According to the mainstream of the natural law tradition, the reality of God
and of our duty to Him are among the things everyone really knows. They are
part of “general” revelation; we have natural knowledge not only of the Second
Tablet of the Decalogue, but of the First. Needless to say, some people find
this claim scandalous. They deny the natural knowledge of God, deny the natural
knowledge of the First Tablet of the Decalogue, and deny the natural knowledge
of the first precept of the Summary of the Law. Apart from direct or “special”
revelation, they think ethics should acknowledge neighbor only. Passions run
high among such thinkers. A book reviewer angrily declares that “God does not
belong” in discussions of how to live. A scholar of my acquaintance devotes
the last phase of his intellectual career to what he calls “pushing God out
of the natural law”—or at least, he says, “into the wings.” This goal is widely
shared. Insofar as it wishes to get by on the Second Tablet without the First,
we might call it the Second Tablet Project.

The Second Tablet Project is probably more popular among lukewarm religious
believers who wish to make the moral law palatable to nonbelievers than it is
among nonbelievers themselves. Nonbelievers who want to get rid of the First
Tablet usually have doubts about the Second too—and for the same reasons. God,
they think, is a dubious proposition, but why should morality be less dubious
than He? Aren’t both matters equally dim? As to the notion of “things we can’t
not know,” they do not believe that there are any—we have only a grab bag of
incompatible opinions about God and how to live, all of them equally controversial
because none of them can be known to be true. Under the circumstances, they
think, the only sensible thing to do is to eject the whole lot of these opinions
from the public square. This is the mentality that finds it scandalous to post
the Ten Commandments on a courtroom wall. The argument seems to be, “Because
we don’t agree with each other, you must do as I say”—for if anyone should protest,
“But your opinion that these norms are not common knowledge is far more
controversial than the norms themselves,” they respond, “See what I mean?” Or
perhaps, like John Rawls, they respond that their opinion should have
special privileges because it is “political, not metaphysical.” Here the argument
seems to be, “The ultimate truth of things is unknowable, and that’s
why you must do as I say.” Of course, any view of what is knowable or un­ knowable
presupposes something about what is, so that is another sleight of hand.

For those who do believe in natural law or general revelation, the fact that
the Second Tablet Project so often turns into a No Tablet project raises an
important question. What difference does it make to the knowledge of the moral
law that we do have some knowledge about God? If we didn’t have that knowledge,
then could we retain knowledge of morality? And if we could retain it, would
it be different?

The inquiry requires two parts, because there are two ways to know about God:
the vague, partial, natural knowledge of God that is available to every human
being, and the additional knowledge of God that is offered (for those who accept
it) in the biblical tradition of direct revelation. Though my emphasis is on
the first way, I will comment on the second as well. To be sure, the Bible is
not included in the things one can’t not know. But every perspective for discussing
what we can’t not know is some perspective for discussing what we can’t
not know, and my perspective is biblical.

By the first way to know about God I mean the sensus divinitatis, the
spontaneous awareness of the reality of the Creator. I do not exclude the clarity
that philosophy can add to this awareness; I only wish to point out that the
philosophical arguments for the existence of God do not start from nowhere.
However complex they may be, they merely elaborate pre–philosophical intuitions,
such as the everyday idea that anything which does not have to be requires
a cause. “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is a question that anyone
can ask.

As to the second way of knowing about God—the biblical tradition of direct
revelation—I use the qualifier “biblical” advisedly. Other religions have traditions
too, but traditions of direct revelation are quite rare. Every major religion
that claims to record God’s direct revelations to human beings in actual historical
time accepts at least part of the Bible; this includes Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam. No major religion outside of the biblical orbit claims to record
God’s direct revelations to human beings in actual historical time.

Part one of the inquiry, then, is this: Apart from any consideration of an
alleged direct revelation, what difference does it make to the natural law that
we naturally have knowledge of God? It seems to make not one difference,
but at least four.

The first difference has to do with what C. S. Lewis called the “abolition
of man.” If God has designed and endowed us with our nature—this is not a question
of how He did it or how long it took, only of who is responsible—then we can
be confident that we have the nature that we ought to have in accord with His
good purposes. This premise in no way slights the Fall; even a crushed foot
remains a foot. The proposition that we are in conflict with our nature has
nothing to do with the proposition that it is not, in fact, our nature.

