... about the agnostic dyslexic insomniac?

He stayed up all night wondering, “Is there a dog?”

If you want to explain what is less clear, you must fall back on what is more clear.  Certainly there is a lot to learn from the biblical narrative, but one must interpret it in the light of the doctrinal statements, not vice versa.  To set aside explicit teachings and rely on the stories alone is just a way to pipe in one’s own prejudices and call them the teachings of the Bible.  Anything goes.

Obviously this traditional approach wouldn’t work if we were dealing with inconsistent texts – for example if grandpa said “Never steal,” but spun tale after tale of thieves getting the best of honest folk.  But the premise of Scripture is that God, always truthful, is consistent.  What He teaches by story, statement, and precept cannot be divided.

“[A]s we have compounded healthful drugs from certain of the reptiles; so from secular literature we have received principles of inquiry and speculation, while we have rejected their idolatry, terror and pit of destruction.  Nay, even those have aided us in our religion, by our perception of the contrast between what is worse and what is better, and by gaining strength for our doctrine from the weakness of theirs.”  --  Gregory of Nazianzen, Pangyric on St.Basil, sec. 11

“Better real darkness than false light, say the saints; better real confusion than false clarity.”  -- Inaugural address of Fr. Thomas Hopko, Dean, St. Vladimir's Orthodox Seminary (1993)

Several philosophers elsewhere on the web seem confused about whether I am an NNL theorist.  That means a “new natural law” theorist, a follower of the basic goods approach of John Finnis, Joseph Boyle, and Germain Grisez.  Heavens, no, not at all.  I am a traditional Thomist, and I’ve criticized the NNL theory in several places.  Among other things, I think that its rejection of natural teleology is a mistake; that what it calls the “incommensurability thesis” -- the view that no fundamental good can be viewed as more important than any other – is false; and that its analysis of what it calls “the basic good of religion” is dreadfully misleading.

But one can view a theory as fundamentally mistaken and still find something helpful in what its proponents have said.  I have certainly borrowed and adapted one of Finnis’s ideas about the one-flesh unity of the husband and wife.  As I would put it, neither of the two has “a reproductive system” – each has only half of one.  The procreative purpose cannot be accomplished until they join.

But notice that I have just referred to the inbuilt purpose of the sexual powers.  Finnis would not do that, and he would regard my borrowing as illegitimate.  I think his idea makes sense only in the context of natural teleology; he is trying to avoid it.