HappyFlappyDeist wrote:Somebody took philosophy in college. This guy!
I changed my post, this is going nowhere. No reason to even instigate further. I understand your post on the last page how i'm 'misinformed'.
I'll end with a simple question before I respond to the others, Where does natural law come from in your view (is it truly reliant on human "reason" as you stated before)? Saying that it comes from reason seems to be pushing the problem further along the ice. God--(gave us)->Reason--(gave us)-->natural law?
My view is that it does not exist, feel free to explode on that
( I actually would truly like to hear your response).
HappyFlappyDeist wrote:@Jac
I think the only misunderstanding that we're (meaning me) having is i'm incorrectly assuming that Natural law is tied in directly and cannot contradict Christianity and vise versa. Be patient with me Rabbi, this is not,by any means, my forte.
I've no desire to explode!
I hope you haven't taken my words too harshly. (And for the record, I did study this material in college. I won't toot my own horn with reference to credentials. Suffice it to say that I've a few, but they are not important. The arguments are.)
So your question is fair. I don't know that I can answer it in a single post, or even a long series of posts. For starters, I would recommend to you a book titled
The Last Superstition by Ed Feser. It's very polemical, but worth its weight in gold in terms of the content. On a far more academic level, I'd strongly recommend
Retrieving the Natural Law by J. Darryl Charles. The latter is about using natural law to work through several serious bioethical problems (which is a particular area of interest for me, given my own profession) we are facing, and some that are developing, in a "secular" setting. I hope you can appreciate the simple fact that if NLT is being employed in these settings in this manner, then it clearly isn't religiously motivated--or, at least, serious scholars don't think it is.
So much for book recommendations. On to your question. Please understand that what follows is very brief by necessity and does not attempt to defend in any detail the premises I am offering. I only ask that you accept them for the sake of argument on their non-religious grounds. If you can see that these premises--whether true or not is irrelevant to our present discussion--are grounded in strict reason and not in theological propositions, then that's all I need to show to establish the basic credibility of my argument.
The short argument against gay marriage is this:
- 1. "Gay marriage" is an oxymoron, meaning that it is self-contradictory, and essentially and necessarily meaningless;
2. Meaningless terms cannot be the basis for argument;
3. Given the nature of government as being rooted fundamentally in force and imposition, government policies cannot be legitimately proposed, implemented, or enforced without sound argument;
4. Therefore, government policies pertaining to "gay marriage" cannot be legitimately proposed, implemented, or enforced;
5. Therefore, "gay marriage" cannot be recognized by governments.
This argument is obviously valid. The question is whether it is sound. (2) is just a self-evident point of logic. (3) is rooted in a particular, but hardly controversial, view on the nature of government (classical liberalism). (4) and (5) are nothing more than logical inferences. The only question is what kind of statement (1) is and whether or not it is true.
Notice that (1) is not making a moral claim. I do argue that "gay mariage" (such as it is) is intrinsically immoral. But that is not the argument against accepting it on a governmental level. After all, even if we established that this or that is immoral, it does not follow that the government must therefore legislate against it. Except in certain circumstances, lying, for instance, is hardly illegal. And theologically, we believe that worshipping false gods is immoral, but there should NOT be legislation that outlaws idolatry!
(1) is both an ontological and linguistic claim. It is linguistic because it recognizes the fact that just because you put words together, it does not follow that you have a real referent, and thus Chomsky's famous illustrative statement, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." So is "gay marriage" really an oxymoron or not? NLT says it is. For NLT claims that marriage is
by nature a sexual union. It is many other things--a public institution, for instance. But the salient point for NLT here is the sexual aspect. Now, NLT is firmly rooted in a deep commitment to Aristotle's notion of final causality, which says that all effects are directed to some end. It would not be an exaggeration to say that final causality--or teleology--is the fundamental principle of all Aristotelian philosophy. It is, not surprisingly, widely misunderstood even in academic circles. But let the confusion on the matter pass. It is enough to point out that final causality says that any and every effect is nothing more or less that the actualization of some real potentality a thing has, but that all potentialities whatsoever are with respect to something else. So a match has the potential
to burn. A heart has the potential
to pump blood. A thought has the potential
to be about X. In fact, the word potentiality itself directly points to the idea of being about something (in that the word is ultimately related to the notion of power or capacity
to do or be something else).
