Swarthmore Peripateo (Vol 3, Issue 1)

Volume 3, Issue 1 | Fall 2014

Peripateo the Swarthmore College Journal of Christian Discourse

Morality, Rationality, and Natural Law A Response to John Lennox

by Greg Brown

Also in this issue: Learning To Seek

by Josh Gregory

Finite Creatures with Infinite Worth

by Catherine Crouch

A Letter from the Editor Dear Reader, The beauty of a community like Swarthmore lies first in its unity. By “unity,” I do not mean conformity to an ideology or to a political agenda. By “unity,” I mean something far more foundational: a shared longing and love for the truth, in all its dimensions. If Swarthmore, then, is to seek to become truly beautiful, it must rekindle a deep, collective longing to know the truth about God. For a sincere and wholehearted pursuit of the truth, however and wherever it begins, naturally opens out onto the ultimate questions of human existence: Who am I? Why am I here? What is there after this life? It leads men and women to the edges of human understanding and holds out to them the possibility of a transcendent reality, the possibility that the full significance of human life can only be captured by looking beyond this world.

In this search for answers, for meaning and for purpose, it is impossible to remain silent on the question of God. One’s answer to the question of God, and the consequent degree of one’s openness to the transcendent, is, in any heartfelt grasping after the truth, too important to ignore.

As Christians, we, the staff of Peripateo, have answered the question of God, the question of the transcendent, the question of eternal and universal truth, with a resounding yes. We believe in the one Triune God and we believe in His Word, Jesus Christ, true God and true man, who entered history as a Light to the world. We believe that in His boundless love He offered Himself up as a spotless victim, to suffer crucifixion and death so that He might make satisfaction for our sins. We believe that He rose from the dead and that, by His glorious Resurrection, He holds out to all of humankind the promise of eternal life in the everlasting embrace of the Father.

Although we represent a variety of cultures and Christian traditions, we have come together as one, united to bear witness to these truths. We offer you, dear reader, this journal as a testament to the ways in which they have shaped our minds and our hearts.

We hope that this journal, conceived in longing and love for the truth, will even further enliven the intellectual discourse on our campus.

In this issue, we present you with a broad spectrum of work inspired by our Christian faith. Joy Martínez reflects on her experience of service and grace in “The Why and the Wherefore” and Nathan Scalise examines the tidal movements of spiritual life in his “Sinusoidal Faith.” In “Morality, Rationality, and Natural Law: A Response to John Lennox,” Greg Brown contests an Oxford apologist’s position on the foundations of morality, and in “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Hospitality,” Suness Jones describes her experience as a Christian traveling in Eastern Europe.

The word peripateo is a Greek word, roughly meaning “to walk around in.” We hope that you will take a few moments to walk with us through the aforementioned articles and through all the other contributions that together comprise this journal. Whether you come from a faith background or not, whether you have been seeking or not, it is our great desire that this journal kindle in you a longing for truth that is bold enough to confront those ultimate questions of meaning, of existence, and of God. If Peripateo will have thereby helped Swarthmore become more united in its search for the fullness of truth, then it will surely have helped Swarthmore to become a more truly beautiful place.

Nicholas Zahorodny Editor-In-Chief

1 | Letter from the Editor

Cover and inside cover photos by Renan Meira’17

IN THIS ISSUE Sinusoidal Faith 7

Peripateo

the Swarthmore College Journal of Christian Discourse

Essays & Ar ticles

by Nathan Scalise

Coherent Compassion 15

Editorial Staff

by Nicholas Zahorodny

Nicholas Zahorodny ’16 Heitor Santos ’17

Morality, Rationality and 21 Natural Law

by Greg Brown

Daze 5

by Emily Audet

Ar t & Poetry

Learning To Seek 6

by Josh Gregor y

“Axiom” 13

by George Abraham

The Why and the Wherefore 3

by Joy Martinez

Reflections

Carlo Bruno ’17 Patrick Han ’16 Dorothy Kim ’15 Nathan Lamb ’17 Nathan Scalise ’16 Michael Superdock ’15 George Abraham ’17 Josh Greogry ’15 Joseph Landis ’16 Renan Meira ’17 Yared Portillo ’15

A Hitchhicker’s Guide to 9 Hospitality

Editor-in-Chief Design Manager Business Manager Editor Editor Editor Editor Editor Editor Consulting Editor Consulting Editor Design Design Photography Design

Contributors

Catherine Crouch George Abraham ’17 Emily Audet ’18 Greg Brown ’15 Josh Gregory ’18 Suness Jones ’16 Joy Martínez ’16 Nathan Scalise ’16 Nicholas Zahorodny ’16

by Suness Jones

Finite Creatures with Infinite 11 Wor th

by Catherine Crouch

Who We Are

Peripateo seeks to reconcile faith and academia by engaging religious issues through an intellectual

lens. We believe that the message of Jesus Christ has powerful implications for our daily lives and the world at large. We aim to fuse creativity and

intellectualism in this journal to invite readers into a thoughtful discourse: what role does God play in our lives? What are the ways that a Christian

perspective both compliments and complicates an academic one?

Contact us at swarthmoreperipateo@gmail.com

Swarthmore Peripateo | 2

The Why

and the Wherefore

by Joy Martínez

For most of my life, I have suffered from chronic

Impostor Syndrome. I live in constant fear that it will one day be discovered that I have been conning everyone all along. Any day now my professors and peers here at Swarthmore will find out that I’m not actually an intellectual, I don’t know what I’m talking about, and I certainly do not belong in academia. Or folks will realize that I am not a kind person, that I struggle with sin and temptation, and that my integrity balances on a pin. One day, someone will uncover the truth: I have somehow survived my obligations and commitments by talk and pure luck.

This past summer, I worked in Philadelphia as a Spiritual Life Coordinator for Broad Street Ministry’s Youth Initiative. “Broad Street Ministry (“BSM”) is a broad-minded Christian community that cherishes creativity, fosters and nurtures artistic expression, extends inclusive hospitality and works for a more just world through civic engagement.”1 They work hard to spread grace, the mercy and love of Christ, through sharing their philosophy of “enough” with a city that struggles with a devastating dichotomy of overabundance and scarcity. BSM opens its doors not only to feed and clothe many who are living in scarcity, but also to restore peace and dignity.

Among a variety of collaborative projects outside its walls, BSM regularly provides basic healthcare through nurses, mail services, tailoring and mending, art projects, and other practical amenities.

It is located on Philadelphia’s Avenue of the Arts among wealthy corporations and luxury hotels like the Ritz Carlton.

The specific program I worked for, BSM’s Youth Initiative, runs mainly during the summer and functions similarly to a summer camp. Youth come and go by the week and use BSM as a home-

3 | The Why and the Wherefore

base from which they learn about Philadelphia’s impoverished demographic. They are sent out daily to various sites in which they work alongside other individuals and organizations that are striving for justice in Philadelphia through collaboration, relationship development, and hard work.

The program sounds, and is, incredible. But it is also an incredible responsibility for one to assume. I was thrilled when I received the job offer, but also anxious and terrified. What if my boss and co-workers discovered the depths of my incompetence and inadequacy?

These self-perceptions, enforced by the oppressive nature of Imposter Syndrome, facilitate a terrible outlook on life and are frankly quite depressing, but the reality they often create is unavoidable for myself and countless others—perhaps we could call it low selfesteem. I never experienced this fear of absolute inadequacy more than when I was offered the job at Broadstreet. I constantly asked God a whiney “why?”. Why am I here? Why did they hire me? How was I able to convince them that I was worth it and capable? They’ll find out who I really am. I do not deserve this. I have no idea what I’m doing. I do not belong. I am not enough. I continued to feel this way through the first days of training. I overanalyzed every comment I made, look I received, and absent-minded thing I did. Anxiety ruled over me like the tyrant he is. But something I do know is that he is no match for the usurper, Grace.

A week or two before I began work this past summer, I shared some of these feelings with an individual whom I truly value and feel valued by. He urged me to change the connotation of a single word: why. He challenged my nervous repeating “why, why” that

Photo by Joy Martinez

questioned the motives of God, and suggested that I instead ask Since I’ve been back at Swarthmore, it has absolutely been diffiGod to show me why, for what purpose, I had been chosen and cult to stay in this mindset—the Impostor Syndrome has returned placed there. There is a fundamental difference between these two with persistence. Every Monday I am too self-conscious to raise a questions that requires thinking of myself less and acknowledging hand in my Shakespeare seminar; sometimes I will barely move my the sovereignty of God more, submitting my fears to the reign of hand above my head, then swiftly lose all courage and pretend to Grace instead of resigning myself to anxiety’s regime of selfishness. be smoothing my hair. For some irrational reason, I am too afraid I had made this summer all about me and about what I thought that whatever comes out of my mouth will forever mark me as a I could do instead of trusting that God would provide me with non-academic, as someone skating by on luck and carefully chosen enough to do my job. silence.

And here is where I’d like What is even more overOne thing has to be true, or everything to return to Grace, to love whelming and immobilizing is falls in shambles around me, impossible to and mercy personified. Even the fear of unveiled hypocrisy. despite my failures and shortEveryday, here at Swarthmore, I gather off of the floor. comings, Grace showed me struggle in doubt and fear that in eight weeks at Broadstreet someone will discover the true Ministry that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I have blemished state of my motivation and intellect, or come to know never felt more peace and satisfaction in where I was, spiritually the convoluted nature of what is in my heart. Like water dripping and intellectually. I found the most fulfilling convergence of my from a broken faucet, a nagging persists at the back of my mind: I passions, skills, and shortcomings. I still have much to learn, yes, will never be enough; there is no way I can allow anyone to come but for the first time in my life I realized that, while I still know close enough to see how shadowed I am as a person. There is too very little, I have accumulated a wealth of knowledge that can be much to lose. utilized and transformed into practical application. I had the necYet, even in the thickest part of these doubts, when truth seems essary preparation to collaboratively design a summer-long cur- to be obscured like sunlight through thick leaves and pine needles, riculum. I had been given enough knowledge of scripture, and even one thing remains unshaken. One thing has to be true, or everysilly icebreaker games, to engage with and encourage high school thing falls in shambles around me, impossible to gather off of the and middle school students. I had been purposely placed at BSM floor. and I had been intentionally chosen, and through the entire sumThe Grace I mentioned before serves as that one consistent mer, I was provided with enough. truth that I keep returning to; it is the constant I depend upon

Swarthmore Peripateo | 4

to provide stability and hope, and it is held firmly in the truth of resurrection. Of course, resurrection begins with Easter Sunday and Jesus’s empty tomb, but I have to believe that it does not stop there. For me, this has to be a hope that is alive right now, today.

