“The chief way in which liberalism undermines religion, then, is that both religious and antireligious citizens internalize the nonjudgementalist attitude. For antireligious citizens, the psychological cost of doing so is low, because they do not recognize their own judgements as judgments. They blithely criticise the faithful for consciously doing what they themselves do constantly, necessarily, and unawares. Unfortunately, for religious citizens, who do recognize their judgments as judgments, the psychological cost of nonjudgmentalism is much higher. Their sentiments may line up with proper toleration; if they have an intellectual grasp of the matter, their minds may line up with it too. In this case religion may remain strong. Unfortunately, if they do not have an intellectual grasp of the matter, then living as they do in a liberal culture, they will probably confuse toleration with mere neutrality–they may mix up judging well with suspending judgment. In this case, of course they go on judging, but they feel guilty about doing so. Their judgments about non-judgmentalism condem their judgments about everything else. Liberals call them fanatics; they worry that maybe they are.” See Budziszewski in The Line Through the Heart, page 182.
A Case for Capital Punishment
J. Budziszewski offers some helpful thoughts supporting capital punishment from a Christian perspective. “First, in considering whether to grant clemency, the proper question is not whether juries ever err, but whether we have reasonable ground to think that this particular jury has erred in fact. Second, any deserved punishment, indeed any element of justice, might whet the impulse for revenge–but when a good impulse is perverted, we shoul fight not the impulse but its perversion, and so with the impulse for justice. Third, Scripture and Christian tradition uphold capital punishment not in contempt for life, but in reverence for it; it is because man is made in God’s image that Torah decrees that whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed. Fourth, although Christ taught personal forgiveness, He never challenged the need for public justice. Official pardon rightly has conditions that personal forgiveness does not. Finally, not only is punishment compatible with love, it is sometimes demanded by it as the only medicine strong enough to do the offender good.” (See The Line Through the Heart by J. Budziszewski, pg. 125)
Finnis on the Link between the Decalogue and Human Fulfillment
“In the synoptics and Paul; in Irenaeus, Augustine, Aquinas and Vatican II, and in common Christian faith, teaching, and belief, right action is not blind submission to unintelligible will. Rather, right action is the wisdom of action which expresses a heart really in line with, toward, the ultimate human end and good, the integral human fulfillment which cannot be found outside that Kingdom whose material is being formed here on earth but whose completion lies beyond history. The rightness of action is always intelligibly related to human good, indeed to the good of particular individuals or groups of individual persons. The upright heart, the will, the choice, is always a choice, will, heart which does and pursues that good and avoids what harms that good.” See Finnis in Moral Absolutes, section 1.3, pg. 11.
Budziszewski on Natural Law and Special Revelation
“Denial of the imago Dei is something new and much more dangerous than a simple return to paganism. As Francis Schaeffer once remarked, the worst that could be said of the pagans was that they had not yet heart that man is made in the image of God. Although they naturally recognized the dignity of man and the justice that is due to him, their understanding of this intuition was deficient. By contrast, our thinkers have heard that man is made in the image of God, but deny it. This puts such a strain on the inbuilt structures of moral knowledge that justice flips upside down. Refusing to learn, they finally distort even what they already know.” See Budziszewski in The Line Through The Heart, pg. 39.
The Problem of Human Cloning and other Extreme Scientific Human Experiments
“Genesis, I think, is the crux of it: Not the text of Genesis, but its idea of creation. To abolish and remake human nature is to play God. The chief objection to playing God is that someone else is God already. If He created human nature, if He intended it, if it is not the result of a blind fortuity that did not have us in mind–then we have no business exchanging it for another. It would be goood to remember that Gensis contains not only the story of creation but the story of Babel, of the presumption of men who thought they could build a tower “to heaven.” Here then is the first difference that the knowledge of God makes to the natural law. A godless natural law would revere the laws of human nature only insofar as we continued to be human. Denying that our humanity is a creation, it would have no reason to preserve this humanity, and no objection to its abolition.” See Budziszewski in The Line Through the Heart, pg. 27-28.
Budziszewski on Natural Law and the Effects of Corruption on Man’s knowledge of Natural Law
“For natural law theory, the consequence of the Fall is that we don’t want to hear of natural law. We cannot fully ignore it, because its first letters are written on our hearts. But we resist the inscription, and the letters burn. Here begins the terrible game that I mentioned earlier. The crisis of natural law in our time owes partly to the deepening intensity of the gam, but partly to the fact that we ignore it. We persist in taking pretended moral ignorance at face value, in philosophizing as though the problem of moral failure were merely cognitive. We suppose that when the opinionators of our time repudiate God, celebrate the destruction of life, and rejoice in sexual debasement, they simply do not know any better. We imagine that if only we present them with airtight arguments, they will change their minds. That is not how it will happen, for there is such a thing as motivated error. Indeed the problem is graver still. Our opinionators have not destroyed deep conscience, but suppressed it. That may sound better, and in a way it is, but in another way it is worse. Like a man who is buried alive, conscience kicks against the walls of its tomb. The defiant intellect–which is that tomb–therefore fortifies the walls.” Budziszewski in The Line Through the Heart, pg. 18.
