Nobody in his right mind likes to discuss his own idiocies.  But because we are all in danger of being idiots, sometimes we owe it to each other to do so.

Professor:

I was struck by the remark in one of your books that before your change of heart about God you had almost reached the “point of no return.”  Would you explain?

Reply:

On a journey, a point of no return is a point beyond which it is impossible to get back to where one started.  For example, someone might jump into a deep hole, or descend into a steep valley, and be unable to climb back out.

Something like that happened to me when I was a young man, after I turned my back thoroughly on God.  St. Paul remarks of the pagans, “for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened.”  Placing the comment in context, I think he is saying that although the pagans knew very well the reality of the Creator, they pretended to themselves that they didn’t; they suppressed their knowledge.  That’s what I did too.

What happens when you try to make yourself stupid is that you succeed even better than you had intended, and that also happened to me.  In order not to recognize the reality of God – whose reality is really quite obvious – I had to disable all sorts of powers and capacities, one part of my mind after another.  I had almost reached the point of being unable to realize my own condition.  It is like pulling out one’s eardrums in order not to hear the voice calling one home.

There are lots of ways to reach this point.  Sometimes we take the act of turning our back on God lightly, thinking, for example, "I'll live without God now, but it will be okay, because later I'll turn back and He'll accept me."  The problem is that by the very act of turning away from Him, we harden our hearts so that it becomes more difficult to turn to Him.  True, we can put no limits on His grace.  Even so, we should not "put Him to the test," saying to ourselves, "Since He can break even the stoniest heart, let us be hard-hearted."

Professor:

I see that you’ve written about the International Theological Commission’s statement on natural law.  Why do you think the statement received so little attention and popularity in English-speaking countries?

Reply:

Some reasons, I think, are internal to the document.  I’ve offered some gentle criticisms here.  A second reason is that the English-speaking countries are mostly Protestant, and although Luther and Calvin believed in natural law, many of their followers have been deeply suspicious of the idea, viewing it as a pagan invention, wrongly baptized by Thomas Aquinas, incompatible with recognition of the Fall.

Fortunately, I think this situation is finally changing.  Strong interest in natural law is reawakening among traditional Lutherans, Calvinists, and Evangelicals:  See for example Robert C. Baker, ed., Natural Law: A Lutheran Reappraisal,Stephen J. Grabill, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics, David Van Drunen, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, and  Jesse Covington, Bryan T. McGraw, and Micah Watson, eds., Natural Law in Evangelical Political Thought.  I might also mention stirrings of interest among Eastern Christians like Fr. Michael Butler, who spoke at last week’s Acton University conference in Grand Rapids, Jews like Rabbi David Novak, author of Natural Law in Judaism, and here and there a few Muslims.

But I think that other reasons for the poor reception of the document have to do with natural law itself.  Although it is a gracious gift of God, it is good news only to those who desire to live according to virtue, and even then it may not be good news without the grace which enables us to obey it.  St. Paul speaks of that knowledge which is a fragrance from life to life for those who are being rescued, but the aroma of death to death among those who are perishing.  How much more is natural law without that fragrance, because morality alone has a heart of rock.

So in one way the natural law is one of the praeambula fidei, the “preambles” to faith, as the Church has traditionally held, but in another way faith may be one of the praeambula amicitiae cum natura, the “preambles” to renewed friendship with our own created nature.

This is the fourth in a series of posts in Q&A format.  It’s an experiment; readers, do you like it or hate it?  Though slightly edited, the questions are from real letters.  By responding to just one letter per post, I can also post more often.  Coming Thursday:  The ITC statement on natural law.  Coming next Monday:  Points of no return.

Professor:

Could it be that the typical elective abortion is not a happy exercise of unfettered personal freedom, but rather the result of coercion?  I think the abortion lobby’s widely trumpeted assertion that abortion is an essential exercise in freedom of choice is an appalling political lie.  How many mothers would rather carry the child to term, but abort because of economic or social pressures -- especially pressures from males who occupy positions of ostensible authority in these women’s lives?