Let us imagine someone who denies divine design. He admits that human beings
have a nature, just in the sense that certain ways of living go against the
grain; he only refuses to allow that we were endowed with this nature by God.
Paraphrasing George Gaylord Simpson, we are to regard the direction of the grain
as the result of a meaningless and purposeless process that did not have us
in mind. I think it follows that had the process gone a bit differently—had
our ancestors been carnivores instead of omnivores, had they laid eggs instead
of borne live young, or had they never left the oceans for the land—then we
would have had a different nature. Given the nature that we do have, certain
things go against the grain, hence a certain natural law. Honor your father
and mother. Do not kill. Do not covet. Given some other nature, different things
would have gone against the grain—hence a different natural law. It might have
been anything. Supplant your father. Chase away your mother. Eat your neighbor
and covet his mate. What strikes our nature as distressing would for that nature
be the norm.

The entire basis of morality, on this account, is the particular nature that
we have at the moment. There would be nothing wrong with having a different
nature and thus a different natural law. We just don’t.

But what if we could? What if we could change our nature? According to those
who hold this view, we already have. Our ancestors were as different from us,
they say, as a prosimian is different from a man. Generation by generation,
the ur–men of the long–gone past adapted to a changing environment. Our great–grand–primates
were the products of adaptation to a life in the branches of trees. Our grand–primates
were the products of adaptation to a life on the savanna. Our parents were the
products of adaptation to the practice of agriculture. And our descendants will
be the products of adaptation to the most enduring features of our own environment,
whatever those turn out to be. Perhaps television.

Notice that on this theory, some of the circumstances to which our ancestors
adapted were the results of their own prior actions. It was they who came down
from the trees, and had therefore to adapt to the savanna. It was they who invented
agriculture, and had therefore to adapt to a different diet. In a sense, then,
we have been influencing our own evolution all along. We have already changed
our nature. We just didn’t know that we were doing it.

If there is nothing wrong with having a different nature—and if we have already
changed our nature without knowing—then why shouldn’t we take the process in
hand? Why shouldn’t we deliberately change ourselves as we wish to be changed?
Why shouldn’t we determine the nature of our descendants?

Such proposals are no longer idle talk. In October 2000, news leaked that an
American company named Biotransplant and an Australian company named Stem Cell
Sciences had successfully crossed a human being with a pig by inserting the
nuclei of cells from a human fetus into the pigs’ eggs. Although the embryos
were destroyed when they reached the thirty–two–cell point, they would have
continued to grow had they been implanted in the womb of a woman—or a sow.

According to J. Bottum in the Weekly Standard, “There has been some
suggestion from the creators that their purpose in designing this human pig
is to build a new race of subhuman creatures for scientific and medical use.
. . . Then, too, there has been some suggestion that the creators’ purpose is
not so much to corrupt humanity as to elevate it.” His comments are worth quoting
at some length:

It used to be that even the imagination of
this sort of thing existed only to underscore a moral in a story. . . . But
we live at a moment in which British newspapers can report on nineteen families
who have created test–tube babies solely for the purpose of serving as tissue
donors for their relatives—some brought to birth, some merely harvested as embryos
and fetuses. A moment in which Harper’s Bazaar can advise women to keep
their faces unwrinkled by having themselves injected with fat culled from human
cadavers. . . . In the midst of all this, the creation of a human–pig arrives
like a thing expected. We have reached the logical end, at last. We have become
the people that, once upon a time, our ancestors used fairy tales to warn their
children against—and we will reap exactly the consequences those tales foretold.
Like the coming true of an old story—the discovery of the philosopher’s stone,
the rubbing of a magic lantern—biotechnology is delivering the most astonishing
medical advances anyone has ever imagined. But our sons and daughters will mate
with the pig–men, if the pig–men will have them. And our swine–snouted grandchildren—the
fruit not of our loins, but of our arrogance and our bright test tubes—will
use the story of our generation to teach a moral to their frightened litters.

Plainly, Bottum is not pleased with what the researchers have done. As he writes,
it makes no difference whether they plan to create subhumans or superhumans,
for “either they want to make a race of slaves, or they want to make a race
of masters. And either way, it means the end of our humanity.” The evil is not
that the experiment might turn out badly. It is that our nature would be abolished.

But our atheist will ask: What exactly is the objection to abolishing our nature?
Why not abolish it? We won’t be around to mind. Our descendants won’t
mind either, because we can build into their natures that they are satisfied
with the natures they get. If we like, we can make an entire graded set of natures,
along the lines of Huxley’s Brave New World. “I’m glad I’m a Beta,” say
his Betas. So why should we reap the consequences that the tales of old
foretold? Why should the pig–men use the story of our generation to teach a
moral to their frightened litters? Why should these litters be frightened by
what, to them, would be the story of Genesis?

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 good to remember that Genesis 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.

