Today Joe reviews an informal debate he had with a former traditional catholic turned atheist on the sexual morality of Catholicism.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I got a fascinating invitation recently to sit down with a guy named Cade to talk about Catholic sexual ethics and gay marriage and trans stuff and all this stuff with a guy who at one point was a traditional Catholic and now is an atheist who is living a gay lifestyle. So his name’s Cade, sorry, I should have started with that guy named Cade. And I’m just going to let him introduce himself in his own words.
Cade:
My background, I grew up in the secular suburbs of Minneapolis, kind of in a cafeteria Catholic household, going to a liberal parish early, early into high school. I went down the apologetics rabbit hole, so I got started with some Catholic answers. I think I read through almost all of your publications at the time. A whole lot of the radio show got into the whole Matt Frat father, Mike Schmitz, who was actually in Minnesota, met him a few different times and then wanted to discern to become a CARite monk. Loved the idea of religious life and ended up in San Diego near Catholic answers to study philosophy and filmmaking. Eventually since leaving and have deconstructed and fall much more on the agnostic atheist side and also like to take a look at Catholic beliefs through a queer lens sense coming out. And Libby, my hashtag best life as people say on my woke left
Joe:
Was like an hour and a half mostly on Catholic sexual ethics generally and natural law, and then gay marriage specifically. And it was, I think it’s fair the way he’s built it is more of a debate. So there were times where you can probably tell, I’m not sure exactly if I should be jumping in or letting him speak. So there may be times when I jump in when I shouldn’t and probably times where I didn’t jump in and I should. So I give that as a little bit of background. I don’t think he was trying to trick me. I think the conversation just went in a different direction than we thought it would. I think it was a really good conversation. I’m happy to have it. And I think one of the things that it reveals is the difficulty in some ways of getting to the bottom of these questions and the importance of getting our basic, someone’s called first principles right at the outset.
So when we’re talking about sexual ethics, and we’re going to be talking a lot about this idea of what’s called natural law, but just on the moral law generally. I’m going to give a long clip here and then I’m going to give some shorter clips as we go from the conversation. And by the way, I will include the entire conversation over on Cade’s channel at the very end. He graciously put the whole thing up and I don’t think he edited it all, or if he did, it was just to eliminate some of the awkward ums and uhs or something like that. So on sexual ethics, I think it’s important to understand what we’re talking about because this is something that not only do a lot of non-Catholics or Catholics get wrong, it’s something I’ve even seen Catholics get wrong where they think of the moral law as is external imposition of authority. And that is neither a good nor biblical way of understanding it. So here’s kind of a contrast between those two.
Cade:
Today we’re going to be looking at the Catholic sexual ethic framework and how it relates to a few different LGBT or queer issues that we want to talk about today. So kind of hand it back to you, Joe, on explaining what is the framework that the Catholic Church uses when evaluating sexual ethics questions and what are the major principles, let’s say, of what the Catholic Church teaches on sexuality. And then we’ll base the discussion from there.
Joe:
That sounds great, and please feel free to jump in and cut in if you interject
Cade:
Whatever.
Joe:
I wanted to start actually found a quote from a 2016 Washington Post article entitled Is Porn Immoral? That Doesn’t Matter. It’s a public health crisis and it’s by the sociologist Gail Dines. And I think this is a good way of framing the conversation because I think that we get the whole idea of morality and ethics pretty backwards from the beginning. So people are often coming into it, whether they know it or not, with a set of misconceptions. And I thought this piece really from the headline on encapsulated that really well. So dines writes the thing is no matter what you think of pornography, whether it’s harmful or harmless fantasy, the science is there. After 40 years of peer-reviewed research, scholars can say with confidence that porn is an industrial product that shapes how we think about gender, sexuality, relationships, intimacy, sexual violence, and gender equality for the worse.
