“My formal philosophical definition of natural law and natural law theory is the following:
The moral theory that a divinely ordered and self-evident universal moral order exists that human reason can, in principle, grasp as intellectually knowable, which serves to direct our behavior toward morally choice worthy goods and away from moral evils. This comprehension of the moral order and its basic non-instrumental goods defines and identifies which actions are reasonable and worth pursuing—even apart from an immediate appeal to divine revelation—by achieving the purposes or goals necessary to human nature’s fulfillment and society’s proper coordination. Natural law is thus action-guiding and action-explaining. It explains what we ought to do and why we ought to do it by providing reasons for action and reasons for restraint.” Faithful Reason by Andrew T. Walker (393 pages, 2024), pages 75 and 76.
The Answer
If you’re here, you might be a Praxis Circle member attracted by our email offering the question: What Christmas idea does every Christian and atheist believe in, but few understand? The answer?
Natural Law Ethics.
As our December Book of the Month concludes, every human being believes based on faith in combination with practical reason.
Whether you are a natural law theist, agnostic, or atheist starts and ends on your view of being (ontology). It hinges on your resolutions concerning three questions: the existence of an all true, good, and beautiful Creator God, the directly connected issue of why there is evil in the world, and that of God’s response, if any, to such evil, pain, and suffering.
Ok, you can stop reading this post now; buy Faithful Reason: Natural Law Ethics for God’s Glory and Our Good and switch to the best overview of Natural Law Ethics around. (And I bet Amazon can still deliver before Christmas.)
Natural law is not only at the approximate center of Christian theology, philosophy, and worldview (Christ is at the center), it’s also at the heart of secular worldview of almost every kind. Furthermore, I am happy to say Dr. Walker employs the word worldview regularly throughout the book, indicating the growing importance of metaphysics and worldview’s direct connection to his subject.
Rather than offer a full book review, my goal by the end of this post is to pique your interest in natural law itself. At bottom I harness a small segment of our Praxis Circle video library to introduce natural law, a fascinating concept you need to understand better if you want better traction in theological, philosophical, and worldview discussions or even everyday practical discussions.
Andrew T. Walker is a widely-published author and associate professor of Christian ethics and public theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. Faithful Reason offers several definitions of natural law from Walker’s own (at top) to Thomas Aquinas: the “rational creature’s participation in the eternal law” (page 87).
Without question, the Ox, Thomas Aquinas, is the Dude of Western medieval theology and philosophy (relevant now more than ever), and Dr. Walker is not quite that (yet), though his definition of natural law is much better than Aquinas’ for today. (Actually, all good definitions serve different purposes in different ways and times.) Walker’s clarification and illumination of the subject updates much of the best thinking since even pre-Christian times.
One realizes early in Faithful Reason that literally everyone applies natural law thinking, whether a theist or atheist, except maybe those who are either 100% random nihilists or mad. (Why? Because all human beings use human reason and memory to live a good life or, at least, to survive.)
Now, granted, there are many walking around today justifying each other while carrying both diseases (nihilism and madness), making it impossible to diagnose their problem exactly. (The NCAA President recently supporting biological men having full rights to compete against women and take their medals? Case in point.)
Many Positives and Few Negatives (All Necessary)
Some of Faithful Reason‘s many positives: again, the best presentation of the subject I’ve ever read; it gathers together much of the best thinking and writing on the subject in the Western world, especially since around World War II; Walker applies natural law principles well on a necessarily selected basis to several of today’s most important and difficult issues. While the world of Natural Law Ethics does involve reason, logic, and binaries, it always requires prudence in the virtues, balancing means to good ends.
Dr. Walker does not “hide the ball.” I love that. Early on he states that Christian reality is reality or truth with a capital T. Varieties of truth do not exist and are contrary to the definition of truth. Again, Natural Law Ethics is based on necessary or divinely-gifted faith applying experience’s practical reason.
Furthermore, there’s no conflict whatsoever between faith and science (the two are different, yet a continous one). Last, divine grace (God direct-to-persons) as revealed in Scripture (special revelation), history, and daily life is complementary to and has priority over common revelation (God’s obvious design and presence in nature) or grace, being universally obvious to many persons, if not most.
Natural law is hierarchical and produces first principles and second principles. Dr. Walker’s own list of natural law goods (self-evident ends humans seek for their own sake to flourish) are life, family life, friendship, knowledge, aesthetic appreciation (beauty), practical reasonableness, integrity, religion, and play. Obviously, money and pleasure can be extremely problematic to us human devils and are thus “instrumental goods.”
As Dr. Walker recognizes, there are other important goods such as work (which Walker might see as instrumental, therefore secondary—I believe work is a primary good). He also lists key underlying norms, axioms, or assumptions supporting these goods and their attainment, like the laws of conscience, reason, causation, duty, and honor.
In my opinion, the negatives of Dr. Walker’s book are not his problem, but the reader’s.
Faithful Reason serves as a textbook offering observations and claims that are currently out-of-style, and many readers today just won’t like them. Unfortunately, for those like me constantly looking for loopholes, his conclusions are sound, based on Scripture and natural experience. Many are lost today, making their own lives and laws as expressive and pleasure seeking individuals, not orienting toward God’s laws and true community welfare or the common good. This is why so many are purposeless and miserable.
If our personal and community goals are human flourishing, however, it seems that experience and sacred text has shown natural law’s most difficult moral principles to be goals to strive for or waypoints to stay close to. I have failed and you have failed to do so all that time, but that does not change timeless standards.
Dr. Walker is selective in the current issues he takes on, but he succeeds in highlighting the principles supporting the mushrooming body of social science research that’s proving many of natural law’s fundamentals. In some cases, such basics have been known for thousands of years outside academic laboratories via commonly-lived reality.