Reply:

I agree.  Pressures from other women too.  When my wife used to do crisis pregnancy counseling, she told me that the most common source of pressure to have an abortion wasn't the man, but the young woman's mother.

Some  -- not all -- of this pressure probably results from the fact that so many of these women’s mothers have also had abortions.  If a woman has had an abortion, then to encourage her daughter to have her baby is to admit, even if only to herself, that she should have had her own baby too.  This requires courage.  It is a difficult thing to do.

Professor:

I recently read your autobiographical talk “Escape from Nihilism,” and was a little shocked by the improbable course of events that have shaped your adult intellectual life.  Your path of seems to have followed a reverse course to mine, and for that matter to that of most thinking adults.

You say that there are holes in the arguments for the denial of free will.  One hole, you say, is that “in order to deny free will I assumed that I understood causality.  That is foolish because I didn't know what causality really is any more than I understand what free will really is.  They are equally wonderful and mysterious."   Why don't you understand causality?   Are causality and freedom really "wonderful and mysterious"?

Reply:

You express amazement that I find causality mysterious.  Since to you causality is an open book, perhaps you might enjoy thinking about some of the questions which have riddled lesser thinkers down the ages.  Why are the patterns of causality what they are and not otherwise?  Why is there such a thing as causality at all?  Why is there something, and not rather nothing?  May you fare well.

Professor:

What would you say is the most powerful evidence for the existence of God?

Reply:

Where to begin?  There are so many.  However, I would say two of most powerful arguments for the reality of God are the following.

1.  The fact that we are here thinking about it.  Unless you are willing to tolerate an infinite regress – and you shouldn’t be -- contingent being can be explained only by necessary being.

2.  All of the things about human beings which have no adaptive value.  A few of these conscience, the sense of beauty, and the desire for meaning, none of which can be explained in terms of natural selection unless you employ smoke and mirrors.  I discuss the argument here. 

Professor:

Many of my atheist friends say the reason they are atheists is that there is no physical, tangible evidence of God.  They want God to come down and say “Hi, I'm God,” or something like that.  How would you respond?

Reply:

If by physical and tangible evidence you mean something we can reach out and touch, like my computer keyboard, then it’s true that there is no physical and tangible evidence of God, but we can’t reach out and touch electrons or historical figures either, and atheists believe in those.

On the other hand, if by physical and tangible evidence you mean the sort of evidence we do accept for the existence of electrons or historical figures, then certainly there is physical, tangible evidence of God.  First there is evidence from the sciences, for example the fact that the cosmological constants appear to have been “fine tuned” to allow life as we know it to exist.  Second there is evidence from empirical history, for example the miracles of Christ, whose life is better attested by eyewitnesses than the life of any other ancient figure, such as Julius Caesar.

I realize that atheists don’t accept these sorts of evidence, but in rejecting them out of hand, they are being inconsistent.  When we point to things like fine tuning, they say that a physical explanation for it will eventually be found -- which is merely blind faith.  But when we point to things like miracles, they dismiss them on grounds that they are contrary to the laws of nature -- which is to assume what they ought to be proving.  Neither response takes the evidence seriously.

Try presenting your atheist friends with the classical arguments for the reality of God’s existence, for example the cosmological argument.  The cosmological argument relies on the principle of causality, which is part of metaphysics, but part of ordinary science too.

