The Original Visitor:  Hello.  I’m back.

Budziszewski:  Good morning.  Haven’t heard from you since blog post number one.  I thought you’d lost interest.

I never left.  I’ve just been lurking.  Reading your posts in the shadows.

Be my guest.

Besides, it isn’t as though I’m your only visitor.

And you know this?

I know many things.  I even know that visits to your website spiked on December 9th.

How do you come by this knowledge?

I’ve hacked your website statistics.

Can all of my figments of imagination hack my data?

Probably not.  I’m talented.

What brings you out of the shadows now?

I’ve been trying to figure you out.

What’s to figure out?  My blogs are pretty straightforward.

Well, for a guy who calls himself a philosopher, you tell an awful lot of stories.  I thought you’d spend more time proving theorems or something.  Do you mind answering a few questions?

Ask away.

For starters, why do you call yourself a natural law thinker in the first place?

Didn’t I make that clear in our previous conversation?

Sort of.  But the things you say don’t sound much like what other natural law thinkers say.

Natural law thinkers like who?

Like the ones my teachers made me read in college.  Thomas Hobbes.  John Locke.  Weren’t those the big guns?  The state of nature and the social contract and all that jazz.

I see the problem.  You’re right.  I’m closer to Locke than to Hobbes, but what I call natural law doesn’t have much in common with what either one of them meant by the term.

Why not?

Because I hew to the classical natural law tradition.  Those fellows were revisionists.

Tell me the difference.

The revisionists pulled the classical tradition to pieces and threw most of its intellectual equipment out the window.  Those implausible ideas that you mentioned -- the thoroughly unnatural “state of nature” and the thoroughly unhistorical “social contract”?  They were the things they used to plug the holes.

What did they throw out?

Some metaphysics, like the concept of real essences.  Some philosophy of mind, like the distinction betweenconscientia and synderesis.  Lots of things, actually.

You’re losing me.  Didn't you see that blogger who said your blog would "make your head hurt"?

Yes, but I thought he was complimenting me.

Give it a rest.  Can’t you just talk common sense?

The terms I used are for talking about common sense more precisely.

Forget the toolbox.  Use street language.  Talk with me like a guy at the bus stop.

Okay, let’s try this.  Four deep considerations run through all of classical natural law theory.  We can call them the four moral witnesses.  I mentioned them the first time we talked.

Except then you called them roadsigns.

Right.

Go on.  What are these four witnesses?

The first one is deep conscience, which provides the starting points of all moral reasoning -- principles which don’t have to be proven, but which we used to prove everything else.  For example, I don’t need a proof to know that equals should be treated equally; the principle is evident in itself.

Maybe conscience is just a way of thinking we can’t escape.  Maybe if we’d evolved differently, we’d have a different conscience.

You’re asking whether the contents of conscience are arbitrary.  Whether they could have been radically different.

Right.

But we don’t experience ourselves as blooming, buzzing, patched-tegether confusions.  We experience ourselves as meaningful wholes.

Even if some of the meanings are elusive at times?

Yes.  It’s because we experience life as meaningful that we’re troubled when meaning eludes us.  We regard the sense of meaninglessness as an aberration.  And that’s the second moral witness:  Recognition of the designedness of things.

Maybe we just evolved a belief in meaning.

I take it that this belief would satisfy a pre-existing need for meaning?

Yes.

And that need evolved too?

Yes.

In that case the need to believe in meaning must have adaptive value.  Tell me what it is.

If you believe your life has a meaning, you’ll try harder to survive.

You’re assuming what you set out to prove.

How?

Belief in meaning would motivate you only if you already had a need for meaning.  Why should we first evolve a need to believe in a meaning which doesn’t exist, then evolve a tendency to believe that it does exist?  You could save a lot of time by not evolving either a need for meaning or a belief in it, and just evolving an urge to survive.

Hmm.  For purposes of argument, I’ll let that stand.

You mean you can’t answer me.