This hope cannot only dwell in two thousand year old texts; it has to exist in this very moment. Resurrection is hope that is seen in the restoration of broken hearts and broken relationships, a hope which raises a soul from the depths of Sheol and coaxes small pink buds from underneath ice and snow. This hope of resurrection has to exist in the heart of Philadelphia and on the top floor of Cornell Library.

This is the only thing that can draw me from the deepest parts of my doubts and self-consciousness. It is the only thing that drives me through finals week and piles of seemingly insurmountable work: a grace that exists beyond my shortcomings and selfloathings, a grace that is not dependent on whether or not I have the right interpretation of Titus Andronicus, or whether or not my heart is consistently in the right place. I have to trust that new life exists, that mercy can be extended even to me, despite all of my faults.

The title of the curriculum I helped to design and facilitate this summer was “Enough is Enough”. It carries multiple meanings that fall into Broadstreet Ministry’s philosophy: we’ve had

enough of poverty and oppression, but we also have enough. We have enough grace, compassion, and mercy extended to us by a loving and benevolent God. We have a God who is good enough, and kind enough to provide us with enough. Even at Swarthmore, even despite all of our shortcomings, God sees us with our halfraised hand, hair twirling, and says, you don’t have to be enough. I am enough.

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. -Micah 6:8 (NIV)

r

Endnotes 1. http:// broadstreetministry.org/about-us/about

Joy Claire de Aguillar Martínez ’16 Joy is mostly from the Outer Banks of Nor th Carolina, and will soon be a special major in English Education.

She enjoys a lot of things that are the color blue, like the ocean and blueberries. She one day hopes to retire in Hobbiton.

Daze

by Emily Audet

Someone convinced me, on a childhood day of sticky fingers and buzzing flies, that You despised me.

You never liked blame much, but I

was taught to blame myself.

Someone convinced me, on a day when crashing thunder approached quicker than lightning and the sky itself felt anger, that to wonder in itself was folly.

No one for me to blame that day, but

I blamed the men who spoke the weather.

Someone convinced me, on some hazy day, that maybe I was wrong.

Someone convinced me, on some day belonging to eternity,

that maybe there was more.

You convinced me, at 4:32 on a Tuesday, warm rain pattering, that there was truth.

You convinced me, at 4:32 on a Tuesday, that I was not alone.

5 | Daze

Learning To Seek

by Josh Gregory

I am drinking from my cup of apple juice— the one with two handles; it cannot tip over, and I would not have let it. Even then. My father is drinking coffee.

We make relishing sounds. I remember looking up at him. Into his beard; shades of brown, silver and gray; a slow disappearance. He stands and walks

away, through the screen door and forest. I am at the edge of the woods my mouth as dark and as empty as the wilderness, calling; I am knocking at the door of your undwelling.

Swarthmore Peripateo | 6

Sinusoidal Faith Photo by Renan Meira

by Nathan Scalise

This is a sine wave:

Sine waves reflect many types of natural phenomena: sound, light, and the waves in the ocean to name a few. I would like to add faith to the list.

Having spent my entire life involved in Christian communities, I’ve heard questions like, “How far along are you in your faith?” or “Where are you in your walk with Jesus?” a lot. These questions reflect an understanding of faith as being linear. The idea is that starting from some initial position, a person moves along a continuum between “mature” faith and unbelief. The times when people “drift away” from God are often referred to as “backsliding”, which is reflective of the understanding that it’s still a motion along the same line. It could look something like this: Unbelief/ Far from God

“Mature faith”/ Close to God

I thought about faith in terms of this model for a long time. It makes sense on a certain level. If a person is trying to get closer to God in the ways that Christians frequently talk about (i.e. praying, reading the Bible, worship, etc.), and that effort is constant, then there is an appealing logic to the idea of constant progress toward God. As a Christian, I want it to work this way. This model is simple. It’s the way that I often see faith presented in lessons for children in the church or by Christians who are talking with nonChristians.

But this isn’t what faith feels like for me. For all its appeal, the linear model has a fundamental problem: constant effort doesn’t yield constant progress. No matter how disciplined and consistent I am in my spiritual practice, whether in praying, in studying the word, or in finding ways to connect with God, there are times

7 | Sinusoidal Faith

when I feel like there is a gulf between God and me. Additionally, the more I talk to other Christians in settings where it does not feel necessary to demonstrate some level of adequate daily progress toward God, the more I encounter other Christians whose experiences are similar to mine. The difference in the responses that I see when the question is changed from something like, “What new thing is God doing in your life?” to something like, “What’s going on in your faith right now?” is staggering. But it’s not just about changing the wording of the questions; it’s about changing the tone of the discussion in a way that allows for struggle.

Even Jesus, the Son of God and the one whom Christians are trying to imitate, didn’t get constant results for constant effort. Jesus, being Himself God, knew God in a way that I cannot know God. Yet, even Jesus proclaims on the cross “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”1 Now, there are a lot of things that can come out of that statement. But I want to get two main things out of it. First, that even Jesus must have had some doubts and hesitations about what He was doing. Second, that whatever His doubts and hesitations were about following God, He did it anyway. His prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane says it well, “For you all things are possible; remove this cup from me, yet not what I want but what you want.”2 I believe that those two points should be the basis for understanding the Christian faith as it is lived.

Growing in faith doesn’t mean that I don’t have doubts or that my doubts disappear. There are things that I’ve been questioning for years already that I suspect I will have doubts about for the rest of my life. I don’t think I’ll ever really understand theological ideas like substitutionary atonement or questions like how and why a bronze-age tribe in the Middle East happened to get chosen for a semi-exclusive relationship with the God of the universe. But similarly, I am compelled to continue by the conviction that there must be something greater out there, that there is more to God than what I can see, and that I have come to know a God whose signature is resurrection. I don’t have all the answers. But I don’t need all the answers to encounter love and understand that I should love God and love the people around me. I don’t need all the answers to

feel like there is something wrong about not sharing with someone who is hungry while on the way to eat a nice dinner. The doubts don’t go away permanently, but I have grown in faith because of following God anyway. The appeal of a sinusoidal model is that it allows for the fact that walking with Jesus is hard, hard enough that at some points, I have wondered if I have made a catastrophic error.

But, I keep walking, and despite, or even because of, the moments of deep doubt, I know God in ways that I did not before.

Feeling Close to God

B

Feeling Far from God

“Mature Faith”/ Knowing God

A

Take a look at point A on the graph. Point A is a place where I am feeling far from God but continuing to pursue God. To me, this is the critical point in the Christian walk. Sometimes, feeling far from God is a result of failing to pursue God. But sometimes it isn’t; the story of Job is a good example of this, which I will touch on shortly. More personally, the first time I organized and led worship night for Swarthmore Christian Fellowship I was so wiped out by the process that I genuinely had no idea whether or not the evening had glorified God, and was beginning to wonder if there was even a God to glorify. The experience of point A can change a lot from time to time and person to person, but that’s one example of what point A has felt like for me. A sinusoidal view of faith removes some of the shame that comes from struggling in context where struggles and calamities are viewed as punishments from God because of sins; despite the fact that this view is clearly refuted by the book Job and the words of Jesus. The possibility of encountering the response of Job’s friends, who insist that he simply confess what he has done wrong to cause God to punish him, even as he spends the whole book maintaining his innocence, does not make me want to tell people when I am dealing with challenges in my faith.

Now, I’m being harsh on Job’s friends, and I ought to give them credit for being there and sitting with him in silence and mourning for days. However, once they start speaking, it’s clear that they view Job’s condition as a problem to be solved. They try to fix him. But as God makes clear at the end of the book, Job is not the problem.

He doesn’t need to be fixed. Unfortunately, his friends are thinking of faith in a linear way, so if Job is having issues and struggles in his relationship with God, Job must be the problem. At the end of the story, God vindicates Job and says the he has spoken of God rightly, but his friends have not.

A sinusoidal model of faith affirms the fact that growing closer to God requires making an effort to move in that direction. It supports the necessity of effort. At the same time, it shows that it is possible to get comfortable somewhere like point B, where things

feel pretty good, and never move to pursue and know God in a more meaningful way. When I talk about growing closer to God, the goal is that for every given time period, be it a day, a week, a month, etc., I can point to one new way in which I know God, or one old thing that I knew and now understand in a new way as well. The problem with point B is that while it feels good, there is no change occurring. If I’m stuck at point B, I know God in the same way that I did when I first got there.

Sometimes growing closer to God has required following God into places and situations that were unpleasant, messy, and made me question if God was really as competent as I had assumed an omnipotent being to be. This summer, I ran the music component of a summer day camp at the Salvation Army in Chester and was frequently taken aback by what I encountered and the lives of the kids I was teaching. In some cases, I can look at how something resolved and see that the hand of God was clearly at work, in other cases, I can’t. That last fact frustrates me, and my frustration with it is independent of the quality of my understanding of free will and its associated consequences. But I do know that my closest friendships are ones in which I can tell the other person when they have upset me without it ruining the relationship. Such experiences have brought me to a similar point with God; I can express my difficulties without destroying the relationship. It is possible to be frustrated with God and still follow God. I want to be honest with people, both Christians and nonChristians, about what I have gotten myself into. I want to be part of a community of faith with understanding and compassion such that if Job had been one our members, we would’ve responded with, “It’s not your fault” without God having to show up in a whirlwind and say so directly. I want to understand faith in a way that will not compel people to “fake it” or otherwise hide struggles around me for fear of judgment. I don’t want people to think that having doubts precludes having faith. I believe that having faith means going on anyway, knowing that the moments of clarity and certainty won’t last forever and doubts will probably creep in sooner rather than later. More importantly, it means knowing that the reverse is also true. In the words of Flannery O’Connor, “Faith comes and goes, it rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean.

