What is Mind?: Is Christian Morality a Natural Morality?

I’m thinking my way towards the sort of intentional view of moral nature pioneered by St. Thomas Aquinas. There is a clear explanation of intentionality, a biological concept to match our biological natures, in How Brains Make Up Their Minds by the neuroscientist Walter J. Freeman. Sticking strictly to the empirical aspects of this concept, Freeman provides a sharp and plausible summary of the Thomistic position on moral intention. I’ll provide a somewhat lengthy quote from How Brains Make Up Their Minds:

I want to describe a neural basis for goal-directed actions that is common to both humans and other animals because it reflects the evolution of human mechanisms from simpler animals in which intent can operate without will. The concept– “intentionality”–was first described by [St.] Thomas Aquinas in 1272 to denote the process by which humans and other animals act in accordance with their own growth and maturation. An intent is the directing of an action toward some future goal that is defined and chosen by the actor. It differs from a motive, which is the reason and explanation of the action, and from a desire, which is the awareness and experience stemming from the intent. A man shoots another with the intent to kill, which is separate from why he does it and with what feeling.

Lawyers following in the steps of Aquinas understand and use these distinctions. Psychologists commonly do not. Philosophers have drastically changed the meaning of the term, using intention to denote the relations that a thought or a belief has to whatever it signifies in the world, but physicians and surgeons, again following Aquinas, have preserved the original sense in applying the word to the processes of growth and healing of the body from injuries, thus retaining its original biological context. I believe that animals have awareness, but not awareness of themselves, which is well developed only in humans. Self-awareness is required for volition: animals cannot volunteer. [How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Walter J. Freeman, page 8]

There seems to be a deep problem here for any claim that there is some natural law which is the same as the Sermon on the Mount. The problem is that the world is a story where a character inside that story can’t see the point of it all yet. From inside the world, we see developments and evolutionary movements which seem to imply much but that much is seen as through a glass darkly. From a natural viewpoint, the purposes of God which would tell the endpoint of the story are often unclear. To see God’s purposes even vaguely, we must have faith and a knowledge of Holy Scripture and also of the reliable commentaries upon that Scripture. (There are, of course, those of simple faith but they need reliable teachers and preachers to rely upon.) Freeman doesn’t discuss these issues. Perhaps he’s a skeptic and perhaps he’s a modern believer under the odd delusion that Creation can be discussed without worrying about the Creator. I’ll address this issue in my next posting. For now, I’ll just discuss the inadequacy of natural-law reasoning to develop the fullness of the Christian moral belief that remains embedded in much of the political and social and moral beliefs professed in the modern West, though no longer practiced. It’s hardly surprising that unfounded systems of beliefs are no longer inhabited — who wants to walk out onto thin air?

I don’t doubt the value of natural-law reasoning. After all, much of my efforts are in the related area of natural theology. On the other hand, my efforts are regulated by God’s direct revelations especially those which come from the Gospels, from the story of the incarnate Son of God. I can use mathematics and physics and biology to describe the universe as a story centered upon the Son of God, but I can’t find a description of the Incarnation or the Crucifixion in the formation of a star nor in the evolutionary story of the human race. True natural law reasoning could see the importance of the instinct found in many species: don’t kill a member of your own species. But that instinct isn’t absolute, though awfully strong in some species such as the wolf.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: so far as honest natural-law reasoning goes, the virtuous pagans of the Roman Republic and likeminded virtuous pagans in other societies were as good as it gets. Those Romans knew abortion was murder but were willing to abort babies to solve a difficult problem. Being honest and insightful, they knew that laws — such as “Do not murder other human beings.” — were strong guidelines rather than absolutes. That’s all that we get from nature and from well-developed human reason untutored by revelation — strong guidelines.

That points to the error in those claims I remember from years ago that the Ten Commandments were a version of Hammurabi’s Code supplemented by a few religious rules. So far as I know, the Ten Commandments were the first absolute laws of that sort in history. The prophets, Amos and Isaiah and the rest, emphasized God’s raising of natural law guidelines to absolutes as part of their call for the Israelites to re-turn to God. In His various parables, and especially in The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Christ went beyond the prophets to new absolutes. Going well beyond the absolute prohibition of murder, the Lord Jesus Christ forbade us to have so much as a violent thought against another human being. For some reason, many non-Christians of the West have assumed those commandments, given by our Lord to the shock of even some followers, are somehow natural — either to be found by difficult intellectual effort or by untutored exercise of human instincts. It’s far stranger that so many highly regarded Christian thinkers seem to make this error.

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