No, I mean I want to get on with it.  Even if we do recognize “the designedness of things,” tell me why you call it a “moral” witness.  What does it have to do with knowing right and wrong?

For one thing, it vindicates the previous moral witness.

Vindicates it in what sense?

If everything in us is meaningful, then conscience is meaningful too.  It’s not an illusion; it really does witness to morality.  It is an inward testimony to God’s law.

Stop.

What’s the matter?

How did God get into this?

I thought you said you’d been reading this blog all along.

I have.

But we’ve been over this.  If things are designed, then Someone must have designed them.

I thought the whole point of natural law being “natural” is that it made recourse to God unnecessary.  Don’t atheists have consciences too?

Yes, but they can’t account for them.  If they are consistent, they will insist that human beings are the arbitrary result of a process that did not have us in mind, and that conscience is nothing more than a residue of that process, just as meaningless as the rest of it.  Have you heard of George DeLury?

I’ve never heard of a philosopher by that name.

Not a philosopher.  A wife-killer.  He drugged and suffocated her.  After he was released from prison, he wrote about the pain of his remorse.  But he said that it meant nothing, because it expressed only a primate inhibition against killing our own kind.

Hmm.  So you’re saying that the second moral witness is a moral witness because makes the first moral witness count.

Yes.

And if there really is a Designer, then I suppose you would say that we should be grateful to Him too.  Assuming the principle of gratitude.  But I suppose you’d say that the principle of gratitude is part of what deep conscience testifies to.

Yes.

To be continued.

Last week I told about my conversation with Standish Wanhope (of course that's not his real name), my table mate at the opening dinner of a conference, who had pushed his atheism so aggressively throughout the meal.

At the closing dinner he was strangely different.  Perhaps it was because the conference was finished, and he no longer had to mark his territory.  Perhaps it was because he had already had a few glasses of wine.  Perhaps it was because the geography of the table brought more people into the conversation.  Perhaps it was because at this final dinner I was joined by my wife, who can talk with anyone in the universe, though she prefers not to be quoted in blogs, and I respect her wishes.

At first Standish was engrossed with a different group at the table, but when he overheard someone in our own covey say something about religion, he turned away from them and joined us.  With characteristic directness, he asked us our religious affiliations.  We told him.  He settled himself into the covey and exclaimed “I’m very religious.”

This hardly squared with his protestations of atheism during the opening dinner, and I was more than a little surprised.  His speech changed too, acquiring a mellow and teacherly quality.  He told us that during his boyhood he had belonged to one of the old-line Protestant denominations, of which he had fond memories.  He had fallen away in his teens, he said, because he couldn’t find a reason to believe in God.

The statement seemed strange to me.  “If you need a reason to believe that God is real, then shouldn’t you also need one to believe that He isn’t?  Why is the burden of proof on the theist?”

“I don’t say that I know God doesn’t exist,” he answered.  “I’m not an atheist, I’m an agnostic.”

I responded, “But aren’t you an atheist in practice?  Although you claim not to know whether God exists, you base your life on the assumption that He doesn't."

He accused me of not carefully listening.  “I don’t assume that God exists or that He doesn’t exist.  Between belief in God and disbelief in God, I’m neutral.”

That didn’t seem right.  “I understand that you view yourself as neutral.  I only suggest that you aren’t.  Not really.”

“But I am. For all I know Christianity might be true, and for all I know it might be false.  I have no information either way.”

“The difficulty with that line of reasoning is that it presupposes that Christianity is false,” I replied.

“How can not having any information whether Christianity is true presuppose that it isn’t true?”

“Because Christianity denies that you have no information bearing on the truth of its claims,” I suggested.  St. Paul had argued that the problem isn’t that people are ignorant of God, but that they suppress their knowledge of His reality.  So if Standish believed himself ignorant, he must think that at least this Christian claim is false.

Perhaps I had hit a nerve, or perhaps I was merely too persistent, for he promptly diverted the entire line of inquiry.  “My lady friend and I have very deep conversations about political and religious subjects.  It’s so important to be able to share your deepest concerns with someone.”