The second difference it makes to have natural knowledge of God concerns what
we might call “oughtness.” A moment ago we spoke of a godless natural law. But
in what sense can a godless mind revere the laws of human nature at all? The
early modern Dutch legal philosopher Hugo Grotius famously remarked that even
if there were no God (as he conceded that it would be impious to believe), the
natural law would still have a kind of force. What seems to impress most people
who read this remark is that Grotius thinks it would have a kind of force.
More interesting is his qualifier: it would have a kind of force. The
suggestion is that it would not have the kind that it would have if God were
real.

Taken with that emphasis, the remark of Grotius might be true. Although a godless
natural law would lose the force of “oughtness,” it would retain the lower force
of prudence. But perhaps it would lose that force too. Let us consider further.

The argument for saying that the natural law would lose the force of oughtness
but retain the force of prudence runs like this. If there is no God, then the
universe is not a creation. One immediate consequence is that I owe nothing
to anyone for the fact that I am in it. If there is a reason to keep the moral
laws, it cannot lie in honoring the one who made us. Another consequence is
that the universe has no meaning beyond itself. The patterns in it just are;
they do not reflect the goodness or the intentions of a Designer.

And this makes a difference. A theist who attributes the order of nature to
God can say things like this: “I see that the sexual powers cause conception,
and that the fact that they do so is part of the explanation of why human nature
has been endowed with such powers in the first place. This tells me that conception
is a purpose of the sexual powers, a part of what they are for.
When I employ them, I ought to respect this fact; I ought not to use them in
ways that are incompatible with their purpose.” Adding inference to inference
in this fashion, he gradually works out a comprehensive account of the right
use of the sexual powers and the respect that is owed to the natural institutions
which direct and contain them, and he can reason similarly about the other natural
powers and institutions.

But an atheist might reply like this: “I use the word purpose too, and
I am even willing to concede that you use it correctly. If one thing causes
another, and that’s part of the explanation of why the first thing occurs, then
the second thing is a purpose of the first;
href="#text1">* even a Darwinist like
me can concede that much. So what? How do you get from ‘One of the purposes
of the sexual powers is procreation’ to ‘I should not use the sexual powers
in ways that are incompatible with procreation’? So far as I can see, the only
thing that follows from the connection between procreation and sex is that when
I do have intercourse, it would be prudent to watch out.” Stretching a point
a bit—taking into account the entire set of things there are to “watch out”
for (not only conception, but jealousy, emotional emptiness, loss of trust,
and so forth)—perhaps a purely prudential justification of marriage and family
and so forth could be developed. Perhaps a purely prudential justification for
each of the other natural laws and institutions could be developed in the same
way. And perhaps that is the sort of thing that Grotius had in mind.

Unfortunately, a truly oughtless prudence would have nothing to say to free
riders. Anyone who thought he saw a way to obtain the benefits of these laws
and institutions without their costs—or who was willing to accept the costs
of transgressing them—would do so. To speak again of marriage, some men prefer
seducing married women. Others say they can do very well without trust. Still
others, that although they fear exposure, they would rather risk it than forgo
their pleasures. Some even enjoy the risk; for them, it isn’t a cost.

To be sure, the oughtless sort of prudence is rather thin. The thicker prudence
of the natural law tradition would point out that free riders sacrifice greater
goods for lesser ones; they ought to desire better for themselves than
they do. But they have no ought—remember? In their sort of prudence,
the good is nothing but the desirable, and the desirable is nothing but what
they actually desire. From their point of view, the good for which they feel
the greatest desire is the greatest good—just because they desire it most.

Some people would say that the thinness of the oughtless sort of prudence is
a problem only for the naive sort of atheist. With a little more sophistication,
the atheist can reply that in the same way things just do have causal
and functional properties, so they just do have moral properties. The
argument saves oughtness by sheer fiat—or so it seems. But does it really save
anything at all? In one way, it makes the atheist’s moral case even weaker,
because it concedes the arbitrariness of the universe in which he thinks he
is living. So we come to the third difference it makes that we have natural
knowledge of God: it determines whether we can expect the universe to make any
sense at all, morally or otherwise.

In the colloquy between theist and atheist presented above, both parties assumed
that the universe is causally and rationally patterned: this causes that, that
explains this, such–and–such is a reasonable explanation of so–and–so. But what
right has the atheist to this assumption? Why should there be any patterns whatsoever?
If the universe just is, then why shouldn’t the things in it just
happen? There is no reason to expect them to yield to reasoning, no explanation
of why they should even have an explanation. Moreover, we are not out of the
woods even if we do find patterns in the universe, for if these patterns too
just are, then there is no warrant for assuming that they are more than
local, accidental, superficial, inconsistent, and ephemeral. The sun may not
rise tomorrow morning. Fire may not burn this afternoon. Two plus two may equal
now four, now six, now one. For me, conception may not be caused by sexual
intercourse (that seems to be how some teenagers think). Even if today I am
myself, next week I may be someone else (that is how postmodernists think).
So why should the natural law have even the force of prudence, much less oughtness?
Why should there even be logic? Why should I “watch out” for anything? How could
I?

