itself.

I wrote in last week’s article: “In the main, Aristotelianism stands for reality’s incipient freedom and morality, its intelligibility, and its teleology.” Whether we’re talking about the authors of the Enlightenment like Francis Bacon and David Hume or the authors of the Reformation like Martin Luther and John Calvin, Prot-Enlight sought to “take down” the “big game” of the Catholic Natural Law, of which these three prongs were (and are) constitutive.

Natural Law Prong #1: Firstly, Catholic Aristotelianism (i.e. Thomism) puts forward physical nature as the forum of man’s freedom and morality. In other words, humanity’s freedom and morality are altogether natural. Catholicism does not naively suppose that either human or physical nature guarantee man’s automatic morality through any and all uses of his freedom; rather, physical nature is the forum where the proper use of human intellect and will may through deliberate action dispose each of the natural appetites, through habit, toward morality. And nature is the locus in quo where this happens. The secular and the Protestant worlds together decry this Catholic position: morality, for each worldview, counteracts nature. Again, for Catholicism, morality is perfectly natural, which is why Thomas Aquinas asserted that all of the appetites are natural…if implemented with the proper disposition, of course.

Protestantism, as mentioned above, rejects the possibility of freedom and morality altogether. Man is enslaved to sin. Whether we talk of Luther’s assertion that human will is “in bondage,” or Calvin’s infamous doctrine of predestination, Protestantism writ large rejects the first prong of the Natural Law hailed by the Catholic Church. The Protestant view of sin, mankind’s “total depravity,” swallows up any possible proper usage of intellect or will.

The Enlightenment, on the other hand, posited naturalism—the perfect opposite of the Natural Law’s first prong. Naturalism describes a deterministic nature which we find “red in tooth and claw.” The animals are no more than complex mechanisms, meat machines, which operate as the vector sum of their competing appetites. Moreover, naturalism places man squarely in the middle of, not above, nature. He too is bestial. He too is determined by his appetites alone. He too is just a meat machine. As such, human free will is rejected and determinism (equal but opposite to Protestant pre-determinism) prevails, although Enlightenment thinkers certainly wouldn’t designate this “sin,” as the Protestants do.

Natural Law Prong #2: Secondly, Catholic Aristotelianism puts forward nature as intelligible. “Being is intelligible,” Aristotle famously explained. As articulated in last week’s article, Aristotle described that form was in matter, as it were, rather than above matter, as Plato had taught. Because matter is in-formed, then, nature is intelligible. If form were instead compartmentalized somewhere above matter, as in Plato’s “noetic heaven,” then the material objects would be neither knowable nor differentiable. But the opposite is true. On this Aristotelian basis, the Thomism of the Catholic Church affirms that faith and reason work together, rather than against one another. Faith is strengthened, not weakened, by the two ways of knowing about human reality: the a priori way, philosophy, and the a posteriori way, science. Both philosophy and science affirm theology because, as Thomas Aquinas famously held, “truth cannot contradict truth.”

Protestantism, beginning with Luther, repudiated the scientific worldview—and not only the false scientific worldview of Scientism, but even science properly done. Protestantism also rejected the philosophical approach to the world: Luther held that “the whole of Aristotle is to theology as shadow is to light.” The rallying cry of Luther’s Reformation was sola scriptura, meaning that the Bible alone—not science or philosophy or anything less than supernatural revelation—is intelligible to the mind of man.

The teachings of the Enlightenment, in a coordinate if opposite manner, reject the intelligibility of the universe. And this is strange because Enlightenment secularists have always claimed to be “for science,” a claim which requires the principle of intelligibility. It’s quite simple: the new Scientism posits materialism. For the materialist, nothing but matters exists. Even though this precludes both ratio and intellectus, materialists never seem to understand how their point of view vitiates science’s ability to be done at all (cogitation requires ratio and intellectus: one recalls John Lennox’s debate with Richard Dawkins, where clearly Dawkins failed to understand Lennox that “the principle of consciousness, intelligibility itself, proved [his] point”).

Natural Law Prong #3: Thirdly, the Aristotelian view of nature poses nature’s goal-orientedness (i.e. teleology). Nature discloses its own purpose. Just as in prong #2, wherein the Catholic worldview affirms via the principle of intelligibility the formal cause of nature, this third prong of the Natural Law affirms nature's final cause as Jesus Christ. Nature's purposive, christological aspect is the culmination of Natural Law prongs one and two: because nature has a goal, its morality and intelligibility are thereby validly connected to the supernatural. If, in fact, nature were devoid of a supernatural telos, as the Prot-Enlights believe, then its ostensible morality and intelligibility would be rendered arbitrary and even conceptually null.