I’m sorry if the words seem made up; I’m quoting him as closely as I can.  At any rate, the diversion succeeded, and conversation in our conversational clump meandered for a time.  When at some point it meandered back to the question of what is true, again he diverted the stream.

“I have a deep, rich secular humanism.”  His voice deepened, as though he were an actor on a stage.  “I’m oh, so wonderfully satisfied with it.”

And then there was the point in the conversation when he asked, “What do you think of the new religious music?  To me it’s just watered-down Simon and Garfunkel.  Give me the fine old traditional hymns any day.”

I had to smile.  You couldn’t not like Standish.  At least you couldn’t not like this Standish.  How the two of him fit together wasn’t clear, because this one contradicted everything the one at the opening dinner had insisted upon.  He was like Penelope, unraveling at night what she had woven during the day.

“Where do you hear the new music?”

“Why, in churches.”

“So you visit churches sometimes.”

“Yes. But isn’t the new music awful?”

“I confess I’d find a steady diet of it difficult. What music do you prefer?”

“You know — the great old songs like ‘Rise Up, Ye Men of God.’”

“Yes, that one sticks to your ribs.  What do you like about it?”

“It stirs you up.  Makes you want to stand and be counted.”

“But for a cause in which you don’t believe.”

“I told you that I was religious.”

“I have a colleague like you.  He’s an atheist, but calls himself an ‘aesthetic Episcopalian.’  He believes in the ritual, but not in the religion.”

“You aren’t understanding me,” he said.  “Let me tell you something you would never guess.  My elderly aunt is a person of deep faith.  What a great lady.  I still visit her sometimes.  It’s a moving experience.  When I’m with her and she speaks about the Lord, I say ‘I believe.’”

“But you don’t believe.”

“When I’m with her, I do.”

“Then why not when you’re not with her?”

“Because I have no rational basis for belief.  It’s feelings.  Feelings aren’t knowledge.”

“Like your feelings about the grand old Christian hymns.”

“Yes. I miss them terribly.”  He told us he’d been thinking about joining a church choir.  Or perhaps that he had already joined it; memory fades.  I think he said he did sing with them sometimes.

“You would join a church choir without joining the Church?”

“Yes.  Just to be able to sing them again.”

Just to be able to sing them.  Just to be able to sing them as though they were true.

That was pretty much where the evening ended, but of course one can’t stop wondering.

I wondered why Standish had really walked away as a teenager; whether at some level, he knew that everything he had walked away from was really true; whether the religious feelings which disturbed the complacency of his would-be-atheism were the natural accompaniment to that knowledge.

Believers are said to have crises of faith.  I think Standish, God bless him, was having a crisis of faithlessness.

Merry Christmas.

People speak so much more preposterously in real life than in fiction.  I used to write fictional dialogues for college students.  Though I presented the dialogues as fictional, most were at least influenced by actual conversations, and a few of them were very nearly transcripts. Here is what I discovered.  Whenever I made up a conversation from nothing but air and imagination, readers tended to assume that it had really taken place.  Often they resisted when I explained that it hadn’t.  (I’m told soap opera actors have this problem.)  But whenever I set down a near-transcript, a dialogue based with almost literal accuracy on a conversation which had actually transpired, readers emailed to complain.  Certain kinds of readers were more vociferous than others:  “Atheists don’t talk like that.”  I had to add fantastic touches to the most transcript-like dialogues even to get people to accept them as good fiction.

So I don’t expect to be believed, but let me tell you about Standish Wanhope.  That’s not his name, but this is what he really said.

We had two conversations.  Both of them took place at a roundtable conference for scholars.  The conference theme was something and liberty.  All of the organization’s conference themes are something and liberty, but each time the something is different.  I believe this time the something was John Locke and Pierre Bayle, but perhaps that was a different conference.