Apply that line of thought to marriage. Marriage itself has a final cause, but let's reduce it further. Being a sexual union, the sex act itself has a final cause, and that final cause, we know from biology, is procreation. We may readily grant that the sexual act has many other (often pleasurable!) aspects. And you might even be justified in raising some of those aspects to the level of a final cause. The unitive aspect, for instance, is very important. It's more debatable whether the pleasure itself is a final cause
of the sex act or if it is the final cause of something else (i.e., the stimulation of our desire for it). Regardless of what other aspects you look at, the fact remains that procreation is the final cause of the sexual union
par excellence. Therefore, anything that does not have the procreation as its final act is not sex. Whatever it may be, it is not sex. (
n.b. - final causality does not entail, imply, or suggest intentionality. Actions may have unintended consequences, or we may take precautions to ensure that some effect does not result from our actions; but such things are only possible and true because of the underlying potentiality that the act is directed towards. So in my estimation having sex with a condom so as not to get pregnant is still sex, as evidenced by the fact that the condom is being used to frustrate the final cause!)
Let me give you a related example. The final cause of speech is communication. Whether or not communication actually occurs is neither here nor there. The fact is, that is what speech is fundamentally about--it is the aim of speech. The material cause of speech is words. So that words become the means by which the final cause is actualized. Now imagine two people--call them Bob and Frank. They make the following statements:
- Bob: "I am a human being"
Frank: "I am a human being"
Now suppose the former is saying this addressing someone else in his native tongue. Suppose the other, though, does not speak English. Suppose he has never spoken or heard one word of English. Suppose he is not addressing anyone at all when he says these words. He is, in fact, a young child blabbering away that just accidentally makes those noises. Now, the question I have is whether or not Frank is communicating at all? Bob certainly is, but Frank is not.
The purpose of the illustration is only to show that for some effect to be called X, it must have the final cause of X. It must have other things, too. But it must
at least have X. That is a basic premise of NLT. "Natural" in NLT is not about the world around us--nature vs civilization. It is about the essence of things. I have a nature. It is a human nature. Trees have a nature. Stars have a nature. Matter in general has a nature. Angels, if they exist, have natures, and so on. Things act like they act, do what they do, and are what they are because of their nature. (Again, you don't have to agree with any of that. I'm just teling you how NLT works.) It is the job of science to discover those natures, and it does a fabulous job of it most the time! Just so, sex has a nature, and the nature of sex is that its final act is procreation. That does not mean that every sexual act must result in procreation to be sex anymore than it means that if I give a speech and unbeknownst to me no one in the room speaks my language and so no one understands my point that therefore I have not actually spoken. The effectiveness of actualizing the final cause doesn't change the nature of the particular act (indeed, that is part of the nature--final causes have, as part of their nature, probabalities and effectiveness!). But what this
does mean is that any act that is not
in principle capable of procreation is not sex. Thus, masturbation is not sex. Fellatio is not sex. "Anal sex" is not sex.
As an aside, this does not mean that anything that results in procreation is sex. These words on this page are communication, but that does not make these words "speech" except in a metaphorical sense. If you prefer a less metaphorical example, taking someone off of a vent in a hospital and allowing them to die and executing someone by lethal injection both have the same result: death. But that does not mean tht removing artifical life support is execution (or active euthanasia, as we talk about it). The philosophical principle here is that for X to be called Y, X must
at least have the final cause of Y, but it must also meet a range of other conditions, as well.
So the point to all this should be clear enough. Marriage is a sexual union. Not all sexual unions are marriages (so naughty teenagers and people having an affair are not married), but all marriages are sexual unions. Two males or two females are incapable of having a sexual union. Therefore, two males or two females are incapable of marriage.
At this point, you may object on MULTIPLE grounds. You may complain that you reject one or more of my premises (that's fine). You may argue that none of this shows that "gay marriage" (even granting its non-existence but using the term for the sake of convenience) has any deletorious effects on society. And that would be true, so far. I've not attempted to show by this argument it does. You might argue that this argument doesn't take the feelings or rights of homosexuals into account. All that's fine. All are worth discussing. But such points are red herrings as far as the argument I am making goes. Strictly, I am not trying to argue that gay marriage ought to be illegal. I am showing you that, in this case, natural law is not related to or reducible to theology. It is a strictly philosophical work. There are, of course, theologicla arguments to be made against homosexual behavior, but NLT does not appeal to them. That NLT arguments come to the same conclusion as theological arguments is also unrelated to the validity of NLT in and of itself, or more specifically to the question of whether or not NLT is essentially theological.
Theologians have, of course, made great use of NLT. But that is no surprise. Good theologians make use of all sciences in which they are trained. After all, science is the study of creation, and all creation, the theologian presumes, is the work of God. Therefore, all science has theological implications. That holds true for NLT, and since NLT is so closely associated with ethics, its prominence for theologians is expected. But the same could be said for a good many other sciences, too, including philosophy itself.
Anyway, I think I've said more than enough in this post. I hope this at least gets you started thinking about these issues maybe in a little different way than you did before. Let me emphasize that I am not, in this post anyway, trying to convince you that my arguments against gay marriage are correct. I only want you to see the relationship between theology and NLT. It is a close relationship, but it is one in which theology utilizes NLT and not vice-versa.