So, with regard to the convoluted Protestant stance on prong #3, the Reformation rejection was not of Christ, but of his sustained connection to the physical world. Reformation theology rejects the idea that nature's purpose is knowable through human examinations of the world. In short, Protestants express ambivalence insofar as they think the natural world does not really have a knowable supernatural end, even though of course they affirm Christ as the Logos (and in that sense, the goal). As Louis Bouyer said, “in Protestantism, everything goes on, or seems to go on, as if the Incarnation had ended with the Ascension of the Savior.” As if Jesus' connection to the world lasted only thirty-three years!

Clearly, through the Enlightenment’s rejections of God, of formal causation, and even of consciousness itself, the secularists removed any conception of a purpose in the universe. Such a crystal clear issue need not be belabored here. The secularists tell us every day, after all, that everything is pointless.

Conclusion

From here, the story only gets stranger and stranger. After all, the Modern English-speaking republics—Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, among ours and the motherland—all claim to be founded upon the Natural Law, even as their professed basis lies in the twin sixteenth century movements (their opposite motives notwithstanding) whose raison d’etre was the elimination thereof!

So where does that leave us?

It leaves us confused, schizophrenic. Think of American history: who was it but men steeped in the Reformation and the Enlightenment—the “Prots” and the “Enlights”—who drafted the several state constitutions, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights? And what are these papers but documented ways of life, memorialized articles of culture, predicated squarely upon the Natural Law. As such, we Moderns are confounded citizens of the most schizophrenic republics of all-time. America, crown gem of all the paradoxical republics, was even founded as against Rome, by folks who thought Canterbury had grown to be too close a likeness.

Americans in 2016 have the temerity to be surprised when recounting our cultural failures in Natural Law living. Many Americans even have the gall to wonder why our republic is failing. In short, when Modernism is based upon dual rivaling rejections of the Natural Law, untangling the web equates to no trifling academic affair: it becomes an existential exercise required for our very survival. Until the republics founded in the Modern era return to the Natural Law, we will continue to be unable to justify such republican desiderata and sine qua nons as: natural rights, subsidiarity, popular morality, anthropology, a liberty-based political economy, and a humane employment of science and technology (materialist science yields materialistic technology, as we recognize). We shall no longer receive these benefits without shouldering the burdens, or at the very least without acknowledging the mutual exclusivity of the Natural Law and Prot-Enlight Modernism.

Until we return to Aristotle, to Thomas, and to the Natural Law, we should expect to find our Modern world more than just cold and hostile to us—we should expect to find it unfree, unintelligible, and pointless.

NOTE: We recently kicked off a new series of posts, each introducing a popular argument for or against God, followed by open-ended discussion. The goal is not to offer a thorough defense or refutation of the argument in the original post, but to unpack it together, as a community, in the comment boxes. The first argument we discussed was Alvin Plantinga's modal ontological argument for God, then we looked at the kalam cosmological argument. Today, we'll look at the moral argument for God.
 

The moral argument is one of the oldest and most-discussed arguments for God. Here's a short video from William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith ministry explaining it:
 

 
The video presents the argument like this:

Premise 1: If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
Premise 2: Objective moral values and duties do exist.
Conclusion: Therefore, God exists.

As with the kalam cosmological argument, the argument appears deceptively simple. The logic is clear and airtight—I'm not aware of any philosopher, theist or non-theist, who denies the logic.

Most of the discussion, therefore, centers on three elements: the meaning of "objective moral values and duties", the truth of premise one, and the truth of premise two. Most critics who reject this argument take issue with one of those three elements.

For example, Sam Harris, in his book The Moral Landscape, attempts to circumvent this argument by refuting premise one. He does so by defining morality as that which contributes to the well-being (or flourishing) of sentient creatures. If it produces more flourishing, it's good. If it mitigates flourishing, it's bad. Defined this way, Harris claims, morality does not require God since science can reveal what is good by identifying things that increase or detract from our well-being.

The problem, however, as William Lane Craig and others have noted, is that Harris equivocates the meaning of "good" (and thus the definition of morality.) On Harris' moral view, something is "good" if it contributes to overall human flourishing, if it yields a positive, pragmatic benefit. But this is different than saying something is morally good. Harris' view is more like saying you made a "good" chess move or you did a "good" job on that portrait. Those examples do not refer to objective moral goodness, just pragmatic goodness. But it's moral goodness that the original argument refers to and claims is inexplicable without God.

So what do you think? Is the moral argument a sound proof for God? If not, how does it fail?