But perhaps the only problem with our sophisticated atheist is that he is not
sophisticated enough. If without God he has no right to assume Pattern,
very well: let him be a sort of Platonist, and posit that Pattern itself is
God. Of course Pattern would not be what the theist means by God, but it would
be God in the impersonal sense: the deepest reality, the underlying principle
of everything, that on which all else depends.

But if he is to be a sort of Platonist, then what does he make of Plato’s problem?
There are a great many patterns, not just one. This raises the question of what
organizes them, what binds them all together, in a unity, a Design. We know
of only one thing that is capable of Design, and that is mind—intelligent agency.
It is not enough for the universe to resemble a mind in having design;
let us have no tricks, like calling the patterns “ideas” when we have not earned
the right to do so. Behind the universe there must be a real mind that
is capable of the things that real minds do, like designing. That brings us
back to God—God as the theist means God, God with a mind, God in the personal
sense.

If our atheist accepts this implication, then he is back in the fold; he is
no longer an atheist. But if he denies it—then it will not help him even if
Pattern really is the deepest reality, because in that case “Pattern” is merely
a fancy name for “patterns,” and plurality of patterns without Design is merely
chaos; “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” After all, Plato merely gave
names to the ways things hang together; he never explained why they had to hang
together, where there was any necessity to it. For example he said that all
good things participate in a sort of super–pattern, or transcendental, called
Goodness, and in token of the fact he assumed an underlying unity among the
virtues—courage, wisdom, justice, moderation, and all the rest. But with nothing
to bring these good virtues into unity, there is no reason why they should
be in unity. Perhaps cowardice is the fount of justice, wisdom comes only
to the wanton, and courage makes fools of us all. Perhaps righteousness and
peace have not kissed each other, as the Psalmist claims, but tear each other
daily into pieces. Don’t many people think this way?

Another of Plato’s convictions was that Goodness is but one of the transcendentals.
He supposed there were two more, Truth and Beauty. Even supposing this true,
it doesn’t help matters, it only makes them worse. For why should the three
transcendentals hang together? Why shouldn’t Goodness be ugly, Beauty lie, and
Truth be inimical to the good—not because they have come apart, as they
seem to in this fallen world, but because they must come apart, because
that is how they are?

Natural selection gives no reason; a clash between, say, Truth and Goodness
would not keep an organism from passing on its genes. In fact there is
no reason—unless there is something else at work, Someone else at work,
Whom Plato may have known but did not name. In the end we find that the sophisticated
sort of atheist is no better off than the naive sort. His universe is just as
mad, and perhaps more terrifying still. It may contain just as much oughtness
as he likes: but what ought to be, what charms us, and what is are all
at war, and the house of Ought is divided against itself.

Our question has been what difference it makes to the natural law that we naturally
have knowledge of God. So far I have been treating this question as though it
meant, “What difference would it make to the natural law if we didn’t
have such knowledge?” But there is another way to take it: “What difference
would it make to the natural law if we do have such knowledge but tell
ourselves we don’t?” In other words we may ask about the consequences of lying
to ourselves about Him. One of these consequences might be called moral “metastasis”—as
in the growth of cancers. This is the fourth way it matters to have natural
knowledge of God.

Do we not lie to ourselves about ordinary right and wrong? The desire to know
truth is ardent, but it is not the only desire at work in us. The desire not
to know competes with it desperately, for knowledge is a fearsome thing. So
it is that we often groan about how difficult it is to know what is right even
though we know the right perfectly well. Every honest person can confirm this
from his own experience. Just how much lying goes on was recently confirmed
during the high–level political scandals of the late ’90s, when everyone from
television interviewer Geraldo Rivera to comedian Jerry Seinfeld seemed to agree
that “Everybody lies about sex.” As Seinfeld put it in interview with Michael
Blowen, “Truth and sex don’t go together.” Presumably he had in mind not only
our lying to other people but our lying to ourselves, because one just can’t
do that much lying without rationalizing it to oneself somehow.