So what I thought was striking about that is, I mean I agree with her conclusions. I think if you asked anyone why Christians are against pornography, those would all be very close to the top of the list if not the top of the list. She thought like, okay, well whether or not it’s a moral issue, it’s this public health issue. And I thought that whole framing is just insane because the whole reason it’s a moral issue, is it a public health issue. So digging into that and kind of thinking about that, I came up with three aspects that I think when we think about morality badly, we tend to think about it, number one, as arbitrary moral laws are arbitrary. So the church says no sex before marriage, but they could just as easily say No sex after marriage or no sex on Wednesdays or during price is right or something.
It just some arbitrary set of rules. It’s like the offsides rule in soccer where you’re like, okay, whatever. And then second, if it’s arbitrary, you’re like, well, who gets to arbitrate? And so in this view, the wrongness of a moral law is determined externally and in authoritarian way, meaning it’s all based on power and authority. So God is more powerful than you, so he makes this thing that would’ve been fine not okay. And if that’s your conception where morality is this external thing being imposed upon you, then the third thing that follows is the moral law almost by definition is an impediment to your freedom and flourishing and your hashtag best life. So to quote a phrase I heard recently. So those would be kind of the three aspects of misunderstanding the moral law, meaning if that’s how you’re thinking about morality, just know that the way you are thinking about it and the way that people who’ve really thought about it deeply and believe in it, think about it are just completely passing.
Now you might think people are wrong to think that it’s something other than that, but you should at least be aware that there’s a gulf there in what you are imagining moral law to be and what the people you’re talking to understand moral law to be. So that’s the negative view, that’s the view I’d say don’t hold that. And the flip side, if it wasn’t obvious enough would be to say number one, moral laws are not arbitrary. They are rooted in human nature and we would say human design that God makes you a certain way. So in the same way that the car maker has an instruction manual or if you’ve got a product, it might say Do this, don’t do that. Don’t scrub a cast iron skillet, don’t put it in the dishwasher. All of that’s not some arbitrary limitation. It’s rooted in having a proper understanding of the design.
Sometimes I think when you hear, even think about the name of this show where it is reference to this intrinsically disordered language of the catechism, which sounds totally clinical, sterile, disembodied, maybe even dehumanizing, but it’s coming from this vision where it says, moral law is rooted in a proper understanding of the human person. And so if we want to know whether something is right and wrong, absolutely we should say what does God say about it? But we should also look at like, well, what do we know about the human person and human flourishing? And so anything that hurts my flourishing is wrong. So that’s the first. It’s not arbitrate, it’s rooted in human nature, but that means secondly, moral law is principally something internal like sin makes you suffer, not chiefly because oh, God’s mad at you and he wants to hurt you. No, no, no.
It’s not that sin makes you suffer because you did the thing you were not supposed to do and the reason you weren’t supposed to do it is it hurt. I’ve got a 1-year-old and he knows he’s not allowed to play with electrical cords and he loves to do this as a result, he likes to just pick them up and hold onto them and say uhoh. And fortunately all he does is that. So it’s actually pretty harmless, but he doesn’t know why he’s not supposed to do them. And it just feels like an impediment to his freedom. But the reality is it’s related to his design. So even though there’s an external kind of forcing, don’t do it. The harm caused would be internal. I mean literally in that case because electricity. And so that’s the nature of sin that the harm it causes and the kind of weight or the force of the moral law happens at an interior level.
So even if you, let’s say you had the purge, there’s no laws for one day, and even if that worked with divine law, you would actually do harm to yourself doing all the things that you were told not to do because the reason you were told not to do them is that they’ll hurt you even if there was no external force, God, society, whatever, you would still have this as a consequence. So it’s not authority based, not external based, it’s internal in terms of the way sin plays out and thus the way morality and ethics principally operate. So at this point, Cade I think very naturally raises several different objections to this idea of the moral law, and particularly he’s got in view the question of what’s called natural law. Now natural law, just those parts of the moral law that you can know from reason alone.