If it is presumptuous to believe that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to believe that unbelief will.”3 Tides are sinusoidal. r Endnotes 1. Mark 15:34, NRSV 2. Mark 14:36 NRSV 3. Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor.

Nathan Scalise ’16 Nathan is from Brewster, Massachusetts and is currently searching for the 25th hour of the day. When not running or eating, he basically lives in the Lang Music Building.

Swarthmore Peripateo | 8

A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Hospitality An Experience Abroad Made Possible Through Kindness

I didn’t really plan to go abroad

my sophomore year, nor did I know what “going abroad” specifically entailed. All I knew was that I wanted to study theology and that getting off campus for a semester sounded like a good idea. So, after much vacillation and prayer, I applied for one program in Rome that had classes Swarthmore didn’t offer. To my surprise, upon submitting the application, I accidentally paid a $500 non-refundable deposit. The company insisted that my submission (which was sent at the last minute) came in too late to not pay the deposit, so there I was—locked in to studying Catholic theology for a semester in Rome. After the initial panic dissipated, I was stoked. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, and I was thankful for that unintentional push to jump into it. This was only the beginning of a series of unplanned events that made me let down my guard and give in to what God was doing with my life. Looking back, I realize that God gets through to me in the most unexpected ways. I took a leap of faith, trusting that God was behind this circumstance and that He was going to be with me in this new venture. Throughout my trav-

9 | A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Hospitality

els when I was abroad, God revealed Himself to me through the people I met, transcending language, circumstances, and my own expectations.

Having faith in God had forced me to put myself out there. Literally, out there. I don’t always realize how far out I’m going until I’m there, on a quiet road somewhere between Niçe and Monte Carlo without a ride, in the rain, with a plane to catch in 2 hours and my friend, Maria, at my side. The day started out innocent enough; we hopped on a bus to Eze, hiked through a medieval town built on a mountain, took the necessary photos for Facebook, and descended, hoping to catch the last bus out of town. When we finally reached the bottom, it became apparent that our situation was desperate. It was raining and there were no more buses going back to Niçe that day. What had started as a perfectly adventurous day had turned into a poor backpacker’s worst-case scenario. After deliberations and groans of pain, we decided to try our thumbs at hitchhiking. This is definitely not the recommended course of action for any stranded person, let alone two girls in a foreign country with limited cell service, but I had a feeling, a prompting if you will, to take this course of

Photo by Suness Jones

by Suness Jones

action. Something inside of me told me it would be okay, so I said a prayer and then found myself on the side of a road hoping that some French passerby would take pity on me in the rain. Luckily, that is exactly what happened-within a couple minutes. The first car we saw stopped and a friendly, young woman who happened to be fluent in English offered us a ride not only to Niçe, but directly to the airport. There literally couldn’t have been a better outcome. I don’t know if that woman was Christian, but I feel that God was taking care of me through her; she was a vessel of God’s love to me.

That wasn’t the only time that God followed through on His promise to watch over me as I exhausted my sense of adventure. Take, for instance, the time that Maria and I were backpacking down the coast of Croatia. We arrived in a village called Pakoštane (look it up, you probably won’t find it), to an empty hostel to find out that the owners, Vedro and Kristjan, forgot we were coming because it was the offseason. Once we confirmed our room, they were incredibly gracious and insisted on making up for their mistake 100 times over. The night started with a home cooked dinner of goat (?) and fresh bread, quickly escalated to visiting everyone in town who spoke English, then progressed to a party back at the hostel, where we were given a liter of freshly harvested olive oil, and culminated in a feast of octopus that Kristjan chose to roast instead of sell in the market. In the morning, they insisted that we had rabbit stew with coffee and drive with them to our next destination, which was two hours away. All of this because they didn’t expect us to stay with them.

Humanity has done nothing to receive God’s love, just as I did nothing to receive the love that was shown to me while I was abroad.

Their hospitality was unparalleled by anything I had experienced before. We were supposed to be paying them, and here they were, giving us everything they could in order to make us feel at home. True love sacrifices, and that’s what these people were doing for us. They gave us shelter, friendship, food, and they shared their lives with us. When I think of myself now, in a position where I have much to give, I ask myself if I would be as life-giving as my friends in Croatia.

I wonder if I am genuine enough to forsake my material possessions to make someone else feel wanted and welcome.

Vedro and Kristjan didn’t let language, money, or their own desires get in the way of seeing me as a human and loving me like one. I eventually found out that even though they were raised Catholic, they didn’t believe in God. This made me think about whom people care about and why. Love is

not reserved for Christians to receive and give, but for all of humanity to use. Our interactions with love are not predicated on being Christian, but on being human.

Often times, I let small inconveniences get in the way of treating other people as sons and daughters of God. If only I truly acknowledged the humanity in people—and their ultimate desire to love and be loved—then I could myself become more human and develop into the woman God made me to be. For as I love others, I myself am loved by the Most High. When I love others, I don’t lose anything but instead gain everything. Vedro, Kristjan, and the lady who gave us a ride were not concerned about what they were losing when they gave us all they had to offer. They were only concerned about how they could give more.

For active Christians, this kind of relentless, self-sacrificing love is not an option. It is not a convenience that will create a “feel-good” moment when mentioned to friends. It is an obligation, one not to be done for any other reason than the fact that a Christian identity relies on the reality of love. It relies on the fact that Jesus, the Son of God, died so that we may have life in Him— eternal life. Humanity is directly connected to a lifeline of love that was and is unconditionally given in the hope that we will receive it. All one human has to do is be open to receive it, and once obtained, it can be given just as freely. Simply put, Christians are to give away something that was free to begin with, that isn’t even theirs, only to gain more. Humanity has done nothing to receive God’s love, just as I did nothing to receive the love that was shown to be while I was abroad. I traveled to 17 countries, for 5 months, on two different continents, and what I remember most are the times when I was loved. I can vaguely describe the parliament building in Budapest, but what I remember more are the faces of everyone in the town of Pakoštane that tried so hard to communicate with me in English. The view of Rome from the top of St. Peter’s Basilica is breathtaking, but not nearly as relieving as seeing a friendly woman offer me a ride in the pouring rain.

This human connection was forged out of love, and it is held together in love. Across the globe, all humans are made in the image and likeness of God. Whether or not we deliberately see it in one another, it is recognized by the love in our hearts and we are called to respond. r

Suness Jones ‘16 Suness Jones is a bucolic California girl with a penchant for the natural. She spends her free time immersed in the avian community.

Swarthmore Peripateo | 10

Finite Creatures with Infinite Worth Grasping the Promise of Redemption

by Catherine Crouch

At the very heart of the Christian faith are thing. This doesn’t just come from my competitive streak, although

two ideas that are very hard for a perfectionist like me to fully that’s certainly part of it. It’s one thing to affirm that my worth comes from God and not my accomplishments when I just have to internalize: • Every human being, including me, is treasured by God and has accept not being the best at something. But it’s another to affirm infinite worth simply because of who we are and not because of it when I have failed my responsibilities to others—whether my students, my family, or my colleagues. Find me in my office after anything we accomplish.

• We are finite creatures with limits on our ability to accomplish I have given an exam that might have been too long or too hard, after a student I knew was struggling and tried to help still did things, because we have limited time, energy, and creativity. poorly in the course, after I have At face value, this is an had a grant application or an aramazing gift. It sets me free to ticle rejected. You’ll find me awtake joy in all that I do rather Every human being, including me, is fully discouraged, wishing I had than live in constant fear of treasured by God and has infinite worth done my work better, wishing I not living up to my potential. simply because of who we are and not had served my students more efIt means I don’t have to be fectively. the best at everything, or even because of anything we accomplish.

Until very recently, I found it make it into the top ten. It also difficult to bring my Christian defines how I believe God infaith to bear effectively on these tends us to relate to others. For example, although I’m sure I don’t always succeed, I try to demonstrate to my students that I value times of failure. If I really believed that my worth came simply them simply for who they are and not for how well they do in my from being a human being, and that human beings are intrinsically class, and I count it a privilege to be part of their lives. I try to relate limited in what they can do, why couldn’t I just accept that I wasn’t and speak to my children so that they know that they are loved perfect and be done with it?

I am grateful for many good friends and excellent mentors, regardless of how well they do at school, whether they win the race many here at Swarthmore, including some who share my Christian or the scholarship or the first chair in the orchestra.

Unfortunately, although it is easy to say that I believe these faith. They have warned me of the dangers of perfectionism; they things, it is often hard to live with a deep conviction that they are have urged me to cultivate a positive attitude and to recognize that true. This becomes very clear when I feel that I have failed at some- failure and setbacks are inevitable when pursuing challenges, and

11 | Finite Creatures with Infinite Worth

can be opportunities for growth. Most of all, they have reminded me to set realistic expectations for myself. There is great wisdom in this advice, and I routinely share it with my students.

A lot of the sting of failure comes from wounded pride. I’m grateful for the opportunity that failure presents to expose and weed out my pride. More and more, I am learning to do my work simply because it is worthwhile and satisfying, not in order to earn

Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. And he said, “Where have you laid him?”

They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?”

Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?”

John 11:32-44 (ESV)

praise from others or professional success, and to wholeheartedly rejoice at others’ success, rather than being jealous.

And yet often it is not only my pride that is wounded by failure.

Even as I’ve grown in humility and patience with myself, I’ve realized that often my distress over failure, whether my own or others’, is because something good has been lost. What if I designed the course so well that everyone in it thrived? What if the struggling student put it all together and aced the final exam? What if I designed my experiment in the best way so that it gave beautiful results and was finished every day in time for me to get home to make dinner? What if I always gave thorough, careful attention to everything I did and everyone I was with, and never lost my temper with my kids or was sullen with my husband? Unrealistic, yes. But wouldn’t it be better?