But the problem of lying to ourselves goes far beyond sex. Along with the mainstream
of the natural law tradition, I have suggested that one of the things about
reality and goodness that we know perfectly well is the reality and goodness
of God. Biblical tradition agrees: when Psalm 14 remarks, “The fool says in
his heart ‘There is no God,’” it doesn’t call him a fool for thinking it, but
for saying it even though yet deeper in his mind he knows it isn’t true. From
this point of view, the reason it is so difficult to argue with an atheist is
that he is not being honest with himself. He knows that there is a God; he only
tells himself that he doesn’t.

One need not take this from a theist like me. Consider the remarks of the Harvard
population biologist Richard Lewontin—an atheist who thinks matter is all there
is—in the New York Review of Books (January 9, 1997): “Our willingness
to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding
of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side
of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs,
in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of
health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community
for unsubstantiated just–so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment
to materialism.” He continues, “It is not that the methods and institutions
of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal
world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to
material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts
that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter
how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for
we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.”

What Lewontin is admitting here is that he and those who think like him are
only selective skeptics. They are hostile to belief in God because of a prior
commitment to a dogmatism that excludes God—a dogmatism about which they are
not skeptical at all, which they accept not because of the evidence but in spite
of it, and to which they will cling even when it forces them into absurdities.
For another example, consider the remarks of the philosopher Thomas Nagel in
his book The Last Word. The purpose of the book is to defend philosophical
rationalism against subjectivism. At a certain point Nagel acknowledges that
rationalism has theistic implications. For the moment, the important thing is
not whether that is true, but that Nagel thinks that it is. Note well what he
says next. After suggesting that contemporary subjectivism may be due to “fear
of religion,” he writes, “I speak from experience, being strongly subject to
this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that
some of the most intelligent and well–informed people I know are religious believers.
It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right
in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God;
I don’t want the universe to be like that.” Nagel adds, “My guess is that this
cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible
for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. . . . Darwin enabled
modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently
providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features
of the world.” If Nagel is right, then those who say that theism is a crutch
have got it backwards. For our contemporary intellectual culture, it is atheism
that serves as a crutch. It couldn’t have been easy to admit that.

So it seems that these men come close to agreeing with me. To be sure they
don’t agree that God is real. But they agree that there is something not quite
honest in their rejection of Him—something driven either dogmatically, as in
Lewontin’s case, or emotionally, as in Nagel’s—rather than forced upon them
by the evidence. The view that the atheist is not being honest with himself—that
he knows that there is a God, but only tells himself he doesn’t know—is looking
better and better. If this apparently preposterous view is true—as I think it
is—then it changes everything. For then the important question is not, “Is there
a God?”, but “Can I concede one part of my moral knowledge while holding down
another?”, or “Can I admit to myself that I know about, say, the goodness of
love and the evil of murder, while not admitting to myself that I know
about the goodness of God and the evil of refusing Him?”

One certainly can do that—lots of agnostics do—but one can never do it well.
The gambit slips from one’s control because, at bottom, it is a lie, and lies
metastasize; the universe is so tightly constructed that in order to cover up
one lie, we must usually tell another. This applies with just as much force
to the lies we tell ourselves as to the lies we tell other people. One could
imagine a universe so loosely jointed that lies did not require the support
of more lies, but the one we live in is not like that. In this one, deception
begets deception, and self–deception begets more self–deception; the greater
the lie, the greater its metastatic tendency. This tendency is strongest precisely
in the case of the greatest self–deception, pretending not to know that God
is real, because there are so many things one must not think of in order
to not think of the reality of God.

One cannot predict in advance what stories people will tell themselves
to make believe that they do not know the reality of God and their obligation
to Him; every agnostic and atheist devises a different set of plausibility gambits,
a different pattern of omissions, of forgettings, of avertings of gaze. But
it is extraordinarily difficult—I think impossible—for such self–deceptions
not to slop over at some point into what one admits about the moral law. Our
minds won’t go like that.

We have been asking how it matters that we have natural knowledge of God, and
we have found that it makes four differences: as to whether man may be abolished,
whether morality has oughtness or only prudence, whether we have reason to expect
the universe to make any moral sense at all, and whether, having lied to ourselves
about God, we can be honest about the rest of our natural knowledge.

Part two of the inquiry is how Scripture illuminates our understanding—how
it matters that there is a biblical revelation over and above the natural
knowledge of God. This revelation makes at least three differences, and the
first difference has to do with forgiveness.