They are very good conferences, if you like very intense moderated discussion among several dozen people for hours on end, based on a common set of readings arranged in advance.  Participants also share meals.  My first conversation with Standish took place at the opening dinner.  Since we were seated alongside each other, it was natural that we chat.  His opening was unconventionally direct, and a little surreal.  “Hello.  I’m Standish Wanhope.  I’m an atheist.”

Atheists don’t talk like that.  Yes, so they tell me.  This one did.  Only one other person has ever introduced himself to me that way:   “I’m Lawrence, and I’m gay.”  Gay people don’t talk like that either.  So I’ve heard.  Never mind.  Standish was straight, but he wanted me to know right up front that he was an atheist.

Why?  I think he just wanted me to know.  And he wanted to argue about it.  He was like a friendly but aggressive and highly territorial dog, lifting his leg every few seconds to mark the boundaries of his conversational territory.   The whole conversation was scented with this maneuver.  I found in short order that his ethical philosophy was based on Darwin, that he had taught at a Catholic college, and that he “had fun ruining all the Catholic kids” -- his very words.  I felt as though he were boasting of deflowering them.

Our conversation wasn’t promising. Picking up on his comment about Darwinism, I asked Standish what he thought of the arguments for intelligent design.  He admitted that he hadn’t read them, but proceeded to lecture me about why they were wrong.  To top off the lecture, he recommended what he said was a good critique.

I found him patronizing, he found me dull.  It was a relief when the conference organizers stood up and went into their spiel.

We didn’t speak personally again until the closing dinner of the conference at a restaurant near the hotel.  This time the content and style of his conversation were strangely different.  He seemed another person.

Next week, how this was so.

I was talking last week about the young man whom the experience of reading Aristotle’s Ethics had “scared.”  In talking with him, I dropped the ball, and I promised to tell how.

Some people may think this has nothing to do with natural law.  I think it has a great deal to do with it.  It seems to me that the theory of natural law ought to be able to address itself to the reasons why the theory alone is insufficient.  Our problem is not just in the intellect.

As I explained in the previous post, the mere discussion of virtue had troubled my guest’s conscience.  He told me that it had made him realize that he hadn’t led a virtuous life.  Aristotle hadn’t mentioned the moral law, but conscience informed my guest that the virtues are commanded by that law.  He was telling me that he was frightened by that accuser.  He wanted to know what he could do about it.  He already knew how Aristotle would advise him to live.  But he hadn’t lived that way.

I told him I didn’t think Aristotle had the answer to his question, but I did think there was an answer.  He asked me to tell him what it was.

This request put me in a difficulty.  "I could speak about that,” I told him, “but not as a representative of the State of Texas, which employs me as a teacher.  I could only do it from the perspective of my faith."

"Would you do that?"

"Are you giving me permission to speak with you not professor to student, but man to man?"

"Yes. That's what I want you to do."

I made a silly gesture of taking off my professor hat.  I explained that he was free to say anything he wished without fear that it could affect his standing in the course.  That didn’t concern him.  He wanted to get on with it.

So I told him I thought he was experiencing what the New Testament calls the conviction of sin.  He said that made sense to him.

I then said the question was about how to be forgiven of sin and healed of what was broken.  He said that was what he wanted.

So in inward fear and trembling, I explained the Gospel of Christ to him.  He had been “scared”; now, I confess, I was.  But he accepted the truth of it all without hesitation.

And he told me it sounded wonderful.

Then would he be interested in entering into that world of forgiveness?  No.  And this was the reason that he gave:  He wasn’t good enough to be forgiven.

Disturbed by compassion, thinking he had misunderstood, I said that if we were good enough, we wouldn’t need forgiveness in the first place.  Not being good enough is the point.  That’s why divine mercy is called grace; it is an undeserved gift.  First God forgives us; then He makes us good.  There would be no need to make us good if we were good already.  Neither would there be a need for forgiveness.

But like a mantra, he kept saying “God couldn’t forgive me.”  Dropping his voice, he said I didn’t know all the things he had done.  “I’m not a good man like you, professor.”  I said the comparison was inappropriate because he didn’t know all the things I had done either.  Christ suffered for us not because we didn’t need it, but because we did.