The argument begins with a logical distinction between contingent beings and necessary beings.  Necessary beings – if there are any, which is not assumed -- have to exist.  By contrast, contingent beings do not have to exist, so if they do, there must be some explanation, some cause, of their existence.  For example, you are a contingent being.  You might never have existed, and the reason you do exist is that your parents conceived you.  Now consider the whole universe.  So far as we know, it didn’t have to exist; so it is a contingent being and requires a cause.  Someone might say, “Yes, but the cause isn’t God; it’s just another thing that doesn’t have to exist.  There might even be a whole series of contingent beings, so that the universe is caused by cause one, cause one is caused by cause two, cause two is caused by cause three, and so on.”  Very well, but could such a chain of causes or explanations be infinite?  The answer is no.  Why?  One reason is that to say that the chain of causes or explanations is infinite amounts to saying that there is no ultimate cause or explanation, because every contingent being requires a cause.  Another reason is that there is no such thing as what philosophers call an "actual" infinite series.  For both reasons, the chain must stop somewhere; there must be a first cause.  Call this first cause cause N.  But the chain couldn’t stop with cause N unless cause N were a necessary being.  This necessary being is what we call God.

I’m trying out a new format for a few posts.  These are real letters, though slightly edited.

Professor:

There seems to be a certain predictability in the way evil deeds play out -- tyrants create the men who will overthrow them, true peace cannot be gotten through despotism, justice cannot be attained through unjust means, and so forth.

Yet there are surprises too.  Secondary causes can alter the outcome of an evil event, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.  How do you view these surprises?

Reply:

Your intuition is that even though people try to justify intrinsically evil acts by their consequences, in the final analysis the consequences of intrinsically evil acts are always bad.  Yet because of the “surprises” you mention, you wonder whether you’re wrong.

I’d say that in certain deep senses your intuition is profoundly correct, but in another sense mistaken.

(1)  Essentially – that is, of itself -- an intrinsically evil act cannot bring about any good results.  The tendency of an act with a wrong object is to bring about wrong.  Sam aims at beating Cynthia, and Cynthia is harmed.

(2) Accidentally – that is, because of circumstances -- an intrinsically evil act may bring about certain good results.  Just because Sam does beat Cynthia, his murderer may spare Cynthia pain.

(3) Providentially – that is, because of the design of the system of natural consequences –the accidentally good results of an intrinsically evil act tend, at least, to unravel.  So far as we know, this unraveling doesn’t always take place, but when it does, the chain of causation can often be traced back to the intrinsic evil of the original act.  Perhaps Fred divorces his wife because he fancies himself more deeply in love with the neighbor lady.  The problem is that love, being a gift of self, is intrinsically connected with faithfulness, so the very thing Fred does for the sake of love renders him unfit for love.  I wouldn’t say that the system of natural consequences works with 100% efficiency; in this life, bad things do happen to good people, and good things do happen to bad.  Even so, the efficiency of the system is amazingly high.  The very things we do to prevent natural consequences themselves have natural consequences.

(4) Ultimately – that is, in view of our final end – an intrinsically evil act always harms the person who commits it more than he could be compensated by any accidental good result.  This is because it cannot be directed to our final end, which is God; by its very nature it separates us from Him.  As John Paul II put it, acts of this sort “contaminate those who inflict them more than those who suffer injustice, and they are a negation of the honor due to the Creator.”

So I’d say that your intuition is incorrect in the accidental sense, mostly correct in the providential sense, and altogether correct in the essential and the ultimate senses.  Does this help?

Professor:

Is there anything to be said for the idea that punishing wrongdoers is justified at least partly by the worth of the persons wronged?  Suppose we let abusers off the hook.  Failure to punish them wrongs their victims; it is out of keeping with their worth as persons.  I haven’t seen much about this in what I’ve read about the retributive purpose of punishment.

Reply:

The intrinsic worth of the victims is certainly important; only beings with intrinsic worth can suffer harm in the sense which would warrant retribution.  We find this view expressed in Old Testament law, for example in Genesis 9:6:  “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image.”  You see the point, I’m sure.  A murderer may be executed not despite the fact that man is made in God’s image, but because man is made in God’s image.  The murderer destroyed something of inestimable worth.

However, punishment should be proportional not to the degree of worth of the injured persons, which is beyond counting, but according to the degree of harm which was done to them, or done to the common good.