Clear vision of the moral law is crushing, because the first thing that an
honest man sees with this vision is how far he falls short of it. He cannot
escape the awareness of a debt that exceeds anything he can pay. Apart from
an assurance that the debt can somehow be forgiven, such honesty is too much
for us; it kills. The difficulty is that without a direct revelation from the
Author of the law, it is impossible to know whether the possibility of forgiveness
is real. Therefore we look away; unable to accept the truth about ourselves,
we might keep the law in the corner of our eye, but we cannot gaze upon it steadily.
Apart from an assurance that the debt can be forgiven—an assurance which transcends
what human reason can find out on its own—no human being dares to face the law
straight–on.

Yet we can’t quite wipe the law from our intellects. It is woven into the deep
structure of our minds, as experts on linguistics say the threads of language
are. Unable to make it go away, we use every means we can devise to pretend
that we are really being good. Evasions and rationalizations spread through
our intellects like the mycelium of a fungus in its host. That is why the ancient
world was brutal, as we of all people should understand. Not even the greatest
of the pagans could admit what was wrong with infanticide, although they knew
that the child was of our kind. Neither can we admit what is wrong with abortion
and a host of other evils.

It is hard enough to face the moral law even with the possibility of
forgiveness. It offends our pride to be forgiven, terrifies it to surrender
control. Without this possibility it would be harder still: How could we ever
face how wrong we had been about anything? How could we bear to change our minds?
The history of ethics would be a history of digging in against plain truths.
Consider how many centuries it took natural law thinkers even in the Christian
tradition to work out the implications of the brotherhood of master and slave.
At least they did eventually. Outside of the biblical orbit, no one ever did—not
spontaneously.

It may seem that the possibility of forgiveness matters only on the assumption
that there is, in fact, a God—that without the lawgiver, there would be no law,
and therefore nothing to be forgiven. The actual state of affairs is more dreadful,
for the Furies of conscience do not wait upon our assumptions. One who admits
the Furies but denies the God who appointed them—who supposes that there can
be a law without a lawgiver—must suppose that forgiveness is both necessary
and impossible. That which is not personal cannot forgive; morality “by itself”
has a heart of rock. And so although grace would be unthinkable, the ache for
it would keen on, like a cry in a deserted street.

The second difference it makes to acknowledge biblical revelation has to do
with providence. Self–interest is not the only thing that tempts us to
commit injustice. One of the strongest motives to do wrong is to make everything
go right, for sometimes justice requires allowing bad things to happen to other
people. If we forbid hanging innocent men, the mob may break out in a riot.
If we forbid bombing noncombatants, the war may be prolonged. If we forbid giving
perjured testimony, the murderer may go unpunished. Surely it isn’t right, we
reason, that there are riots, longer wars, and murderers free in the streets.
Let us do evil for the sake of good. It doesn’t seem just to do justice.

Christian faith undercuts the urge to fix everything on our own through conviction
of the final helplessness of man and confidence in the providence of God—through
certainty that only God can set everything to rights and faith that in the end,
He will. Man can merely ameliorate, not cure; but there will be a Judgment,
and there will be a hand that wipes every tear from the eyes of those who mourn.

The final helplessness of man to fix himself may seem fatuously obvious after
a century that killed hundreds of millions of people, all with the idea of improving
human life. If it is a fatuity, however, it is an unbearable fatuity, one that
we persistently refuse to accept. I commented earlier on the idea that one may
play God if no one is God already. What we have in view here is the conviction
that one must play God if the Creator is not Judge and Healer too. Immanuel
Kant thought that morality would be undermined without a belief in divine judgment,
but Kant did not say the half of it. The wrongs of the world would not merely
dismay the desire to do right. They would taunt, torture, and drive men to a
despair that could be relieved only by committing yet greater wrongs, on the
principle that if God does not save us then we must save ourselves.

There may be some few who could resist this terrible conclusion. I have not
met them. It is no accident that not even the Stoics, who invented the very
term “natural law,” ever rose to the idea of principles which hold without exception,
principles which may not be violated even to prevent violations. The problem
was not that they failed to find these principles written upon their hearts,
but that they could not bring themselves to attend closely to the inscription.
It would have been too awful to believe that the goodness of the ends did not
justify the wickedness of the means, because how else could the ends be achieved?
The same people who said Fiat justitia ruat caelum, “Let justice be done,
though the heavens fall,” also said Salus populi suprema lex, “The safety
of the people is the supreme law”—and as they understood these mottoes, the
second unraveled the first. Have the Germans begun another uprising? Then raze
their villages, rape their virgins, and show them what the Pax Romana
means. All for justice, all for order, all for peace.

