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.

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.

A day after Thanksgiving, with the turkey and stuffing settled in our stomachs, it's a good time to reflect on one aspect of the holiday often ignored: historically, this was a day in which Americans were encouraged to call upon God both in gratitude for His blessings, and to ask mercy for our sins.

We see seeds of this in Lincoln's 1863 Thanksgiving proclamation, the source of the modern holiday, in which he reminded Americans of “the gracious gifts of the most high God, who while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.” It's clearer in prior Thanksgiving proclamations (for example, James Madison's 1814 proclamation of a day intended for “a devout thankfulness for all which ought to be mingled with their supplications to the Beneficent Parent of the Human Race that He would be graciously pleased to pardon all their offenses against Him”).

In 1865, President Andrew Johnson proclaimed the third modern Thanksgiving by setting apart

"a day of national thanksgiving to the Creator of the Universe for these great deliverances and blessings. And I do further recommend that on that occasion the whole people make confession of our national sins against His infinite goodness, and with one heart and one mind implore the divine guidance in the ways of national virtue and holiness."

So let's talk about one of “our national sins,” racism. Whether you're recounting to your kids the story of the first Thanksgiving, and have to explain what happened to the Wampanoag Indians; or explaining how President Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday while fighting to save a nation and liberate a race of people from chattel slavery (which then-Senator Obama referred to as “this nation's original sin”); or simply taking a break from Thanksgiving festivities to watch the news, only to see a nation in flames over the shooting death of Michael Brown, racism is an unavoidable reality.

I'm not going to write an essay explaining that racism is evil. I'm confident that you know this already, even if you struggle with racism personally. And in describing racism as “evil,” I use the term advisedly. We recognize—virtually all of us, anyways—that racism isn't just mistaken, or factually incorrect, but actually a moral ill. This is why the Washington Post's Alyssa Rosenberg can casually refer to the racist as “a wholly bad person.” She doesn't need to explain or defend this association, because she can count on her readership sharing her sentiment.

Instead, what I want to explore is what we can learn from our moral intuition. If we're right that the racist (or, in any case, racism itself) is evil, what does this tell us about human rights, metaphysics, and God?

I. Why Racism is Evil: The Universal Equality of Man

If you were asked why racism is evil, I suspect your answer would involve something about the idea of the universal equality of man. America was famously founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. At the time those words were penned, one race of Americans was being used as slaves, one race was being exterminated, and women and non-landowners had very little political voice. We weren't, as a nation, actually living as if our Declaration of Independence was true, nor have we always done so in the years since. But we really do believe those five words, and they've served as a veritable engine of social justice.

This notion of fundamental human equality is also the basis for international human rights law. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” And it is precisely this “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family [that] is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.”

This is why we rightly view racism as an evil. It strikes at the very root of our belief in the universal equality of man. For example, consider the white supremacist who believes that members of his race are superior because they're more intelligent than other races. That's not primarily a question about the latest social sciences on how well different racial groups perform on IQ tests, or how legitimate IQ tests are, or anything else. Underlying all this, we're confronted with a question about the foundations of human dignity. Is the worth of human beings something that can be determined by skin color, or by any sort of test, or by any of the countless other markers by which we can separate ourselves from one another? Because if all men truly are created equal, it's because our inherent dignity is rooted in something deeper, in our common humanity.

When we take seriously this idea of basic human rights, owed to us simply due to our humanity, we repudiate all manner of injustice, from racism to sexism to abortion. But these rights also point to a bigger reality, namely the existence of God.

II. Universal Human Rights, the Equality of Man, and the Need for God

So most of us share these foundational beliefs about human rights and dignity. But atheistic materialism can't get you to universal human rights or the equality of man. As Ross Douthat asked Bill Maher, “Where are human rights? What is the idea of human rights, if not a metaphysical principle? Can you find universal human rights under a microscope?”

The Declaration of Independence recognized this. Remember that the Declaration didn't suddenly make all men equal. Rather, it simply recognized that we already were equal, prior to the law. That's why the Declaration describes these realities in theistic and natural law terms: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

These aren't rights that are invented by the state or by the crowds; these are rights that we have inherently, rights which the state and the mob must recognize. If they came from the state, then they wouldn't be human rights at all, but civil rights. And what the state giveth, the state can taketh away. Obviously, corrupt states and corrupt men can violate human rights; the point here is that they can't repeal them. They're unalienable.

Indeed, the whole point of saying something is a human rights violation is that the victim had rights that the state or the masses ought to have respected. It's why slavery was wrong even when the government and the majority of people condoned it. And it's also why, when corrupt southern states imposed Jim Crow laws, and lynch mobs threatened the basic rights of African-Americans, there was a higher law to which African-Americans could appeal, above the level of the mob or the state.

The Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, one of the principal drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, recognized this, explaining that the “philosophical foundation of the Rights of man is Natural Law.” For human rights to exist in any meaningful way, they must be rooted in natural law, in something coming from before and above the level of the nation-state or the masses.

III. The Unsavory Alternatives

Having said all of this, where does this leave atheists? Not in a good place. On atheism, fellow man is nothing more than a mere collection of material parts, none of which are inherently dignified. And he, like you and I, is ultimately nothing more than a cosmic accident. In such a world, how can he or we have any rights to begin with, except for the rights that the state or the masses decides to give us?

Human rights, as we've seen, can't be meaningfully grounded in the masses or in the state; after all, these rights are often needed precisely to protect us from the masses and the state. We need the existence of something like natural law, and law based on much more than instinct or the like. If natural law is just instinct, why ought we listen to it or obey it?

Likewise for the equality of all men. What exactly is the basis for this equality, if not our shared endowments from our Creator? Theists hold that our equality is ontological, related to the sort of beings that we are. We're each made in the image of God, and we're each endowed with certain rights and dignity, which we share in common. But ontology is blatantly metaphysical, and this particular belief appeals quite directly to God. Without that theistic appeal, the whole thing seems to fall apart.

The most you can say without God would appear to be that all men are of equal social utility. But of course, that's untrue, and obviously so. Some people are born with serious handicaps; others are born into extreme privilege. By any purely-material criteria, some people are born better or worse off than their peers. So, without any connection to the Creator, “all men are created equal” reduces to a meaningless bromide. It sounds nice, but deep down, we don't believe it.

Let's return once more to our port of departure, racism. If your view is that human dignity and human worth is rooted in our intelligence, our physical ability, our life expectancy, our freedom from pain (or conversely, our ability to feel pain), and the rest, the most that you can say is that you're only conditionally not a white supremacist. Tomorrow, some double-blind gold-standard study could come along showing that whites (or some other racial or ethnic group) outperformed their peers in these categories, and you'd be forced to that they have more dignity and worth than members of other racial and ethnic groups.

Such an absurd result reveals the poverty of atheistic materialism; it fails to account for our most basic moral intuitions, and it fails to explain how we can know that racism is a moral evil. Since we do know that racism is evil, we can know with equal certainty that our brother is more than a collection of purely-material parts. During this time of thanksgiving, we should rejoice and be thankful to God for our shared human dignity, and we should take this chance to entreat His forgiveness for our individual and national sins, not least of which is racism.
 
 
(Image credit: Nation of Change)