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
“The Christian faith holds that the creation has been damaged. Human existence is no longer what was produced at the hands of the Creator. It is burdened with another element that produces, besides the innate tendency toward God, the oppposite tendency away from God…. This paradox points to a certain inner disturbance in man, so that he can no longer simply be the person he wants to be….There is a collective conciousness that sharpens the contradiction….The stronger the demand made by the law, the sronger becomes the inclination to fight it.” by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in God and the Worlld: A Conversation with Peter Seewald. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002), 51-52, 161.
But That’s Not in the Constitution…
In a previous post I argued that the Declaration of Independence is our country’s charter and is a higher law than the Constitution itself. The Declaration provided the justification for our country’s separation from England and lays out the grounds on which our country may once again be dissolved. If the Constitution ever becomes destructive of its role of securing those unalienable rights endowed to us by God, then we have the right to abolish the Constitution and create a new framework for government. The Constitution then becomes undeclarational.
The necessary key to understanding the Constitution is to read it in light of the Declaration. After all, the Constitution was written only about eleven years after the Declaration and by many of the same people. The Constitution should be expected to be in philosophical agreement with the Declaration. The Declaration states that all people are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” and that the role of government is to secure these rights. The Declaration does not attempt to define these unalienable rights, nor does the Constitution.
The Constitution does not concern itself with rights, but with the process of government.
This statement bears some emphasis. We are accustomed to think that the Constitution protects certain rights because those rights are “in” the Constitution, either explicitly or by reference to other rights. I blame this thinking on the Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, the granddaddy of Roe v. Wade. In Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court found the existence of a right to privacy by reference to other rights discussed in the Constitution:
The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. See Poe v. Ullman, 367 U.S. 497, 516-522 (dissenting opinion). Various guarantees create zones of privacy. The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen. The Third Amendment, in its prohibition against the quartering of soldiers “in any house” in time of peace without the consent of the owner, is another facet of that privacy. The Fourth Amendment explicitly affirms the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The Fifth Amendment, in its Self-Incrimination Clause, enables the citizen to create a zone of privacy which government may not force him to surrender to his detriment. The Ninth Amendment provides: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
The Constitution is not concerned with protecting specific rights as it is in protecting rights in general. To put it another way, the Constitution is not concerned with identifying and protecting specific rights. Rather, the Constitution protects the sum total of those unenumerated rights endowed to us by God by setting up a system and a process in which the sum total of those rights would be protected.
But what about the Bill of Rights? Aren’t those specifically listed rights? While the Bill of Rights do specifically list and protect certain rights, there is a theme concerning the rights protected. The main purpose of the Bill of Rights is not to specifically protect the listed rights, but rather, through the rights specifically protected, to curb potential government abuses. The First Amendment right to free speech was not included in the Bill of Rights because speech in and of itself is so wonderful, but to prevent the government from enacting laws quashing speech critical of the government. The Founders in drafting the First Amendment were not so concerned about ensuring the integrity of the arts and literature as they were in preserving an atmosphere wherein seditious speech would be protected. Likewise, the Second Amendment is not so concerned with protecting a person’s right to hunt and engage in the shooting sports so much as it is in ensuring an armed citizenry as a final check on governmental abuse. Each of the specific rights included in the Bill of Rights was not included for the sake of the individual right in and of itself, but rather as a check against potential governmental abuses.
The Constitution does not define, nor does it make any attempts to define, our rights. Rather, the Constitution protects all unenumerated rights by guarding against government overreach or abuse. The rights protected by the Constitution are all those rights endowed to us by our Creator, regardless of whether those rights are “in” the Constitution or not.
NATURAL LAW AND TESTIMONIAL KNOWLEDGE:
The Faculty Model and the Extension of Moral Knowledge
By Joshua Farris
The Faculty Model: “the hypothesis of the existence within the human mind of a language faculty. According to this hypothesis, the language faculty is the source of a certain characteristic conscious experience one has when one sees or hears a sentence s in a language one understands.”