Indeed it would be better. And just a couple of years ago, I realized that my Christian faith affirms and explains the longing I feel for this unrealistic but better world, along with the grief I feel at the losses that come from failures, as well as the far greater losses filling our world that come from violence, injustice, sickness, and death. As Christians, we believe that God has promised that someday the entire universe will be made perfect as Jesus returns to be fully present with us. We are promised that every loss will be redeemed and every tear will be wiped away. This wouldn’t be needed if there weren’t real losses that come from our human limitations and failures, not to mention from human cruelty.

This promise affirms to us that God knows and has compassion on the grief that comes with our losses, and has a future for us that will be free of grief and loss. The accounts of Jesus’s life demonstrate this compassion through and through. To take just one example: Near the end of Jesus’s own life, one of His friends, Lazarus, became seriously ill. Lazarus’s sisters, Martha and Mary, sent word to Jesus asking Him to come heal their brother, but Lazarus died before Jesus arrived. When Jesus arrived, He brought Lazarus back to life. But before He even made it to Lazarus’s tomb, He was met by the grieving sisters, and He wept with them in their grief, even though He knew He was about to restore their brother to them.

God’s compassion to us, and this promise of restoration, are for me the essential complement to trusting that God’s love for us does not depend on our accomplishments, and is not imperiled by our failures and shortcomings. Yes, I need to outgrow my perfectionism and become more patient and realistic with myself (as well as other people). This is happening, though slowly, and I’m gaining perspective on my failures and truly believing that they do not define me. But most of all, I’m placing my hope in the One who will restore all things and wipe every tear away. r

Catherine Crouch Catherine Crouch is an Associate Professor in the Depar tment of Physics at Swar thmore. She is married to Andy Crouch and together they are raising their children Timothy and Amy.

Swarthmore Peripateo | 12

“A

you cradle Him like the empty space in a hyperbolic cosine; His existence, deduced from premonition like He was the only sinusoidal thing that could ever exploit your symmetry &&i sometimes you’re jealous of His His imperfect symmetry ||ii the way He oscillates like the only simple harmonic ghost of yourself you ever knew && sometimes you starve him out like a dying thing because you are epsilon, greater than the space His knotted organs deserve to occupy && sometimes when He exhales He can feel his insides converging into something imaginary && still you say you complete him – iii && on nights when you try to erase His existence, you unroot the negatives of His footprints to remind yourself that parts of you are imaginary && that you are a complex thing && sometimes He is too real to see that && sometimes He’s jealous of your relationship with numbers because at least their existence is rational, deducible && sometimes He wonders if He can even exist as an entity divisible by zero && sometimes He wonders if He is divisible at all && still you will try to construct him like an algebraic thing, like a real thing, like a definition built upon axioms you swore into His collarbones because you were convinced He needed convincing like every number system needed basis && so the digits of His fingers became the most natural thing to call air because gasping and grasping are not too far

13 | Axiom

XIO

apart when your dying radius hits the negatives && sometimes you wonder what to call shape without diameter || space without distance || shape without shape && it is then you realize, there is something staring at you from behind the looking glass && that thing is real here && that thing is axiom in this space because it exists even though you’re not comfortable in your own metric && even though this space is compact with ghosts nesting the intervals on your ribcage to sleep, ghosts are but whispering sinusoids && whispering sinusoids are the only proof that your heart ripples through your chest like daybreak && dusk is the truest thing to call home when you’re afraid of your own existence, so you hide yourself behind incomprehensible symbols || poems where you write about yourself in (second person)3 && you should stop trying to prove yourself to Him because He is all you have in this space && that is reason enough for speculation.

M”

or, “how you found God through Mathematics, and vice versa”

by George Abraham

i && Indicates a logical “and” expression, as interpreted by a computer. ii || Indicates a logical “or” expression, as interpreted by a computer. iii Completeness is a notion regarding convergence of sequences, which is defined by infinitely small epsilon values.

Swarthmore Peripateo | 14

15 | Coherent Compassion

http://tinyurl.com/ko7dvdq

Coherent Compassion A Christian Perspective on Euthanasia and End of Life Care

by Nicholas Zahorodny At the beginning of this year, the lower house

of Belgium’s parliament voted decisively to legalize the euthanasia of minors. The amendment had already passed handily in the upper house, with only 17 of 71 voting to oppose the new legislation, and within a month the bill was officially signed into law by Belgium’s king. This swift passage and wide margin of victory in both houses of parliament reflect the general approbation of such legislation amongst the Belgian public.

Of those Belgian citizens surveyed in a recent poll, 75 percent approve the passage of laws that would render euthanasia by lethal injection legal for patients under the age of 18.1 Such high approval ratings, however, signal much more than just the prevalence of permissive attitudes regarding euthanasia; they signal an increasingly wide schism between the popular secular perspective and the traditional religious perspective on suffering, life, and death. Even the briefest survey of the debate surrounding euthanasia law in Belgium makes this conflict apparent. To offer but one example, Catholic Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard, in concert with leaders of Belgium’s Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities, issued a statement urging that “to prescribe euthanasia for vulnerable people radically contradicts their condition as human beings.

We cannot enter into a logic which will lead to the destruction of society’s very foundations.”2 While on the other side of the debate, Philippe Mahoux, a Socialist Party senator, former surgeon, and outspoken proponent of the amendment, calls the extension of legal euthanasia to minors “the ultimate gesture of humanity.” 3 At first glance, the highly polarized nature of this conflict may seem perplexing. Both interlocutors quoted above have shown themselves, beyond any reasonable doubt, deeply sensitive to the tragedy of human suffering, especially to the suffering of young children. How, then, can their conclusions about what euthanasia represents, both for the individual and for society, be so utterly irreconcilable? The pertinent difference lies in the type of action each considers an authentic expression of love for the long-suffering and terminally ill. In this article, I aim to develop a Christian perspective on suffering, palliative care, and euthanasia that is not only reasonable in itself but is also more compelling than its secular counterparts. I will be-

Swarthmore Peripateo | 16

gin with a brief outline of human goodness and flourishing, which will serve as a framework for later inquiries affirming the intrinsic and unconditional value of human life. I will then argue that an authentically compassionate species of care, one fully consonant with the inviolability of innocent life, cannot include euthanasia or physician assisted suicide. A consistent Christian ethic of life, as well as any sound secular morality, must always remain deeply concerned with easing suffering, but never at the expense of destroying the source of value, the human person, such concern is meant to protect.

The first step in developing this ethic is to move beyond the sandy foundation of moral intuitionism and to build instead upon the bedrock of right reason. A passage from Romans will serve as the fountainhead of this endeavor: “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience bears witness (emphasis added).”4 Such a passage suggests the beginnings of a foundation for ethical thinking. For it draws the reader to consider the existence of a law, a standard of normativity, intrinsic to the human person, a standard whose force derives not from common agreement, independent choice, or external imposition. It is related to, but clearly distinct from, the human conscience. Whoever a man is, wherever he is, and whatever he may happen to believe, a look into his heart, into the substance of his being, will reveal the same immutable law, as much a part of him as any other feature of his personal reality. But how does one come to know this law, to be convinced of its reality, and to search its decrees?

It is helpful to illustrate the answer to this question with an analogy. Amongst arborists, it is generally not a matter of contention whether a given tree is doing well or doing poorly. If the roots of an oak, for example, provide the tree with water and nutrients from the soil, if its branches grow leaves and sprout acorns in the proper season, if its bark remains resilient and its heartwood intact, then the tree is said to be doing well. Likewise, if the tree were deficient in any of these respects, it would be said to be doing poorly, or at least sub-optimally. These measures of the oak’s flourishing are not arbitrary; they are rooted in a reflective consideration of its characteristic behavior and integral capacities. From the tree’s nature, then, proceeds its standard of natural goodness.5 It is the same with man. Certainly, human beings and trees are substantially different. Both, however, are substances, each with a species-specific nature that grounds the ends toward which the whole and its parts are directed. A human nature, fashioned, like all natures, by God in a divine act of creation, is the wellspring of our essential powers. Broadly construed, they are nutritive and reproductive, like the oak tree, sensory and locomotive, as is typical of animal natures, and of course, rational, a feature unique, amongst material substances, to humankind. These powers, and the ends toward which they point, form the foundation of natural goodness in human beings. If claims involving “ought” are to be fully and distinctively applicable to human beings, then they must be framed in a way compatible with this uniquely human standard of natural goodness. The alternative is a morality detached from the

17 | Coherent Compassion

foundational realities of the human person and, therefore, from the law God has placed, according to St. Paul, in every human heart.6 Because I have painted this account of human goodness briefly and with broad strokes, there are certain to be a number of objections. Nevertheless, in order to move expediently to the article’s focus, the ethics of euthanasia and physician assisted suicide, I refer the reader to other articles that have specifically taken up answering these objections.7 Having established a working foundation for claims involving “ought”, it is possible to formulate the question: What attitudes ought we to hold toward the sick and the dying? How ought we to treat them so that our actions express justice, charity, and full respect for their humanity? The Christian perspective on this first question could not be clearer. Most will recognize it in Matthew 25:31-46, wherein Christ discusses the judgment of souls before God. “Then shall the king say to them that shall be on his right hand: Come, ye blessed of my Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you…For I was hungry, and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in; naked, and you covered me; sick and you visited me; I was in prison, and you came to me…Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.”8 The message Christ communicates here is both extremely challenging and extremely serious. The hungry, the naked, and the sick, all of the most dependent amongst us, bear the “face of Christ”.9 Like Christ crucified, these people are helpless. They are despised and rejected by the world. Jesus’s message is challenging because the fallen nature of humankind disposes men and women to respond to weakness with apathy and scorn rather than with pity and compassion. To locate the sanctity of the divine image in those whom severe illness has deformed, whether physically or psychologically, and to revere that image sincerely, are the clear commands of this passage.

The corresponding severity of these commands becomes evident as soon as one considers the fate of the people who have failed to keep them: “Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me not to eat: I was thirsty and you gave me not to drink.”10 As we would consider the needs of the young, the healthy, and the strong, so too must we consider the needs of the old, the sickly, and the weak. Illness and disability, even in a life that is rapidly ending, do not excuse hardness of heart but rather magnify the condemnation that falls upon it. For it is only in the context of caring about the infirm as full and equal human beings that one can ask sincerely about what constitutes a coherent expression of compassion for the sick and the dying.