 
 
(Image credit: Reasonable Faith)

This past weekend former-educational-TV-star-turned-science-advocate Bill Nye posted a video about abortion on Big Think. Nye attempts to use science to resolve the debate about abortion and arrives at the following conclusion: “When it comes to women’s rights with respect to their reproduction, I think you should leave it to women.”

The video is a perfect example of Maslow’s Hammer, or the saying, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” In this case, the hammer is science and the nail is anything people disagree about. While science can tell us a lot about the world, it can't answer all of our questions.

For example, science gives us facts about the way the world functions (or what is), but only philosophy and/or religion tell us how we should live (or what we ought to be). This includes telling us whether it is right or wrong to kill unborn humans (or any human for that matter).

Refuting Nye's Main Argument

Unfortunately, not only does Nye’s video contain terrible philosophy, it doesn’t even get the science right. Let’s break it down:

"Many, many, many, many more hundreds of eggs are fertilized than become humans. Eggs get fertilized, and by that I mean sperm get accepted by ova a lot. But that’s not all you need. You have to attach to the uterine wall, the inside of a womb, a woman’s womb."

Yes, human beings in the embryonic stage of life receive nutrients from their mothers' uterus. A human embryo cannot develop into an adult without implanting in the uterus just as a human infant cannot develop into an adult without attaching to his mother's breast or some suitable alternative.

"But if you’re going to hold that as a standard, that is to say if you’re going to say when an egg is fertilized it’s therefore has the same rights as an individual, then whom are you going to sue? Whom are you going to imprison? Every woman who’s had a fertilized egg pass through her? Every guy who’s sperm has fertilized an egg and then it didn’t become a human? Have all these people failed you?"

Does Nye believe that newborns are persons? If so, then does he think we should imprison mothers and fathers whose children die of natural causes like Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)? If having a high mortality rate means one is not a person, then born children were not persons throughout much of human history. Historically, (as well as in some parts of the world today) the child mortality rate was between 33% and 50%. That means one-third to one-half of all children died before they reached the age of five.

If we accept that born children sometimes die from causes beyond their parent's control, and that this tragic fact does not nullify their right-to-life, then the fact that unborn children also die from causes beyond their parent's control does not nullify their right-to-life either.

Plus, it may not be the case that large numbers of human organisms are miscarried. Instead, what might be happening is defective human tissue that could never develop into a fully mature human being is lost. According to embryologists Keith Moore and T.V. N. Persaud, “The early loss of embryos appears to represent a disposal of abnormal conceptuses that could not have developed normally.”¹

Answering Ad Hominems and Other Bad Arguments

"It’s just a reflection of a deep scientific lack of understanding and you literally or apparently literally don’t know what you’re talking about. And so when it comes to women’s rights with respect to their reproduction, I think you should leave it to women."

Bill, if you want to see someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, look in a mirror. If you want to see the scientific evidence that a human organism begins to exist at conception, watch this video.

"I’m not the first guy to observe this: You have a lot of men of European descent passing these extraordinary laws based on ignorance. Sorry you guys. I know it was written or your interpretation of a book written 5,000 years ago, 50 centuries ago, makes you think that when a man and a woman have sexual intercourse they always have a baby. That’s wrong and so to pass laws based on that belief is inconsistent with nature."

What does being a male of European descent have to do with abortion? This seems pretty racist and sexist to me. Imagine if I said in response to another hot-button issue, “You have a lot of people of African descent protesting police conduct and trying to pass laws that are based on ignorance.”

Also, it was seven white men of European descent that struck down all legal protection for the unborn in Roe v Wade. Now that was an extraordinary law based on ignorance, but their positions are okay because apparently men are only allowed to have an opinion on abortion if they’re pro-choice!

Second, both Christians and non-Christians have put forward powerful, secular arguments against abortion that have nothing to do with the Bible. Read Christopher Kaczor, Patrick Lee, Scott Klusendorf, Don Marquis, Stephen Schwarz, Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen, and Frank Beckwith just to name a few.

Third, Christians do not believe that, “when a man and a woman have sexual intercourse they always have a baby.” Sometimes the sperm and egg never meet and so no new life is created. Sometimes they meet but what is created is just randomly generating tissue and not a human organism (e.g. a complete molar pregnancy). But sometimes the sperm and egg recombine to form something that is neither sperm nor egg. It is instead, as the eminent embryologists Fabiola Müller and Ronan O’Rahilly describe, “a new, genetically distinct human organism.”²

Pro-life advocates simply believe that all human organisms (i.e. human beings) ought to be treated equally. They should not be killed just because they are unwanted by older, bigger, more powerful human beings.