The Book’s Importance
Any book describing Natural Law Ethics (some call it truth) well is important, but this one is a sign of increasingly positive religious, cultural, and social times ahead among American intellectual leaders. The U.S. is already experiencing these positives in the trenches, and we can anticipate more in the future. It’s extremely hopeful that such a prominent Protestant such as Dr. Walker has written a great book about a subject Protestantism has largely ignored since the early 1900s.
Dr. Walker explains that the Catholic Church and the Protestant Churches were mostly in agreement on a Christian natural moral law from the Reformation through the late 1800s, but now much of the natural law analysis is within a Catholic playing field. I would say that Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI moved the Catholic Church a bit more toward Protestantism and that Evangelical Protestants have moved much more toward the Roman Catholic Church ever since. Especially since the late 1800s, the Catholic Church developed and used its Magisterium as protection from the West’s severely debilitating secularism—a crippling influence especially over the last 60 years.
No doubt, sharing the common opponents of militant Neo-Marxism, postmodernism, identitarianism, and nihilism have helped bring Protestant and Catholic elements together. This is so wonderful to see.
In sum, Dr. Walker’s book is another sign that truth is showing itself and proving out, and that the Catholic and Evangelical Protestant churches are moving closer together in agreement on basic Christian orthodoxy. Staying true to Natural Law Ethics could be the primary reason these two churches are the two fastest growing strands of Christianity in America and across the world. Truth matters and works.
Praxis Circle Video Involving Natural Law and Its Ethics
As you know, Praxis Circle operates from a Christian worldview. We realized early on that Natural Law Ethics were central to this worldview, and we sought out a healthy number of Contributors who could comment on the subject.
Perhaps the Contributor sought most directly for his natural law expertise is Robert George. Dr. George is cited throughout Walker’s book and is featured in the playlist on natural law at the top of this post. It includes 9 clips totaling 25.78 minutes.
If you’re an agnostic or atheist, you can still engage in natural law thinking if you see a consistent result from nature and a consistent pattern in human behavior. One can adjust Walker’s and even Aquinas’ definition of natural law simply by eliminating God from the equation.
I would suggest that PC Contributors Heather Mac Donald and Jonathan Haidt do this in the much shorter playlist (9.78) presented below, entitled “Nature-Only Law.” Ms. Mac Donald says she does not believe in natural law (and in other clips that she does not believe she can claim a personal knowledge of truth, while disavowing the 1970s variety of postmodernism she mastered at Yale), and Dr. Haidt raises interesting questions about certain aspects of a purely secular type of natural law.
We do not think the argument that there are extreme differences in human norms across the globe—e.g., most societies dislike incest and cannibalism, but a few do love them—is a final nail in the coffin of natural law, as often portrayed by its detractors, any more than the claim that because some prayers don’t work, prayer is bogus as a meaningful, fulfilling activity that often works. Indeed, there are plenty of very good laws many people break; I would say all of them get this human treatment.
Having watched the Nature-Only Law clips, more interesting questions might be:
- Are you admitting you believe in truth if you say you believe there is no truth?
- Where would the ideas of truth and reason originate? From matter and energy only?
- What is truth and reason?
- Are any truths universal, what types, and how would you judge that?
- Is it only human beings who exhibit reason, and what are the differences between humans, various types of animals, and even plants?
- What would be the source of Jonathan Haidt’s “shared intentions,” a distinctly human attribute he mentions that’s central to his worldview?
- What is “the mind” that houses and develops these intentions, and where does it originate? Same question for conscience?
- Does nature exhibit reason and morality outside human existence, an issue Dr. Haidt also raises? Is morality strictly a human function? If you say no, how are you defining morality, and what are the consequences, if any, of that to the idea of God? If you say yes, same questions.
- Is it possible that moral truths are just as hard and knowable (equally true) as “scientific” truths and facts?
- Does every true conclusion need a first, self-evident cause somewhere in the chain of being and thinking? Again, where would such truths originate, and how are they knowable to us?
- Is it possible to have any morality at all if life is only material, and how does that work exactly?
- Finally, can we have morality without God?
- What has human life shown us, and what are the trends we are seeing in the West today?
If you are thinking about these questions at all, you’re thinking about Natural Law Ethics.
Summary
Faithful Reason offers very specific conclusions to most of these important questions with well-reasoned analysis, and I have tried not to spoil it by telling you Walker’s answers. You should also know that he presents two helpful appendices after the “Conclusion,” “Responding to Natural Law Objections” (offering responses to six) and “Deploying the Natural Law in Public Apolgetics.” I hope this last quote will further greater interest in taking on Natural Law Ethics:
“The is-ought and fact-value dilemmas used to deny moral obligation in Christian ethics by secular critics is the same dilemma that renders claims of secular progressivism moot as well. . . Sound moral reason . . . is going to require God’s existence known through some form of revelation.” (page 381)
Well, maybe we can prove God from our own sinful, self-serving, and flawed moral existence and reasoning here on earth when thinking and gazing up to heaven, rather than getting spoon fed from the top-down.
And that brings us almost to December 25, where the alpha and omega of human ethics and flourishing emanates. What is the center of natural existence and law? You know the answer to that One.
Have a productive last weekend before Christmas, and I hope Faithful Reason is now part of your shopping list and worldview plan for 2025.
Here’s one final Greatest Hit from the incomparable Ox (Aquinas), a typically elegant and short definition of law itself:
“An ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated.” (page 81)
Beautiful! So simple with only the most defining points.
Now, did he kick the can down the road with a potentially circular reference to “ordinance”? You be the judge, but only after buying and reading Faithful Reason. After all, life, faith, reason, conscience, passion, community, and natural law have to start somewhere (as far as we human creatures can tell).