Compassion always aims at the good of its recipient. What sorts of action, then, are consonant with the standard of human goodness and flourishing developed above? The first major consequence of this account of human flourishing is that all actions taken with respect to the sick and the dying must be life affirming rather than life denying. For the good of life is the precondition of the pursuit and the possession of all other earthly goods. Health, knowledge, friendship, procreation, and the other basic goods each tend toward

suffering that it is actually, with the patient’s consent, an act of compassion to end their lives and thereby to end their pain. Disease has already robbed the patient of any enjoyment he might have once found in living. His former autonomy, his ability to strive after his own wishes and to act upon his own will, may have been wasted entirely by sickness. His capacity to be even a passive recipient of goodness may have dwindled down to almost nothing.

Chronic pain renders mere subsistence a trial and a torment. If the patient recognizes these realities and begs for a release from his misery, does not our sense of humanity demand that we oblige him? As Belgian Senator Mahoux suggests, the scandal ought to consist not in the ending of a life, but in the unnecessary continuation of extreme suffering—that alone is truly scandalous.13 When a dying patient begs for a final release from excruciating suffering, it is providing just such a release that truly expresses compassion for the patient in agony. Certainly, the doctor’s role is to heal, but when healing is impossible, the refusal of such a desperate and difficult request can only be callous and dogmatic.

The emotional and rhetorical force of the argument from compassion is impressive, but a critical examination of its interior logic reveals a set of presumptions that is deeply unsettling. The first of these presumptions is that the life of the sick or terminally ill patient is not worth living. If a young, perfectly healthy individual were, for whatever reason, to request euthanasia, then the supporter of compassionate euthanasia would reject the request without a second thought. There is nothing compassionate, in the sense of compassion developed above, about killing an innocent in the

Photo by Sam Gutierrez

the perfection of those integral human capacities to which they correspond, but after the loss of life there is no human left to perfect. Termination of life is the termination of all earthly goodness and of all future possibility of such goodness. To return to an earlier example, an arborist can neither save, nor heal, nor treat a blighted tree by chopping it down. In the same way, ending a human life, even one deeply afflicted by serious illness, cannot possibly benefit the one that lives it. Death is, in this sense, the greatest loss, the greatest evil that could befall a man. By doing violence to the nature that God made, life-denying action annihilates the source of value, the human person, that a consistent health care ethic exists to protect. Care expressive of love for the human person, then, must always affirm the inviolability of innocent human life.11 Here one might object that while the above considerations may seem sufficient justification for a prohibition against the common cases of intentional killing, they are entirely insufficient for dealing with the more complicated cases of euthanasia and physician assisted suicide. In these cases, the patient under consideration is suffering from a debilitating disease, suffering to such an extent that he would choose to die rather than to live. Although the various defenses of physician assisted suicide and euthanasia that emerge from this consideration are complex and often overlap, I will confine myself here to addressing the argument from compassion.12 I take up the argument from compassion because it is probably the most familiar and certainly tends to wield the most rhetorical force in public debate. The central claim of this argument is that some patients suffer such intense, debilitating, and irremediable

Swarthmore Peripateo | 18

prime of his life. For as long as the supporter of compassionate row language from the argument on natural goodness, if a patient’s euthanasia agrees that compassion must aim at the good of its re- integral human capacities are so severely diminished by disability cipient, then the permissibility of euthanasia for the young and and pain that his potential for authentic flourishing is reduced to healthy is incompatible with his position. By the same principle, almost nothing, then the quality of his life is virtually zero. There however, a supporter of compassionate euthanasia for the sick and is no scandal in saying that such lives are not worth living; lamendying must admit that it is better, or else a matter of indifference, tably, whatever quality of life the patient once had is just no longer for the sick and terminally ill to die than to live, or in other words, there. If someone realizes that he has nothing for which to live, that their lives are not really worth living. Otherwise, euthanasia is especially in the case that life is painful and death is imminent, not an act aimed at the good of its recipient, and hence not an act then there seems nothing wrong in allowing a doctor to ease the of compassion. patient’s pain by ending his life. The patient with a zero, or perhaps Even individuals defending euthanasia on the grounds of hu- even sub-zero, quality of life simply passes away, without any great manity and compassion thereby communicate an extremely dis- consequence, moral or otherwise. tressing message: there is a group of pitifully weak, totally depenThis understanding of value as quality of life, however, depends dent people at the fringe of society, and these people are of so little for its force upon the false supposition that life is only instrumenvalue that it is a matter of indifference, at best, whether they live or tally valuable, rather than intrinsically valuable. To claim that life die. Declines, especially rapid declines, from good health to debili- is only instrumentally valuable is to claim, much as in the quality tating illness represent times of deep personal trial, times often ac- of life argument, that life is only valuable as a means, an instrucompanied by depression or depression-like symptoms. The society ment, for experiencing and achieving things that are themselves that responds to such suffering good. Merely subsisting, perwith the normalization of eusisting through time and takTermination of life is the termination of all thanasia, with the message that ing up space, has no value. In such lives really are not worth earthly goodness and of all future possibility this sense, a life is like a vessel, living, has failed miserably in worthless in its own right but of such goodness. showing its weakest true charvalued insofar as it contains ity and true compassion.14 good things. Once everything One might insist that this of goodness has leaked out, perinterpretation is uncharitable. Euthanasia does not communicate haps through an ever-widening crack, there is no reason to keep that the life of the patient is worthless, but rather that, beyond a the vessel. Such an instrumental, quality of life model of human certain threshold of suffering, it is simply unreasonable to force a value, however, relies upon a radically flawed account of the human person to continue living against his will. This attempted riposte, person. For in a fundamental way, the human person is not like though, is nothing more than circumlocution. Imagine a star track the vessel that contains water. He is, rather, the wellspring from runner that has crushed his leg in a terrible car accident. Realizing which that water flows. Capacities, properties, achievements, and that he will never run again, he visits his doctor and says, “My leg experiences do not just accidentally attach to persons. They are is damaged beyond repair and will be a source of chronic pain for natural outgrowths of our human nature, a nature that unifies the the rest of my life. My career in track, upon which I pinned all of entire human person. Integral human capacities and properties, as my hopes and aspirations for the future, is finished. How can you explained earlier, flow from human nature, and the successes, acreasonably expect me to carry on?” Even if the doctor were gener- complishments, and experiences of human life flow, in turn, from ally unopposed to compassionate euthanasia, he would reject the the development of integral capacities and properties. patient’s request, instead recommending therapy and medication.

Unlike everything that flows from it, however, a nature is endurWhy? Because any such judgment about reasonableness presup- ing unto death. Though the pathways leading up to the surface may poses another, logically prior judgment about the value of what be choked by debilitating disease, the underground source remains would be saved and the value of what would be destroyed. When constant, untouched, always distinctly human. A disease can devaswhat a doctor decides to destroy is a life, whether one uses the tate a person, undermining capacities and obliterating experience, language of reasonableness or not, that decision is underlain by the but it can never make that person any less human. For the Lord presupposition that such a life is not valuable enough to be worth God imprints upon every human being the same rational nature, living, a presupposition difficult, as shown above, to reconcile with a nature that is never effaced, even in the midst of the deepest and a sincere love for the human person. cruelest of afflictions. We are all made in His Divine Image, the One response open to the defender of euthanasia and physi- wellspring of our nature formed and sustained unto death by His cian assisted suicide is to reject such a harsh interpretation of the great love for us. To understand the supreme value of such a life, claim that some lives have little value. If one thinks of the value an inherently and unalterably human life, to understand that one of a life as the quality of that life, the defender of compassionate must value the wellspring and not just the water, is to understand euthanasia might suggest, then the idea that some lives have less the intrinsic value of human life. To justify euthanasia with appeals value than others need not express contempt for the sick and dy- to low quality of life is to ignore this value and to do violence to ing. Instead, such a view would merely express a mature reflection that which we are called to love. on the objective and subjective condition of the patient. To borIf euthanasia, though, cannot be a coherent expression of com-

19 | Coherent Compassion

passion, then what are we to do in the face of tragic suffering, especially the suffering of children? The argument from compassion is so well received, despite the cruelty and indifference of its interior logic, in part because its surface rhetoric promises a straightforward, streamlined solution to terrible suffering. To believe that such a solution exists, however, is to engage in magical thinking— there cannot be a single solution to the countless cases that will arise over time. However, there can be, and there must be, a holistic framework, a system of supports flexible enough to engage each patient in a fully human way. An important element of this framework is a robust network of formal and informal palliative care.

Palliative care is a special sort of care, often for those in the final phases of life, structured around the understanding that the treatment of patients experiencing deep suffering must be multidimensional. The sick and dying patient is never just a medical problem, because a human being is never just his biology. There are psychological and spiritual elements to lived experience, and these elements cannot be ignored if one hopes to treat the whole person. At the physical level, the current state of pain-relief and painmanagement is truly remarkable; physical suffering that would have been difficult to manage only forty or fifty years ago can now be controlled routinely and effectively.15 The claim, often made by those in favor of euthanasia, that in most cases where euthanasia is being contemplated the pain is truly unbearable and incapable of relief is becoming less and less plausible.

As most people suffering from a debilitating and terminal disease struggle intimately with anxieties related to alienation from society, diminishing personal autonomy, and fear of death, however, the medical treatment of physical pain is not enough. Formal networks of palliative care also include, therefore, psychologists, counselors, and, for some, chaplains experienced in engaging with the concerns of the sick and the dying. Nevertheless, such is also the place for the special involvement of informal networks of palliative care. Here, the family and local communities, especially faith communities, are of the utmost importance in standing as witnesses of love and charity to those living through a time of deep personal darkness. For a patient to be aware that he will always remain in full communion with others and that others will always stand in solidarity with him ought to be the ideal for a society determined to recognize the full worth and value of its weakest and most vulnerable members. A society determined to realize this ideal, then, will channel public awareness and resources toward building up the formal networks of palliative care and also toward safeguarding the informal networks: local communities and, of course, the family.

