Breaking the (Natural) Law
Appeals to what is “only natural” must reckon not only with the brokenness of a world subject to sin, but also with the miraculous inbreaking of supernatural love.
By Delaney Thull
From “all natural” products to the justification “it’s only natural,” we all make frequent claims about what does or does not meet the “natural” definition. We look to nature to decide what is good for us: think about the modern movement to reform corporate America’s workplace culture to properly value getting a good night’s sleep. Champions of sleeping often offer explanations about how sleep is—by nature—essential for human wellbeing.
Sometimes, however, our appeals to nature conflict. Take the widespread (and growing) popularity of video games or the ongoing love for sports, like American football and rugby. It’s part of our nature to enjoy competing and collaborating—being creative and connecting through play. But do we really want to say that our enjoyment of the violence prevalent in so many video games or sports is good because it’s just part of how we’re made?
Given our tendency to look to nature for many of these considerations, it’s no surprise that we do the same when addressing significant moral questions about life. We base decisions on how to organize our communities, or what practices to permit in the law, on some kind of natural order. Even Saint Paul makes one such claim in 1 Corinthians 11, arguing that “nature itself teaches” about the differences between men’s and women’s hair. He uses this appeal as part of the reasoning for his pastoral advice that women in the church in Corinth should cover their hair.
Or, for a modern example, consider how contemporary debates about parenting often hinge on claims about what nature demands for healthy maternity experiences and successful child rearing outcomes. Breastfeeding is natural for humans, but do children need it to flourish? Women have a natural window of fertility, but should that limit their reproductive choices?
Sometimes our appeals to nature reference what we moderns think of as biological science, where we observe parts of life on planet Earth that have to do with ecological, biochemical, anatomical, and physical phenomena. One of the earliest systematic theorizers of nature was Aristotle. Studying everything from sea sponges and octopi to olives and figs, he argued that we could reason on the basis of our observations about the natural world. Doing so in an orderly and organized fashion would help us to discover and understand the natural functions of different plants and animals through a process of 1) observation, 2) comparing and contrasting, and 3) categorization. Since Aristotle, we’ve continued to develop more rigorous and accurate scientific methods. New technology, like microscopes and telescopes, allows us to observe ever tinier or more distant parts of nature, and new methods for reasoning, like randomized controlled trials and big data analysis, allow us to draw increasingly rigorous conclusions.
Understanding nature isn’t just about the biological functioning of flesh, blood, and bone.
Occasionally, however, we are referencing more than just the facts of biochemistry and physics when we appeal to nature. There is a long philosophical tradition of considering elements of human communities and cultures as part of nature itself. On this more complex view, understanding nature isn’t just about the biological functioning of flesh, blood, and bone, but is also about understanding the organic structures of human behavior in community, much like we might study the social relations of chimpanzees or the schooling behaviors of fish. Aristotle claimed that humans are “political animals,” and argued that living in complex communities is as fundamentally natural for humans as it is for bees.
Human communities across history often have basic structures in common, like practicing marriage to make families, using markets and money for exchanging goods, or creating origin myths and moral stories to help govern behavior. Observing humankind at a zoomed-out level suggests that some set of practices are standard for our species and contribute to our flourishing in human communities.
Of course, unlike chimpanzees and fish, humans get to decide, to some extent, how we will structure our own communities. We regularly argue about the best ways to use marriage, money, and mythmaking—and even intentionally alter the formal laws and informal laws that govern these structures—resulting in great variety in their operation across different cultures. So for humans, we can celebrate that some social behaviors are as natural for us as some biological functions, even if we still have a tremendous burden to work out exactly which social behaviors are good or best for us.
Studying the natural world and how it is organized, then, offers a plethora of knowledge. But it is not so straightforward as simply drawing conclusions from observations. Christians have a view of nature—our world, our bodies—as created good by God Himself. Christians also think that nature is broken: the corrupting powers of evil and human sin have given rise to suffering, violence, pain, lack, death and decay. Because of this brokenness, there are additional complications when we look to nature to give us moral insight—to show us the Good. The natural order is full of goodness, but it is also full of goodness-corrupted, goodness-gone-wrong, goodness-decaying. How do we know what is goodness and what is brokenness?
It is too simple to claim that we can identify something as good or bad on the basis of whether it occurs naturally.