On "Telling People What To Do"

"I mean it’s hard not to get frustrated with this everybody. And I know nobody likes abortion, okay. But you can’t tell somebody what to do. I mean she has rights over this, especially if she doesn’t like the guy that got her pregnant. She doesn’t want anything to do with your genes; get over it, especially if she were raped and all this."

Why is it that “nobody” likes abortion? If the unborn are not human beings then abortion would be as innocuous as a wisdom tooth extraction. Instead, society's ambivalence towards abortion is evidence that abortion destroys a living human, organism.

After all, how could two human beings procreate a non-human offspring that only becomes human after birth? The answer is "they can’t.” Therefore, the human organism they procreate (i.e. the baby) should have the same right to life as his born brothers and sisters. All children have the right to loving support from their mother and father even if one of these people "doesn't want anything to do" with the genes of the other. At minimum, children have the right not be killed just because one parent despises the other.

In response to Nye’s assertion that “you can’t tell somebody what to do” I say bullocks. Nye says in another video that fracking, or drilling for natural resources with high pressure water, “can’t be unregulated.” So, it’s okay to tell businesses not to pollute the earth but it's not okay to tell parents not to kill their children. What about "My corporation, my choice!"

Finally, what is the “this” that Nye says women have rights over? I’m sure Nye means “the pregnancy” but that is just a roundabout way of saying the mother has unlimited rights over her unborn child. Civilized people long ago rebuked the idea that children are chattel property of their parents that can be disposed of at a whim. Perhaps Mr. Nye would like to join the rest of us in the 21^st century and stop peddling crude, Stone-Age-like tyranny over helpless human beings.

Are There More Important Issues?

"So it’s very frustrating on the outside, on the other side. We have so many more important things to be dealing with. We have so many more problems to squander resources on than this argument based on bad science, on just lack of understanding."

It’s true abortion isn’t the only issue today any more than slavery was the only issue that affected people in America in the 1850's. But slavery was the most important issue because the lives of human beings matter more than "economic choice" or "state autonomy."

Likewise, if the unborn are human beings then over a million of them are killed in our country ever year and many of their parents suffer physical and emotional trauma related to this killing for decades after the fact. Unless a pro-choice advocate can show the unborn are not human beings (which Nye has failed to do), then he has no grounds to say abortion is not an issue worth pursuing in public debate.

"It’s very frustrating. You wouldn’t know how big a human egg was if it weren’t for microscopes, if it weren’t for scientists, medical researchers looking diligently. You wouldn’t know the process. You wouldn’t have that shot, the famous shot or shots where the sperm are bumping up against the egg. You wouldn’t have that without science. So then to claim that you know the next step when you obviously don’t is trouble."

This argument is akin to saying, “Look, without scientists you wouldn’t even have medicine that treats diseases like syphilis, so don’t tell us it’s wrong to deceive and kill African-Americans in order to study this disease! You don’t even know what you’re talking about!”

Mr. Nye, you are the one who is completely ignorant of the developmental growth of a human being. By defintion a human embryo is a human being in the first seven weeks of life and a human fetus is a human being in age anywhere from eight weeks until birth. Saying an unborn human being is not human because he or she is an embryo or fetus is as ridiculous as saying a fifteen-year-old is not human because he is a teenager.

"Let me do that again. Let me just pull back. At some point we have to respect the facts. Recommending or insisting on abstinence has been completely ineffective. Just being objective here. Closing abortion clinics. Closing, not giving women access to birth control has not been an effective way to lead to healthier societies. I mean I think we all know that."

I’m going to keep this post limited to just the topic of abortion, but notice that Nye is simply making assertions here and not giving any evidence for his position. He just wields the “hammer of science” (a metaphor that some news sites have even adopted) in order to shut down the discussion with one massive appeal to authority. This is ironic since Bill Nye only has a bachelor's degree in engineering. As one writer puts it, “Calling yourself the ‘Science Guy’ does not mean that you are an expert on anything. It means you're the host of a kids show.”

Why Not Debate the Issue?

"And I understand that you have deeply held beliefs and it really is ultimately out of respect for people, in this case your perception of unborn people. I understand that. But I really encourage you to look at the facts. And I know people are now critical of the expression 'fact-based' but what’s wrong with that? So I just really encourage you to not tell women what to do and not pursue these laws that really are in nobody’s best interest. Just really be objective about this. We have other problems to solve everybody. Come on. Come on. Let’s work together."