This necessity of creating a society in solidarity with the sick and the dying is the reason that there is no more pernicious phrase in the current euthanasia debate than “death with dignity.” Human life is incredibly fragile, shot through with weakness at almost every joint. No one lives but that he lives in a state of persistent limitation and dependence upon others. Such is the human condition.

Insisting on some false ideal of radical freedom, independence, and strength, in order to hold it up as a standard for human dignity is to perpetuate an illusion rooted in pride and destructive of the human family. There is nothing undignified, nothing subhuman or deserving of contempt in the struggles of the sick and the dying. Jesus

Christ, one might recall, chose to humble Himself, to live a life full of human weakness, and to suffer an agonizing death. In the suffering of the terminally ill, then, there is a special sign, an extraordinary closeness to the Passion of our Lord. These men and women share in His dignity as they share in His pain. Let us not, therefore, turn away. Let us not abandon them upon the Cross. r Endnotes 1. For these details and more, see the New York Times (“Belgium Close to Allowing Euthanasia for Ill Minors” and “Belgian Senate Votes to Allow Euthanasia for Terminally Ill Children”) 2. Reported in the Catholic Herald (“Belgium Bishops Attack Proposed Euthanasia Law Extension”) 3. Reported in the New York Times (“Belgian Senate Votes to Allow Euthanasia for Terminally Ill Children”) 4. Romans 2:15, Douay-Rheims translation 5. This analogy is largely taken from Moral Theory: A Non-Consequentialist Approach by David Oderberg 6. For these thoughts and more in the same vein, see Moral Theory: A Non-Consequentialist Approach by David Oderberg, Aquinas by Edward Feser, and Man and the State by Jacques Maritain 7. See the above authors and texts, as well as Practical Philosophy: Ethics, Society and Culture by John Haldane 8. Matthew 25:31-40, DR translation 9. From “Address of Holy Father Francis to Participants in the Meeting Organized by the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations” 10. Matthew 25:42, DR translation 11. There is an interesting debate about whether one upholding the inviolability of innocent life can maintain a principled, morally relevant (in some circumstances) distinction between killing and allowing to die. Though I believe that such a distinction is defensible, its defense lies outside the scope of this article. For a very basic introduction to this question, see Life and Death in Health Care Ethics by Helen Watt 12. Arguments from personal autonomy and from utilitarianism are also commonly invoked in support of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. For a very basic introduction and response to these arguments, see Life and Death in Health Care Ethics by Helen Watt 13. Reported in the New York Times (“Belgium Close to Allowing Euthanasia for Ill Minors” and “Belgian Senate Votes to Allow Euthanasia for Terminally Ill Children”) 14. See Life and Death in Health Care Ethics by Helen Watt 15. For a brief history of advances in pain management, see A Capsule History of Pain Management by Marcia Muldrum

Nicholas Zahorodny ’16 Nicholas is an Eastern Rite Catholic and a double major in philosophy and economics. He loves to set his alarm clock to ring at 5:30 AM on Saturday mornings.

Swarthmore Peripateo | 20

Morality, Rationality, and Natural Law: A Response to John Lennox

by Greg Brown

21 | Morality, Rationality, and Natural Law: A Response to John Lennox

Consider from time to time what passions are predominant in your soul; and when you have discovered them, adopt a manner of life which is altogether contrary to them, in thoughts, in words, and in deeds. – St. Francis de Sales, 16091

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. – David Hume, 17382 Introduction

These quotes—both old and western—instantiate a stark disagreement over the nature of of morality and rationality.

Contemporary readers may find St. Francis’s recommendation odd, straitlaced, and ascetic. He wrote it, though, in a practical spiritual guide for laity. His admonition denies Hume’s understanding of motivation as sub-rational and reason as instrumental.

It would surprise no one, I presume, to suggest that St. Francis’s attitude is more recognizable in the Gospel, but Hume’s position surely has a deep hold on our modern consciousness.

Last semester, Oxford Professor John Lennox visited Swarthmore for the Veritas Forum, to give a lecture in which he argued that morality depends on God.3 As I will explain in more detail below, Lennox invokes Hume in the course of his argument and draws a theistic conclusion. One might summarize Lennox’s argument as follows: There are objective moral truths, like: the Holocaust was a grave evil. There is also an is-ought gap: one cannot infer statements in the imperative (“ought”) mood from statements in the indicative (“is”) mood.

No factual description implies a normative prescription. With reference only to the things of this world, there can be no grounds for condemning horrible actions.

In particular, the is-ought gap vitiates both historical and recent attempts4 to derive morality from biology. Since morality is not adequately accounted for by this world, there is good reason to believe that God exists to ground morality.

Lennox carefully acknowledges the ambiguities inherent in discussing the re-

lationship between morality and God. A Christian’s insistence that morality depends on God may offend the atheist. But, Lennox says, one does not have to believe in God in order to act morally, for surely there are nonbelievers who do great things.

Nevertheless, his argument remains controversial in its claim that “there is [not] a rational basis for morality without the existence of God.” As a Christian, I agree with the conclusion and the proffered qualification: morality depends on God and atheists can act morally (their non-attendance of Catholic Mass notwithstanding). In some respects Lennox’s argument is theologically attractive. If sound, it would show that the human world is insufficient for morality and therefore it appears to accentuate our dependence on God. Conversely, it is perhaps felt that if the is-ought gap were bridgeable, then morality would be autonomous from God, and that would be bad.

These features of the argument do not strike me as decisive, for I believe another moral theory still preserves the dependence of morality on God, although my focus lies elsewhere. In my judgment, two of Lennox’s positions are difficult to hold consistently: - When an atheist acts morally, he or she acts non-rationally; and - What is thereby implied: Oftentimes, when a theist acts morally, he or she acts rationally.

In addition, some of what Lennox says about the substance of moral agreement commits him to a non-rational view of moral behavior. Finally, Lennox does not attempt to block the morally non-cognitivist and subjectivist conclusions, typified

by Hume’s quote above, which the is-ought gap historically has been taken to support.

I will spell out this critique of Lennox in greater depth and then consider an alternative natural-law account of morality.

Rationality in Lennox’s Argument

It will be important to get a handle on what Lennox holds to be the psychological component of a good act. Lennox does not say a lot about this in his talk. One of Lennox’s remarks suggests his position: “God created human beings with an inbuilt moral compass.” Why invoke God

here? Lennox responds, “The God question comes in to answer, why is it that we all have the same morality?” Lennox, then, holds God to be the best explanation for the sameness of morality among humans.

Lennox’s claim that atheists lack “a rational basis” for morality is meant to be a criticism, so he holds that morality can and should be rational. “Non-cognitivists” deny precisely this, arguing that the rationality of action is merely apparent, and morality is really driven by sub-rational passions. It seems that, if morality can be rational, then it must be rational. In other words, if morality cannot be reduced to or eliminated in favor of the sub-rational, then morality is essentially rational. Why? To act non-rationally is to act for the wrong reason or without any reason. Since one’s responsibility for an act depends on its being done freely, it is hard to imagine non-rational acts being designated “moral” alongside choices freely made for good reasons. To the extent that atheists act for the wrong reasons, they engage in morally blameworthy behavior, though we may not blame them for acts yielding good results despite defective motivation—as when someone helps the poor for the sake of vanity, or fights crime to maximize preference satisfaction.5 The distinction between the rationality of the moral action of the atheist and the theist must be marked by a parallel distinction in their moral psychologies. It is hard to tell what that distinction would be. It could not be that theists, like Lennox, recognize the inadequacy of naturalistic ethics and the problem posed by the is-ought gap, and consequently recognize that morality depends on God—for many are not even aware of such philosophical considerations, and much less do they attend to them when faced with a moral dilemma. Often a theist will act well in the same circumstances and for similar reasons as does an atheist.

Both will save a child drowning in a lake, and both will (usually) decide not to steal petty cash. The theist in general will not have specifically or exclusively theistic motivations for doing so. So if the atheist acts non-rationally in such cases, so does the theist. To phrase the problem as a dilemma, the reasons that govern an action are either relevant or irrelevant to the act’s moral quality. If relevant, then a general distinc-

Swarthmore Peripateo | 22

tion cannot be drawn between theists and atheists, who often act for similar reasons.

If irrelevant, then morality on Lennox’s view is non-rational. In either case he cannot appeal to the atheist’s good behavior in arguing for the existence of God as a “rational” foundation for morality.

Part of this tension arises from If the source of moral activity is the apologetic aim of Lennox’s armerely ‘an in-built moral compass,’ gument. Do we really want to say that an atheist who saves someone then little has been gained over from drowning did not have “a rathe evolutionary-biological tional basis” for that action? But theories of morality which Lennox this tendency to regard morality as sub-rational also resurfaces in Lenrejects nox’s other premises. For instance, one premise of his argument is that people generally agree on moral issues, and therefore God is needed to explain their common morality. But in what sense do people agree morally? The point here is that people agree on most moral issues, like whether killing an (adult) human is wrong.

This constitutes agreement only if one disregards the reasonability of morality, for it can only be claimed that people by and large agree if their reasons for agreeing are ignored.

Even in those cases on which atheists and theists agree—a perpetually shrinking field—there usually is unstated but significant disagreement over justification.

For instance, Peter Singer holds that killing infants is wrong not because they are intrinsically valuable by virtue of their humanity (for they are not mentally developed enough to be “persons,” and to attribute value based on species membership is “speciesist”) but because killing them usually violates the preferences of the parents.

In cases where this negative utility does not obtain, when the child is unwanted, and especially when the child’s future is judged to be not worth living, infanticide can be permissible.6 So when Christians—who find an absolute prohibition against murder in the Fifth Commandment—say with Singer that killing is wrong, do they agree with him? We can say so only if humanity’s common “moral compass” merely tracks conclusions rather than the justifications adduced in their favor.7 Morality turns out to consist in “doing the right thing.” If atheists and theists are to be construed as in agreement on most issues, then intentions

23 | Morality, Rationality, and Natural Law: A Response to John Lennox

and reasons cannot be relevant.