Without confidence in providence, our vision of every Commandment goes askew.
For example “Thou shalt not murder” seems to change before our eyes to “Thou
shalt keep alive the greatest number possible—at the expense of others, if that
is what it takes.” In the novel (and later movie) Sophie’s Choice, a
Nazi guard at Auschwitz commands the young mother to choose which of her children
will be sent to the ovens. If she cooperates in the crime, the one she selects
will be burned; if she refuses, then both of them will be taken to their deaths.
After a long, hanging moment, she pushes away her smallest child and cries out
that he take her—not the other, not her favorite! Her choice is plainly evil;
for the sake of a better result, she has united herself with the sin of the
murderer. And in the end her favorite child dies too. But without faith in a
God who hears the cries of the suffering, how could she choose otherwise? One
day I was surprised to hear one of my seminar students argue that it would have
been “selfish” for Sophie to refuse to mark one of her children for death. How
so? His reply was that she should have been willing to “sacrifice herself”—by
which he meant sacrifice her conscience. It took me some time to realize
that although my agnostic student considered “I must promote life” to be a real
moral duty, he viewed “I must not have complicity in murder” to be a merely
personal scruple on the order of “I am not the sort of person who skips bathing.”
He didn’t deny that conscience speaks differently, but for the sake of a “better”
result, he thought, Sophie should have been willing to suffer the agonies of
its accusations.

And if there is no God, why not? The motto “Do the right thing and let God
take care of the consequences” makes sense only on the assurance that He will
take care of the consequences. Without that assurance, doing the right thing
means taking care of the consequences—or trying to. And so it is that
unless there is providence, the urge to do good irresistibly consorts with evil;
unless God is just, our judgments become unhinged.

The third difference biblical revelation makes to moral understanding concerns
our ability to recognize our neighbors for what they are. To be a person is
to be a proper subject of absolute regard—a “neighbor” in the sense of the Commandments—a
being of the sort whom the Commandments are about. It is persons whom
I am not to kill, persons whom I am to love as I love myself. But what
is a person? If we accept the biblical revelation that man is the imago Dei,
the image of God, then every human being is a person—a person by nature, a kind
of thing different from any other kind, a being whose very existence is a kind
of sacrament, a sign of God’s grace. Trying to understand the nature of man
without recognizing him as the imago Dei is like trying to understand
a bas–relief without recognizing it as a carving of a lion.

The problem with rejecting this biblical revelation is not that one loses the
dim, inbuilt sense of awe that clings to human life; we intuit the image of
God even if we do not know what it is. The problem is that this inbuilt sense
is not enough. We need an explanation of what it is that we are intuiting—of
what we experience when we experience the sense of awe. Without this explanation,
I may try to hold onto my knowledge of the evil of murdering my neighbor, but
I will find it difficult to recognize my neighbor when I see him. It is not
impossible; more or less adequate explanations can be constructed from
materials accessible to natural reason. But that is the long way around, and
most people weary long before they reach the end of it. By and large, the ones
who do stay on the trail are the same ones who acknowledge the biblical revelation
of the imago Dei.

In contemporary secular ethics, the ruling tendency is to concede that there
are such things as persons, but to define them in terms of their functions or
capacities—not by what they are, the image of God, but by what they can
do. To give but a single well–known illustration, philosopher Mary Ann
Warren defines “personhood” in terms of consciousness, reasoning, self–motivated
activity, the capacity to communicate about indefinitely many topics, and conceptual
self–awareness. If you can do all those things, you’re a person; if you can’t,
you’re not. The functional approach to personhood seems plausible at first,
just because—at a certain stage of development, and barring misfortune—most
persons do have these functions. But to think that they are their functions
blows the core right out of the moral code.

Warren offers her definition to justify abortion. Obviously, unborn babies
are not capable of reasoning, complex communication, and so on. If they cannot
perform these functions, then by Warren’s definition they aren’t persons, and
if they aren’t persons, they have no inherent right to life. But it cannot end
with abortion. If unborn babies may be killed because they lack these functions,
then a great many other individuals may also be killed for the same reasons—for
example the asleep, unconscious, demented, addicted, and very young, not to
mention sundry other cases, such as deaf–mutes who have not been taught sign
language. In Warren’s language, none of these are persons; in biblical language,
she refuses to recognize the imago Dei. She does claim to oppose infanticide—but
only because any given infant is probably wanted by someone. She does not concede
that the infant has an inherent claim to our regard, and if no one does
happen to want it, then, she says, “its destruction is permissible.”

The cure for such blindness is not to tinker with the list of functions by
which we define persons, but to stop confusing what persons are with what they
can typically do. Functional definitions are appropriate for things which have
no inherent nature, things whose identity is dependent on our own purposes and
interests. Suppose I am building an automobile and I need to keep two moving
parts from touching each other. I don’t need an object of a particular natural
kind for that; anything which fills the space can be a spacer. Its very identity
as a spacer is relative to how I want to use it, or to what function I value
in it.