Knowing what is good for us and deciding how to live depends to a large extent on understanding the constraints of nature on our bodies and our lives. We need to sleep. We need to eat. We need to care for our vulnerable, needy babies. We operate within the laws of physics. But we also fight these constraints. We fight the constraint of gravity on our bodies when we build flying planes and spaceships. We resist the constraints of sleep, hunger, and loneliness with drugs to wake us up, curb our appetites, and numb our minds. Cancer might be an entirely natural process, and part of decay and ageing, but we go to great lengths to understand and push it back. Becoming infertile is also an entirely natural process, part of having an ageing body, yet we go to increasing lengths to understand and push it back. The questions we must ask ourselves are these: which of the natural constraints are good, God-given ones and which ones can we push back? Are there any constraints we ought to resist all together? Are there limits at all to how much we ought to resist?
And what do we do about exceptions to norms? For all the seemingly widespread norms of nature, we find exceptions that occur just as naturally. In humans, there are standards about the number of limbs and chromosomes we have or the sexual differentiations and mental capacities with which we are born. There are also exceptions to these norms. The same is true of other animals and plants. We often decide that some norms are good or that some exceptions are harmful. For example, we have broad benchmarks for the milestones of healthy child development, and we work hard to cure medical conditions that prevent children from reaching those benchmarks. But sometimes we identify exceptions as beneficial and good, worth instrumentalizing or protecting. Consider the work of Temple Grandin, who argues compellingly for the social value of supporting neuroatypical people with autism or learning disorders, because of the unique and helpful ways they learn, reason, and create.
It is too simple to claim that we can identify something as good or bad on the basis of whether it occurs naturally, or whether it fits the broad patterns of what is normal by nature. The Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out this problem for human reasoning, calling it the is–ought distinction. Just because something “is” a natural fact doesn’t mean it “ought” to be that way. Hume argued that we need more ingredients in our reasoning process in order to evaluate what ought to be. Just looking at the natural facts is not enough. We must reason about—weigh, evaluate, consider—the observations we make about nature.
We must reason about the observations we make about nature.
Clearly it is tricky to appraise the facts of nature when making claims about what is good for humans. But in keeping with Hume’s framework, the Christian tradition combines revealed wisdom in Holy Scripture with a long history of church teaching to develop an approach to evaluating nature.
First, just recognizing the challenge is a good step. Understanding that an assertion that something is natural is not in and of itself a moral claim is fundamental. Understanding how these complex “by nature” arguments work is important for all kinds of contemporary questions in public and in Christian life. We need to be able to draw conclusions about what will lead to our flourishing, both without over-claiming about needing to conform to nature for the sake of naturalness, and without hubris that nature has no wisdom to offer about what helps us thrive.
For example, in a lot of cases, it is good and right to perform lifesaving surgeries on pre-borns and newborns with congenital medical conditions. Doctors couldn’t perform such surgeries without enormous scientific and technological power over nature. And yet, the only way we know what kind of life and function to aim to make possible for the infants is by looking to the broad patterns of nature to learn what kind of functions are suitable for humans.
Second, we must bring moral reasoning to bear on what we learn from nature. Christian tradition teaches that we are moral creatures, made with the purpose of glorifying God. Christians are inheritors of a long tradition of people working out what the good life looks like—trying to find the balance of living in submission to our natural constraints, while also exerting our normative and creative powers to identify, overcome, and repair what is difficult, broken, and decaying.
Christians ought to be stewards and protectors of all that is good in the natural order, and Christians ought to be transformers and perfectors and healers of all that is broken. Jesus Christ himself healed the sick, raised the dead, cared for the poor, transformed water into wine, and multiplied the loaves and fishes. In his hands, these are supernatural acts, violations of the patterns in nature. Not only did Christ act in ways that counter the dictates of nature, he taught us to do the same. It is contrary to the historical patterns of human behavior to “turn the other cheek” in the face of violence, or to “forgive 70 times 7 times” in the face of hurt and betrayal, and yet Christians are called to ultimately conform to this Way of Love over and above the way of nature in typical human communities.
Third, we must marvel at—and not take for granted—the human institutions that help us flourish, like family, church, economy, and state. Crucially, when Christ changed the course of nature in human lives—healing, raising, or providing—he wasn’t overcoming nature for the sake of some radically supernatural new reality or utopic vision. Rather, he was restoring humans to good human functioning in accordance with their natural human surroundings. Christ returned the sick, dying, and hungry to their communities, to continue living out their natural human lives, but with a new understanding of God’s love, having learned that nature conforms to God alone and exists by His grace alone.
Just as Christ supernaturally overcame the harms of nature, like sickness, death, and scarcity, we too get to shape nature when we participate in these kinds of actions. When we organize our churches to find ways to meet the needs of the most vulnerable or work together to provide care for sick friends and family, we are reconciled to nature, not because it is overcome or permanently transformed, but because we can act in the Name of Jesus and know that the brokenness we encounter in nature is not the end of the story.
Images by Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael
Delaney Thull is a philosophy Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.