Lennox and the Is-Ought Gap

To summarize the foregoing, Lennox’s argument requires drawing distinctions between the rationality of atheists and theists that cannot be generally maintained. The issue of rationality crops up also in Lennox’s endorsement of David Hume’s unbridgeable gulf between “is” and “ought”: Now I disagree with David Hume on many things that aren’t relevant to tonight, but on one thing I do find him very convincing. He observed, in his reading of moral philosophy, that people often advance arguments from what ought to be on the basis of factual statements about what is. They would describe a situation: it is like this, it is like that. Then suddenly, in the text, it would change from “is” to “ought.” Now Hume would say you cannot get from “is” to “ought.” You cannot get from the indicative to the imperative.

In terms of formal logic, whatever is in the conclusion of an argument must be contained in its premises, so one cannot derive morality from factual judgments that do not already contain moral principles.

Many authors have drawn non-cognitivist conclusions from the is-ought gap; that is, they have taken it as a reason to doubt the objectivity of morality. The basic intuition is obvious enough: If morality cannot be derived from factual statements, then surely it cannot be derived at all, for where do we start other than factual statements? Lennox, like most Christians, will not endorse this move. A Christian might respond that morality does not need to be derived from “is” statements, because we can learn what is good by faith, from Scripture, and from religious authorities, like the Catechism of the Catholic Church, our parents, and pastors.8 There are some problems with this response. It is not available to Lennox, at least not as an exhaustive account of moral knowledge, because as he grants and insists, non-Christians can behave morally.9 More worryingly, perhaps, is that, given the is-ought gap, theism does not obviously solve the problem. As Edward Feser points out: Suppose Hume’s stricture against deriv-

ing an “ought” from an “is” really were well-founded. It would follow that the purely theological ethics...cannot get off the ground. For statements about what has been divinely revealed, or what God has commanded, would be mere statements of “fact” (as Hume understands facts), statements about what “is” the case. And how (given Hume’s account of practical reason) does that tell us anything about “value,” about what we “ought” to do?10 Furthermore, if the source of moral activity is merely (that being the key word in the point I develop here) “an in-built moral compass,” then little has been gained over the evolutionary-biological theories of morality which Lennox rejects, besides the truism that some of those theories have had disastrous consequences historically. Does the is-ought gap imply that I cannot infer that I ought to help someone from the fact that he is suffering? If so, then on what basis do I help him? That I do so is “built in.”

Lennox critiques Richard Dawkins’ view whereby we, as moral actors, “dance to the beat of our DNA,” but on his view, since moral principles cannot be inferred from descriptions, do we dance to the beat of our in-built moral compass?

I pose these objections tentatively, as questions, because I do not suppose that no response can be made.11 Nevertheless, given the reference to Hume, Lennox owes his listeners an argument blocking Hume’s skeptical conclusions. Lennox’s assertion that his disagreements with Hume are “not relevant to tonight” is too dismissive; indeed, Feser above qualifies that the limitations on theological ethics would depend specifically on Hume’s conceptions of facts and practical reason, both of which I will reject below. In handling this objection, at the very least Lennox would have to admit that a rejection of Hume’s other theses (and an articulation of alternatives) is essential to his argument.

All of this suggests only that the isought gap may have undesirable implications that Christians should hesitate to accept. A skeptic might press, “But what if it is nevertheless true? So much the worse for Christianity.” I will rebut this response after introducing the theory of classical (“old”) natural law and examining its handling of

the is-ought gap.

Natural Law

What follows will be primarily expository, though for a Christian audience dialectical arguments can be made in favor of natural-law ethics. Many Christians— though not all—will view morality as a rational endeavor based on the fact that man is “made in the image and likeness of God.”12 Moreover morality is “written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.”13 So natural law explains why atheists can act rationally—in brief, because it is natural for them to do so, and they, like theists, can recognize the actual goodness in certain actions. Though their natural ends depend on God, knowledge of this is not (always) required for rational moral behavior.

To begin, let us reimagine our dialectical opponent: not as an apologist like Lennox but as a moral skeptic like Hume. Moral skepticism acquires much of its steam from the intuition of a so-called fact-value distinction, a thesis related to and often blurred together with the is-ought gap.14 Whereas the is-ought gap is a semantic thesis about what can be deduced from descriptive propositions, the fact-value distinction is an ontological claim about the nature of facts and values. Hume endorsed both, largely on account of his empiricist epistemology and the way he defines “facts,” which rules out the objectivity of morality a priori.15 Facts—whatever they are—are paradigmatically normal. But the truth of a fact-value distinction therefore seems to suggest that “values” must be metaphysically odd and quite unlike plain old facts. A Humans, as rational beings, can engage moral theory constructed from a metaphysics that in practical and moral reasoning—an shades the alleged disapplication of the human power of tinction between facts rationality to the fulfillment of basic and values may be able to overcome this issue. human ends. To be morally good is to be Natural law starts by a good practical reasoner. looking at natural goodness. Human goodness is goodness for humans, but goodness may be attributed even to non-rational beings to whom it would be pointless to moralize. There is goodness for cats and there

Swarthmore Peripateo | 24

is goodness for trees. Humans, as rational beings, can engage in practical and moral reasoning—an application of the human power of rationality to the fulfillment of basic human ends. To be morally good is to be a good practical reasoner; as such, natural-law theory situates moral behavior in a broader account of goodness, thereby rendering it less odd.

Let’s make this more precise. We can enter the debate by asking a grandiose question: What is good? This question has received countless answers in the history of philosophy, and therefore most of them are wrong. I will offer one. We do not predicate “is good” exclusively in moral contexts, and the meanings with which we do predicate it are not identical. If I tell you “x is good” and “y is good,” then you are left very much in the dark, for suppose x is Charlie, a cat, and y is Knifey, a knife. Merely knowing that x and y are good A good is an end, and to conceive does not warrant the inference that x and y share some propof it as good is to recognize it erty. Charlie might be good beas something to be desired and cause he is free of illness, musobtained. cular, and cares for his kittens endearingly, whereas Knifey might only be good for stabbing. In general, the meaning of the proposition “x is good” depends on our knowing that “x is an F,” so that “x is good” is analyzed as “x is a good F.”16 A thing is good inasmuch as it succeeds at being the sort of thing that it is. The actualization and perfection of that thing as a member of its kind—an entity with its essence or nature—is constitutive of its goodness.17 Charlie is disposed to care for his kittens, among other things, and it is because that disposition or end is inscribed in his nature as a cat that his fulfilling of it constitutes (part of ) his goodness. What is good for something else might not be good for Charlie.18 For this reason, goodness is related to being, or as the Catholic theologian and philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas held, “goodness and being are really the same, and differ only in idea.”19 So-called values, then, are aspects of facts. The neat and tidy bifurcation between facts and values does not really obtain.

So there is nothing uniquely moral about goodness-as-such. Cats and trees are not rational, so their good does not consist

25 | Morality, Rationality, and Natural Law: A Response to John Lennox

in behaving morally. This extends even to humans; to attribute goodness to a person is not eo ipso to attribute moral goodness to that person. Breaking my arm is bad even though I am not necessarily morally responsible for it. The badness of the injury is not interest-relative either; if I perversely decided to break my arm and now claim to prefer it that way, my flourishing will still be impaired.20 Humans are rational. A human reasons well—and thereby flourishes in respect of his rationality—when he identifies goods and disposes himself to obtain and respect them, which process often requires choosing appropriate means—although to be sure, this is usually done unconsciously.

Moral reasoning enters when one must avoid falling afoul of competing goods.21

“Is” and “Ought” Revisited

Let us return to the is-ought gap, the claim that moral prescriptions cannot be derived from factual descriptions. I begin with a few examples posed by Matthew O’Brien and Robert Koons that challenge the is-ought gap: [F]rom the fact that you hand me certain green pieces of paper, I can infer that I now owe you $20; from the fact that a tree’s roots are wide and numerous, I infer that the tree is healthy; from the fact that another beer would make me woozy, I infer that my drinking it would be intemperate. All three of these inferences share the same logical form, and all three derive values—owing, healthfulness, and intemperance—from natural facts. There is nothing logically distinctive about the third inference, which is the only ethical one, and so unless there is something suspect about the first two, there is no general problem with “deriving” ethical conclusions from natural premises.22 Yet we are more inclined to accept the is-ought gap than the is-owe gap. The fact that we regard the is-ought gap as uniquely problematic is probably an indication that we have misconceived the nature of practical rationality.

Perhaps one can derive the intemperance (and badness, even) of drinking another beer from the fact that it would make one woozy, but one still cannot derive that

one ought not to drink another beer. Here we should consider the account of practical reasoning provided above. Since humans are rational, part of their goodness itself consists in disposing themselves to obtain what they recognize as good. As John Haldane says, “[T]he connection between judging something to be good and concluding that, other things being equal, one ought to act so as to achieve it is an internal one. That is to say, in the domain of practical reasoning to assent to a value judgment is, among other things, to be disposed to act on it.”

Part of human moral psychology is the “inseparability of evaluation and prescriptivity.” A good is an end, and to conceive of it as good is to recognize it as something to be desired and obtained. Haldane defends Thomas Aquinas’s first principle of practical reason—“Good is to be done and evil to be avoided”—as a solution to this problem.

The principle may seem trivial because we generally understand a “principle” as something that factors into our reasoning, like a premise in an argument. But as Haldane notes, Aquinas’s principle is “not a piece of moral advice. Rather, it states a constitutive element of the domain of practice.” 23 It is a principle in the more classical sense of that from which something—in this case, rational, purposive action—proceeds. That people dispose themselves to act on their evaluations is what generates prescriptions for action.24 Of course, many people do recognize that another beer will make them woozy but nevertheless proceed. One can therefore act against a good. In such a case there are other competing goods that win out.