You want the facts? Okay, would you be willing to debate the facts about abortion with me? You recently debated Ken Ham on the issue of evolution and his only credentials are a long history of advocating for young earth creationism. When it comes to this issue I have the credentials that would justify a debate between us.

I have a graduate level education and have studied abortion for over a decade. I have written a book that has become the most comprehensive popular-level defense of the pro-life position (which is currently the first thing that comes up when you search “pro-life” on Amazon). It's also been endorsed by nationally known pro-life advocates such as Lila Rose and Fr. Frank Pavone. Finally, I have been invited by secular universities to debate other well-known defenders of the pro-choice position such as Dr. Malcom Potts at UC-Berkeley.

And just so it isn’t “two white men arguing over women’s rights” I would be happy to do a team debate where you and a female pro-choice advocate of your choosing debate me and a female pro-life advocate of my choosing, such as my friend Stephanie Gray. As you said, “I really encourage you to look at the facts.” So, let’s look at the facts together in front of an audience and see who’s position they really support.
 
 
(Image credit: New York Times)

It was revealed this week that, for the first time in its history, Harvard University, which had been founded for religious purposes and named for a minister of the Gospel, has admitted a freshman class in which atheists and agnostics outnumber professed Christians and Jews. Also this week, the House and the Senate of California passed a provision that allows for physician assisted suicide in the Golden State. As I write these words, the governor of California is deliberating whether to sign the bill into law. Though it might seem strange to suggest as much, I believe that the make-up of the Harvard freshman class and the passing of the suicide law are very really related.

I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised that non-believers have come to outnumber believers among the rising cohort of the American aristocracy. For the whole of their lives, these young people have been immersed in the corrosive acids of relativism, scientism, and materialism. Though they have benefitted from every advantage that money can afford, they have been largely denied what the human heart most longs for: contact with the transcendent, with the good, true, and beautiful in their properly unconditioned form. But as Paul Tillich, echoing the Hebrew prophets, reminded us, we are built for worship, and therefore in the absence of God, we will make some other value our ultimate concern. Wealth, power, pleasure, and honor have all played the role of false gods over the course of the human drama, but today especially, freedom itself has emerged as the ultimate good, as the object of worship. And what this looks like on the ground is that our lives come to belong utterly to us, that we become great projects of self-creation and self-determination.

As the Bible tells it, the human project went off the rails precisely at the moment when Adam arrogated to himself the prerogative of determining the meaning of his life, when he, in the agelessly beautiful poetry of the book of Genesis, ate of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Read the chapters that immediately follow the account of the Fall, and you will discover the consequences of this deified freedom: jealousy, hatred, fratricide, imperialism, and the war of all against all. The rest of the Biblical narrative can be interpreted as God’s attempt to convince human beings that their lives, in point of fact, do not belong to them. He did this precisely by choosing a people whom he would form after his own mind and heart, teaching them how to think, how to behave, and above all, how to worship. This holy people Israel—a word that means, marvelously, “the one who wrestles with God”—would then, by the splendor of their way of life, attract the rest of the world. On the Christian reading, this project reached its climax in the person of Jesus Christ, a first-century Israelite from the town of Nazareth, who was also the Incarnation of the living God. The coming-together of divinity and humanity, the meeting of infinite and finite freedom, Jesus embodies what God intended for us from the beginning.

And this is precisely why Paul, one of Jesus’ first missionaries, announced him as Kyrios (Lord) to all the nations, and why he characterized himself as doulos Christou Iesou (a slave of Christ Jesus). Paul exulted in the fact that his life did not belong to him, but rather to Christ. In his letter to the Ephesians, he wrote, “there is a power already at work in you that can do infinitely more than you can ask or imagine.” He was referencing the Holy Spirit, which orders our freedom and which opens up possibilities utterly beyond our capacities. To follow the promptings of this Spirit is, for Paul and for all the Biblical authors, the source of life, joy, and true creativity.

All of which brings me back to Harvard and legalized suicide. The denial of God—or the blithe bracketing of the question of God—is not a harmless parlor game. Rather, it carries with it the gravest implications. If there is no God, then our lives do indeed belong to us, and we can do with them what we want. If there is no God, our lives have no ultimate meaning or transcendent purpose, and they become simply artifacts of our own designing. Accordingly, when they become too painful or too shallow or just too boring, we ought to have the prerogative to end them. We can argue the legalities and even the morality of assisted suicide until the cows come home, but the real issue that has to be engaged is that of God’s existence.

The incoming freshman class at Harvard is a disturbing omen indeed, for the more our society drifts into atheism, the more human life is under threat. The less we are willing even to wrestle with God, the more de-humanized we become.
 
 
(Image credit: Business Insider)