By contrast, if I am a person then I am by nature a rights–bearer, by
nature a proper subject of absolute regard—not because of what I can do,
but because of what I am. Of course this presupposes that I have a nature,
a “what–I–am,” which is distinct from the present condition or stage of development
of what I am, distinct from my abilities in that condition or stage of development,
and distinct from how this condition, stage of development, or set of abilities
might happen to be valued by other people. In short, a person is by nature
someone whom it is wrong to view merely as a means. If you regard me as a person
only because I am able to exercise certain capacities that interest you, then
you are saying that I am not a person. And so the functional definition
of personhood does not even rise to the dignity of being wrong. It is incoherent.

Some modern people will bite the bullet and agree with me. They will try to
rescue their position not by drawing back, but by pushing further still, becoming
“post” modern. “Very well!” they might say. “Let us grant that persons in the
merely functional sense are not persons in the moral sense. But in that case
there are no moral persons, because the ‘human beings’ whom you call
moral persons do not exist. There are no ‘natural kinds.’ There are no ‘natures.’
There is no ‘what–I–am.’ All value is relative because all meaning is relative;
all meaning is relative because every definition is contrived to the convenience
of the definer. The definition of the ‘human’ is no less contrived than any
other.” They have a point. We saw earlier that without God, there is no reason
to believe in any sort of pattern in things—“natures” included.

But they escape one incoherency only to fall into a greater one. The former
incoherency concerned only how we think of persons. The new one concerns how
we think of everything—how we think of reality, even how we think of thinking.
A condition of being able to say anything meaningful at all is that not
everything is a creature of our own regard for it. There must exist some things
that are what they are despite us; their meanings provide the anchors for all
other meanings. If all meaning were relative, then even the meanings of the
terms in the proposition “All meaning is relative” would be relative. Therefore
the proposition “All meaning is relative” destroys itself. It is nothing but
an evasion of reality. That seems a high price to pay, even for the privilege
of killing people.

A modernist who rejects the greater of these incoherencies is not yet in the
clear; one does not have to believe that all meanings slip away to see the meaning
of the person slip away. Though a modernist may keep up the pretense that he
is still talking about what persons really are, his functionalist method allows
him to know only what he wants them to be—and different modernists want them
to be different things. One thinker has greater regard for sentience, another
for cognition, another for self–awareness. One thinks the important thing is
sociality, another the capacity to make plans. With each different criterion
of personhood, a different set of beings is welcomed through the gates of others’
regard. This writer says that higher mammals are persons, but human babies not.
That one says that human babies are persons, but Grandma not. The one over there
says that some human babies are persons, but only if their mothers think
they are.

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 heard 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.

What shall we say about the Second Tablet Project? Just that it cannot succeed.
The Second Tablet depends on the First; whoever denies his duty to God will
find, if he is logical, that he can no longer make sense of his duty to his
neighbor. Conscience will certainly persist, reminding him of both, but it will
seem to him an absurdity in a sea of absurdities. Though he may admit that he
has a nature, he will be unable to say why he should keep it. Though he may
admit that this nature is governed by certain laws, he will find that their
oughtness creeps out the door and that even their prudence slips away. All this
will be needless, for he does have the knowledge of God; he merely denies it.
But denial only makes his crisis deeper, for lies metastasize, and the greatest
lie metastasizes to the greatest degree.

Then should we say that the Two Tablets are enough if only we take them as
a pair? More’s the pity, no: not even the pair of them is enough by the light
of nature alone. Though natural knowledge is sufficient to illuminate our duty,
duty by itself is despair. It cannot assure us of the possibility of forgiveness
when we fall short; it cannot assure us of the certainty of providence in the
face of evil; and it cannot explain to us the fallen dignity we bear as images
of God. In want of the first assurance, we seek refuge from guilt by denying
our sins. In want of the second assurance, we seek to make everything go right
by doing wrong. In want of the explanation, we find it all too easy to pretend
that we do not recognize our neighbors for what they are.

In these senses, moral knowledge is protected and illuminated by the knowledge
of God, and the natural knowledge of God is protected and illuminated by the
knowledge of His word. Faith and reason contain and depend on each other. May
we be spared the illusion of an ethics that stands wholly by itself.

Notes

*I
am paraphrasing the formal analysis of purpose developed by philosopher Robert
C. Koons.

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J. Budziszewski is Associate Professor of Government and Philosophy at the
University of Texas at Austin. His newest book, The Beginning of Wisdom,
will be released this fall by Spence Publishing.