Those goods may be merely apparent—as, a Christian might argue, the “goodness” of drunkenness is—and they may be supported by various sorts of rationalizations about which it would be impossible and uncharitable to generalize.25

Conclusion

This concludes a surely insufficient sketch of natural-law ethics.26 I have only mentioned its relationship to moral theology in passing: it is consonant with Christianity, preserves the rationality of morality, and explains why there can be good atheists—for acting morally does not necessarily require knowledge of or belief in

God, though a broader metaphysical and theological account will implicate Him as well.27 In addition: 1. Natural law gives proper attention to the moral object, the act that is done.28 The Ten Commandments, for example, require that specific boundaries be not transgressed, even though morality consists in much, much more than avoiding thou shall not’s.29 2. Natural law supplies an account of intention, which figures significantly in New Testament moral teaching.30 3. Natural law facilitates an analysis of virtue.31 4. Consequently upon (3), natural law yields an apt account of the supererogatory—that which is not morally required but is nevertheless praiseworthy. The centrality of the supererogatory to moral theology hardly needs to be belabored.32 Contemporary ethicists often eschew questions of virtue and supererogation for a few reasons: a narrow focus on the categories of permissibility and obligation, a tendency to draw big distinctions between the “right” and the “good” (or to eliminate the latter from the domain of reasonable public deliberation), and a tacit acquiescence to something like Hume’s dictum about the reason and the passions.33 Moreover, Christian ethicists should be poised to challenge these tendencies. Natural-law theory can frame questions about the good life over and above what is required as a matter of strict justice.

I hope I have been fair to Professor Lennox. His targets were not Aristotle and Aquinas but the “new atheists,” and he did admit that there is a vast literature on the is-ought gap that he could not take account of in his lecture. Nevertheless important and interesting questions remain unanswered. The reference to Hume raises the question of whether an is-ought gap is consistent with Christian moral realism. I suspect that qualifications drawn in order to relieve the problems associated with the rationality of morality and the is-ought gap will block Lennox’s argument for the existence of God, though I merely assert this since I cannot survey all possible responses.

Certainly there is some common ground between my view and Lennox’s, for if

Swarthmore Peripateo | 26

natural law is true, then each human is directed by a “moral compass”—his nature and the light of his intellect—which is universal. However, the moral law need not yield universal agreement. So in a way my argument is more demanding of

atheists, for it takes moral disagreement seriously. While I admit that atheists can act morally, how frequently they do so is another question—though the question can and should be asked of Christians as well. r

Endnotes 1. Introduction to the Devout Life, Part IV, Chapter X. 2. A Treatise on Human Nature (2.3.3).

3. “Does Morality Depend on God?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzdi1mZ0FHc. 4. A representative example of his contemporary targets is Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press, 2010).

5. I assume here that preference utilitarianism is false.

6. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (New York: Cambridge, 2011), 73-76 (on the definition of “person”), 151-154 (on infanticide).

7. One might ask whether this line of argument is consistent with my earlier claim that “[o]ften a theist will act well in the same circumstances and for similar reasons as does an atheist.” It is, because my claim relies on the fact that often, when atheists and theists do agree in a substantive sense, Lennox would not (in general) say that the theist is behaving non-rationally. Lennox’s argument, on the other hand, requires a high degree of agreement among the human population.

8. Another position that some Christians might take is that humans are not actually responsible for their good actions; rather, God is responsible. A quick retort would be that a human acts well when he chooses to act well; what he doesn’t choose to do, is not even a “human act,” but merely an “act of a human”—to invoke Aquinas’s famous distinction. If humans are in no sense responsible for their good actions, then those acts are not morally good, or else “moral” means something totally alien—so the point of attributing those actions to God, to affirm his goodness, is thereby undermined. A proper assessment of God’s role in our good actions will be one of cooperation.

9. It is also unavailable to him because he isn’t Catholic.

10. ‘A Christian Hart, a Humean Head,’ First Things, 6 March 2013.

11. New natural lawyers endorse the is-ought gap but would reject that it bears the implications suggested above. On their view, there are underived “basic goods,” arrived upon through “non-inferential acts of understanding,” that provide pre-moral “reasons for action.” By considering the self-evident “first principle of practical reason” that “one ought to act with a will consistent with integral human flourishing,” it is possible to derive “moral norms” (sometimes called “modes of responsibility”), second-order conclusive justifications for action, that suffice to adjudicate between serious conflicts of basic goods. See John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (New York: Oxford, 1980); Robert P. George, In Defense of Natural Law (New York: Oxford, 2001), ch. 1-2.

12. Genesis 1:27 (NIV); Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1701-1706.

13. 2 Cor 3:3 (NIV); on the natural possibility of knowing the Ten Commandments, see Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q100, A3.

14. John Haldane, Practical Philosophy: Ethics, Society, and Culture (Charlottesville: Imprint, 2009), 40-45.

15. “All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact.” An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section IV, Part I (emphases in original). Relations of ideas are conceptual truths, like “2+2=4” or “All bachelors are unmarried.” Matters of fact are known either by immediate sense impression or by inference from immediate sense impression. If this distinction is exhaustive, then there is no space for values in Hume’s catalogue of “the objects of human reason”—that is, true statements.

16. In philosophical jargon, goodness is attributed to a natural-kind predicate rather than predicated of an individual. The predicate “is good” on its own is of indeterminate content.

27 | Morality, Rationality, and Natural Law: A response to John Lennox

Peter Geach, ‘Good and Evil,’ Analysis 17 (1956), 32-42.

17. Anthony Lisska, Aquinas’s Theory of Natural Law: An Analytic Reconstruction (New York: Oxford, 1998), 96-100.

18. On the sort of essentialism for which this theory calls, see David Oderberg, Real Essentialism (New York: Routledge, 2007). This theory differs from that defended by Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam in, for instance, Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1972). See also Gyula Klima, “Contemporary vs. Aristotelian Essentialism,” Mind, Metaphysics, and Value in the Thomistic and Analytic Traditions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2002), ed. John Haldane.

19. Summa Theologiae, Ia, Q5, A1.

20. And my arm may not be your only concern.

21. David Oderberg, Moral Theory: A Non-Consequentialist Approach (Malden, MA: Blackwell), 36-38.

22. “Who’s Afraid of Metaphysics?’” Public Discourse, 10 June 2011 (emphases in original).

23. John Haldane, Practical Philosophy, 48.

24. Robert P. George (see n. 11) contends that these sorts of derivations are inadequate, citing a concession made by old natural lawyer Henry Veatch “that there can be…no inference of ‘propositions about man’s duties and obligations’ from ‘propositions about man’s nature.’” Veatch suggests that natural lawyers advancing the is-ought gap might understand deduction and inference “in a somewhat straitened and overly technical sense.”

George insists that this response is inadequate. See Robert P. George, In Defense of Natural Law, 88-89.

Veatch, I think, concedes too much here. The derivation of prescriptions should not be understood as a loosening of formal logic’s definitions of “deduction” and “inference.” Rather, practical reasoning involves the disposition to act on one’s evaluations of goods, goods which depend on the natures and dispositions of things. The old natural lawyer insists that the modern moral tradition has misconceived the nature of the “ought”: Because of the way that human practical reasoning works, moral theory is a matter of discovering what is perfective of humans, who, with that understanding, proceed to act.

25. On the relationship between the intellect and the will, see Stefaan E. Cuypers, “Thomistic Agent Causalism,” Mind, Metaphysics, and Value, ed. John Haldane, 90-108.

26. For general espousals of this theory see David Oderberg, Moral Theory; John Haldane, Practical Philosophy; Ralph McInerny, Ethica Thomistica: The Moral Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University, 1997); Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009), ch. 5.

27. Specifically, the question arises: why do humans (or anything else) possess the natures and ends that they do? An answer to this question, I claim, will lead one to God. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Q2, A2; or, for a more detailed contemporary exposition, Edward Feser, “Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way,” Nova et Vetera, 11 (2013), 707-49.

28. David Oderberg, Moral Theory, 86-88.

29. Exodus 20:2-17. (NIV) 30. For example, Matthew 5:21-22. (NIV) 31. David Oderberg, Moral Theory, 45-53.

32. Matthew 19:16-30. (NIV) 33. Elizabeth Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33 (1958); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue 3rd Edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2007).

Greg Brown ’16 Greg is from Durham, CT, and is planning to major in Mathematics. He enjoys to read, hike, and play cards.

Swarthmore Peripateo | 28

PERIPATEO CONTRIBUTORS AND STAFF George Abraham ’17

Emily Audet ’18

George plans to major in Engineering and/or Mathematics. He has written spoken word poems since 10th grade. He is a member of OASIS and recently competed in CUPSI.

Emily Audet is a first year with an interest in history and Arabic and political science and law.

She figures that if she doesn't sleep for the next four years, she can major in all of those.

You can see his piece on page 13.

Josh Gregory ’15 Josh, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is an Honors Religion major. He is an avid pilgrim.

You can see his piece on page 6.

Patrick Han ’16 Patrick Han plans to major in Political Science and minor in Public Policy and Chinese. A Chinese-born Korean raised in southern California, he enjoys fencing and long walks on the beach. He is also a great driver.

You can see her piece on page 5.

Carlo Bruno ’17 Carlo is an intended Political Science major from Half Moon Bay, California. He misses the beach and the Mexican food.

Dorothy Kim ’15 Dorothy is a Biology major with a minor in English Literature and is from Por t Washington, New York. She enjoys eating Moose Tracks ice cream and reading The Swatter in her free time.

Michael Superdock ’15 Nate Lamb ’17 Nate is a minimalist.

Michael is from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and is a major in Computer Science. When holding a hot object, he likes to drop it like it’s hot.

Heitor Santos ’17

Joseph Landis ’16

Heitor is a Political Science and Education special major from Brazil. He likes to lie on Parrish beach and complain about pasta bar.

Heitor believes in fairies.

Renan Meira ’17 Renan is from Brazil. He is a sophomore. He is an ar tist. He is cool. He actually doesn’t have a problem with long sentences.

29 | Peripateo Staff

Joseph is studying Political Science and Arabic.

He is a junior from Lancaster, Pennsylvania (but he is not Amish). He likes to climb things.

Yared Portillo ‘15 Yared is a Latin American Studies special major from Santa Maria, CA. She previously wanted to special major in adventuring.

Selah.

Pause. Breathe. Think of that.

May the path rise to meet you and surround you with good yet to be done.

May your hands grasp onto love and establish peace.

And when you are weary, may the Spirit overflow its banks and bathe your feet in grace.

Selah

‫סֶלָה‬

‫סֶלָה‬