Testimony: ‘S by doing x testifies to H that k’=df S does x intending to show H a sign that will cause H to know that k, by causing H to read that K. (See Hossack in The Metaphysics of Knowledge)
There are minimally two different views on the epistemic and ontological nature of testimony. One is a faculty that says that there is some faculty in human persons that disposes oneself to language acquisition and is directly tied to propositional content, that is supported by the relation meaning. There is also the ‘inferential’ view of language and testimony that says that by way of symbols and by way of speech-acts performed the receiver/hearer/reader infers to the truth of the matter given the conditions. It seems that inference is a basic logical tool that we derive from basic logical truths that we know to be true that we then use in induction (probability reasoning), deduction (reasoning from the general known truth to specific truth claims) or abduction (reasoning to the best explanation. The inference serves as an epistemic relation that we use to come to know more truth, but testimony does not seem to work like that. Arguably, it seems that testimony many times serves as a foundation to our inferential knowledge. Inferential knowledge many times already presupposes testimonial knowledge that we as humans trust. It seems that testimony is more direct than is inference. It is like perception in that it is direct and requires some true knowledge.
Scenerio 1: The child and moral knowledge of right and wrong may begin with moral foundations, but many times children are not able to deduce or induce with any certainty to the knowledge of God for a moral framework or to more specific and complicated aspects of morality. Children may not know first of all that God is or who God is by nature, at least not immediate awareness. Much of what children come to know about God is not drawn from nature, their own human design or conscience. Much of a child’s knowledge of God comes through testimony from their parents. Parents serve the function of being an immediate source of knowledge to their children when it comes to moral knowledge and knowledge of God. This is not to say that knowledge of God does not correspond to the linguistic and moral structures already present in children it does that and more. The knowledge that children have closely ties with knowledge of God that they come to know through parents and others in their familial society. The knowledge that they do not inductively arrive at for themselves becomes a framework of knowledge for thinking about other moral matters. Such as the notion that people have value that is derived from God. Mercy and grace are greater than retribution. Kindness and love become aspects of the child’s knowledge framework that is then made sense of in terms of the underlying theistic structure whereby children come to know a God is personal and who desires relationship. This, then is fostered in the context of the familial society which is then fostered further in the broader community.
Scenerio 2: The extension of moral knowledge is not only through utilizing the rational tools of deduction and induction but also more directly with testimony within a community. As human persons we come to know many truths not through mathematical deduction or some other rational tool, but through and in the context of relationships as when we were children. We come to know through knowledge by acquantance or practical knowledge in the context of community, but also in the context of testimony. In virtue of a communal framework that all persons necessarily find themselves in there is a direct relationship between knowledge and what others tell us. I come to know more about the subtle aspects of God’s mercy through others telling me from Scripture and showing me from Scripture how to be merciful. Thus testimony is a source of moral knowledge it is not a tool derived from basic truths of logic that we then use to deduce further truth. Instead it is a basic source of knowledge that we come into the world instinctively relying upon and implicitly accepting even if we are not aware of its reality. As a result testimony serves to extend what knowledge we already have and may even add to it.
Scenerio 3: Evidential justification that extends, furnishes, deepens and coincides with natural knowledge of morals derived from natural law. One example of testimony serving as evidential justification or a source of knowledge that extends our knowledge is the example given from the trinity. In Christian theism, traditionally, we believe in the God who is three persons or the God who is composed of three persons. This is one example of knowledge that comes through testimony—i.e. Scripture. This is not a propositional truth claim that we know intuitively, immediately or as a deduction from nature, but it does support, correspond to and extend our understanding of the essential nature of God from physical nature. The reality that God is perfect in goodness makes much more plausible sense given his Trinitarian nature. Thus, as children come to know directly from testimony so do we as adults come to know directly truths that are hidden in physical nature or general revelation, but revealed in Holy Writ.
This does not mean that we cannot test the truth claims from testimony in other ways. The doctrine of the resurrection is a propositional truth that is revealed in Scripture in the form of testimony that we may come to know directly through Scripture, but it can also be tested by other means. Other means might include historical evidences buffering the support of the New Testament claims, evidence of eye-witness claims, considering the various theories for the supposed missing body of Jesus and other foundational truths found in Christian theism supporting the doctrine of the resurrection. Furthermore testimonial knowledge that we gain either from a community of believers or directly from Scripture itself is something that we don’t simply stop at, but we go on to test in other ways. We take that knowledge and put it to the test of practically living out what we know to be true through experimentation in everyday life.
My point here is testimony is a basic source of knowledge. With respect to natural knowledge of morality testimony extends our knowledge of moral truth from what we know directly concerning moral basics through something like the faculty model and less like the inferential model.