It was as though he didn’t hear me.  The problem was not just that he was in despair.  It was that he clung to his despair, much as the saints cling to hope.  And so the conversation went.

According to St. Thomas Aquinas, the sin of Satan was that he wanted something of his own power, something he had not received from God.  So I asked my guest whether his conviction that he was too sinful to be forgiven might be rooted in a kind of pride.  Was he suggesting that his sin was so great, so unique, that it towered even over God’s mercy?  For nothing can overcome God’s mercy.

My last shot was to ask whether he claiming that his moral standards were higher than God’s -- that in this sense he was more righteous than God – that he wouldn’t allow God to sink so low as to forgive him?  For it isn’t because of low standards that God forgives us.

The questions simply didn’t register with him.  He iterated and reiterated his formula that he was not good enough to be forgiven.  He repelled reasons like oilcloth repels water.  He longed for forgiveness, but he was resolute not to be forgiven.

We talked.  We parted.  For several years I saw him on campus from time to time.  He always greeted me and chatted for a few minutes.  But the conversation that day had completely failed.

Why had it?  Only God knows, but after years of thinking about it, I do suspect part of the reason.  Taking my guest’s statements at face value, I think I had utterly misread both his motive and the state of his understanding.  I thought then that he was missing the point about forgiveness, but in fact he did get the point.  I thought then that he didn’t understand that he could be forgiven and healed, but in fact he did know he could be.

The problem, I now suspect, was that he wanted to be forgiven, but not healed.  The fatal flaw in his motive was unwillingness to change and be changed.  We cannot cooperate with the grace of forgiveness unless we also cooperate with the grace of healing, but he wanted only the first half of the deal.

I should have challenged him.  I didn’t.

No one can refuse good except for the sake of some other apparent good – St. Thomas again.  I didn’t see that some good must have seemed even better to him than beatitude.  I didn’t recognize that even in the teeth of unhappiness, the pursuit of some cherished desire seemed better to him than the Supreme Happiness which leaves nothing further to be desired.  So, though he could barely live with himself, still he clung to himself.  Desiring to preserve his life, he was losing it.

I haven’t seen him in years, but I still pray for him.  I pray for his redemption.  I pray that he might have talked with others, who didn’t drop the ball as badly as I did.  I also pray that I will do better, the next time someone turns up at my door to show me his trembling hands.

My post this week is a short one.  I’ve been writing about the ways of bringing suppressed moral knowledge back to the surface.  Last time I emphasized that these ways are merely illustrations, not magic tricks to be played on every audience, not use-on-all-occasions conversational stratagems.  Sometimes, I said, the only thing to do is nothing – or what looks, from the outside, like doing nothing.  One must wait alertly for an opportunity from God.  And one had better be praying at all times, because one may have to wait a long while, and the opportunity may come and go by in a flash.

Case in point:  An older, returning student visited my office hours one day to tell me that I was “scaring him.”  The class had been studying Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.  Conversation went something like this.

“I’m scaring you?”

“Yeah.  [He holds out his hand.]  I’m shaking.  See?”

He really was.

“How am I scaring you?”

“Well, it isn’t really you.  It’s Aristotle.”

“How is Aristotle scaring you?”

“It’s this book of his you’re making us read.”

“How is Aristotle’s book scaring you?”

“Well, he keeps talking about the virtues.  And it’s making me realize that I haven’t led a virtuous life.”

In the assigned reading, Aristotle had merely explained that the virtues are necessary for a flourishing life.  He hadn’t mentioned God.  He hadn’t mentioned law.  He hadn’t said a thing about guilt or transgression.  And I hadn’t said anything about them either.

Until this moment I hadn’t known that God could use an old pagan who said nothing about these things to bring about the conviction of sin.

And here the young man sat, his hands still quivering, waiting for me to tell him what to do about it.

The ball had been placed in my own hands.  And I dropped it.  Next week, why, and how not to.