This is a summary of my thoughts on dealing with natural law from my viewpoint of updated Thomistic existentialism. There may be some new thoughts in this entry but mostly I’m aiming at two goals:
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Improving my presentation of my views of a truer natural law, that is, one that corresponds to modern improvements in our understanding of human nature.
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Providing a foundation for viewing human nature in terms of our evolutionary past but also in terms of the new opportunities which arise from the nature of the human mind which can shape itself by active responses to its environments or multiple environments or the entire universe or even the world — the universe seen in light of God’s purposes which define a moral ordering upon His self-aware creatures.
The second goal is the more important though we must understand the ways in which human nature is part of this universe before we can understand how we can transcend our natural-born condition by the seemingly odd strategy of shaping our minds in response to this universe, our physical environments but also our knowledge of deep-space objects and quantum events and very abstract mathematics. To put it in perhaps a little more simply: a human mind can be shaped to correspond to the nature of created being in a very wide sense. To be sure, this is a matter of principle. No particular human mind could actually shape itself to fully correspond to Creation, including all that we can’t see — in which category, I’d place such bodies of truths as transfinite set theory though they might not be manifested directly in this particular universe, this phase of Creation.
Non-Christians and perhaps even non-theists can develop a version of this worldview in which the human mind can, in principle, come into a somewhat direct communion with created being. Or so I would assume on their part, though I have a specific viewpoint as a Catholic Christian who is updating Thomistic existentialism to account for modern empirical knowledge. This sort of creative thinking must be done from a specific viewpoint, motivation is crucial and so is faith in the rationality of Creation. Faith is always of a particular shape or it’s not likely to hold up when the going gets rough, which is true for many stretches of creative efforts. In my case, that faith in rationality comes with my belief in a rational Creator. And so I turn to a recapitulation of my understanding of human nature, of man’s nature as a particular species of great ape, on my way to an understanding of man as a potential creaturely person, an entity resembling a world in having an objective substance and also a narrative structure which is well-ordered.
We modern human beings, Christian and non-Christian alike, have failed to integrate our empirical knowledge into our culture. Our cultures, even the entirety of Western Civilization, have become ghettos, isolated from God’s Creation. Some Christian thinkers of this age reject the need to even study modern empirical knowledge because, to consider just one pile of empirical knowledge, evolutionary theory doesn’t seem to fit with their view of human morality. Many other Christians accept evolution while seeming to somehow put it to the side — their metaphysical view of man and his moral nature seems to be related, but not always closely, to the empirical reality indicated very strongly by modern science. Their view of human morality is largely structured according to the best of ancient philosophical thought founded upon ancient science and mathematics. (See Hellenistic Metaphysics is too Small.)
Thomistic thought, which is the only ground-up Christian philosophy I know of, looks at empirical entities, creatures, from an empirical stance, rather than the idealistic Greek philosophy which started from abstract concepts of virtue and understands human moral nature by weaving such pieces together into a whole. See What is Mind?: Is Christian Morality a Natural Morality? for one of many discussions I’ve provided on this topic. William J. Freeman, the neuroscientist whose views I discuss in that entry and some others with the same major title, What is Mind?, has proposed that, of all major philosophers, Aquinas provides the best foundations for an understanding of human nature that is built from modern scientific knowledge. I’d only add that we should generalize from ‘scientific’ knowledge (as narrowly understood) to empirical knowledge that includes history and literature and the practical arts by which we make our livings, and other specialized fields of empirical knowledge as well. I say this by way of clarification because modern neuroscientists, such as Freeman, know quite well that there is intelligence in the work of a dancer or baseball player or farmer as much as in the work of a philosopher or mathematician. But it’s easier to speak of the more abstract sorts of intelligence when developing philosophical or theological positions.
Once the world is seen as the physical universe ordered to God’s purposes and once we’ve gained the confidence to speak of even the flow of natural events as part of a story being told by God, we can even speak of morality as arising in this story. In fact, if we look directly at the evidence gathered and organized by evolutionary biologists, especially those in the school of sociobiology, we can see that moral natures seem to have arisen and evolved to more complex states in the flow of the same story in which eyes and nervous systems evolved. There are a lot of details to be settled and, without the proper critique on both biological and philosophical bases, ideologists find it easy to distort this evidence, but a fresh look should allow a thinker to realize that the story of the evolution life is not so much nastier than the story of the formation of Israel. That alone hints of a reconciliation between a Biblical God who shaped Israel and a God who created a nature which can be downright and disgustingly nasty at times.
Morality has evolved during the course of that biological evolution with all of its nasty events. The so-called altruism which leads social rodents to sacrifice themselves for others, preferentially their close relatives, isn’t an indication that the higher altruism — even caritas — of a St. Francis is ‘only’ a biological impulse. It’s an indication that morality is a very basic part of the story by which life evolved. Evolution leads to moral order, at least in social mammals, by developing ties between closely related animals and then similar animals. It’s not only human beings who respond tenderly to a creature with oversized eyes and chubby cheeks — females of one species are often used by farmers or zookeepers to nurse the young of another species.
Yet, we have to remember that the higher altruism of a St. Francis is different and I’ve proposed a way of helping us to understand that difference — we can shape our minds in active efforts to understand Creation and those efforts are as good as child-like imitations of God’s work in bringing Creation into being and then shaping it into this world and the world of the resurrected and maybe others. By responding to Creation, we’re actually responding to God’s creative work and shaping ourselves to accord with the activities of God as Creator.
Does God impose order as if He were a human engineer forcing silicon and other minerals into the state we call ‘semiconductor’? Is mind imposed upon a brain and maternal nature upon a pregnant woman? Or does mind emerge from the purely physical actions of brain-cells as if an engineer could cause nature herself to produce semiconductors by her ‘own’ processes and for his own pleasure? Is maternal nature strictly an effect of hormonal flows during preganancy, childbirth, and nursing? Those who see God as outside of us and outside of His own Creation have to think in terms of imposed order, perhaps calling it ‘intelligent design’. Those who see God as His own Act-of-being, Creator of all other acts-of-being, can see matters a bit differently. We and rattlesnakes and interstellar gas-clouds exist as objects of God’s love, yet He doesn’t love only from the outside. He loves us even as He first creates the stuff of Creation and then shapes it into the concrete stuff of our universe and then brings us into being from that stuff by telling our story. He loves us from deeper inside of us than we ourselves can reach.