So there are some things that we believe in as Catholic Christians that we can’t expect a non-Christian to believe in because it’s something that’s just coming from the Bible, right? So fair enough, something like you need to go to mass. There’s an element of that that you couldn’t possibly have known from reason alone. Now the idea that you should worship the creator in some way is something you can know from reason alone, and that’s why we find religions all over the world. The particulars of what that looks like aren’t something you could know from reason. You have to have God reveal that to you. So sometimes we get confused in our thinking about this because most of the time you know things from a combination of your reason and what God has revealed to you through faith. And so you may not know which things are which, but it’s important in a context like the imposition of law to know well, which things could anyone from reason alone know?
Because that’s kind of fair play even in a secular society. You don’t have to be a Christian to know murder is wrong. And even though as a Christian you may know it from a combination of both your reason and the 10 commandments. So with that in mind, we’re talking, like I said about natural law, this idea that there are some principles that are going to be knowable from reason alone and that this is going to include some things like elements of sexual ethics. And so Kate is going to begin by just spelling out his objection to the framework,
Cade:
How I’m going to approach the question. And I think what people watching are going to see that we’re both going to approach these questions from wildly different lenses. And so there’s absolutely going to be this huge mismatch to it.
Joe:
It’s really at this point, which is about 10 minutes into the interview or conversation that I realized it was going to be more of an informal debate, which again is fine, but I hadn’t necessarily prepared for that, which is one of the reasons I like having this opportunity to say, here’s some more stuff I would’ve prepared if I knew this was going to be a debate. And so he has several critiques that he offers, and these are critiques that you should know if you’re going to argue from natural law or critiques that maybe you have yourself against the idea of natural law. And the first is that for all of the talk about natural law being this thing that you can know from reason alone, it is suspiciously a very Catholic dominated sort of field. Now that matters because the whole point of natural law as St.
Paul says in Romans two is that there are some things that the Gentiles who don’t have the law know that by nature they know what the law requires. And this shows that the law is written on their hearts that there are some things that God has written on every human heart. So for instance, you know that it is wrong to rob your neighbor, and if you are robbed, you feel a sense of an injustice having been done to you. Now that’s true regardless of your religion. And you can educate yourself into stupidity. You can come up with a moral theory that says actually robbery is okay under these conditions, but the base level knowledge is something that even a child realizes go steal candy from a baby. And you’ll see that they get very out riched about it. They have an intuitive sense not only I want something and don’t have it, but an injustice has been done to me.
So that’s evidence of what we would call natural law. Now obviously not everyone has a sophisticated understanding of this, but moral intuition and everything is rooted in the idea of natural law. When it’s proper moral intuition against society, miseducation, those things can color it and distort it, but that base level knowledge that you should do the good and avoid evil, that’s something that’s built into our human programming, so to speak. Now, Cade’s first objection to this is that sure, for all that talk of how this is open to everybody, again, this looks suspiciously like a front for Catholicism.
Cade:
So when it comes to natural law, my central thesis is that the Catholic conception of natural law is a unreliable investigat and empirically harmful framework that gets to conclusions that are ultimately all or that are ultimately Catholic teachings, but with extra steps. And what I mean by that is that once in this whole conversation, the question becomes, so can we use that framework that you’re bringing and apply it in the secular sphere to questions when it comes to what we want to legislate? And it seems like often there’s this equivocation of like, is this for Christians or is this for the world in that God designed us a particular way and that natural law relies on the presupposition that God has designed us? So it seems like the conclusions are inherently religious.
Joe:
So his argument there is for all the talk natural law, we’re starting with a belief in God and deriving this idea of dividedness and natures and all of this from our starting theological premises. And the counterargument is that no, this actually works the other way around that we actually observe that things are designed, they have a purpose, that they have what’s called a telos, like an end or a goal or a function. And from that people often but not always reason to God. So here’s more of his argument on that point.
Cade:
It seems like the only people who take classical natural law seriously are people who already belong to the Catholic faith that it seems to be an internally consistent worldview. I don’t think there’s any gaping holes within it, but I think that it’s an unprincipled approach in that a secular person, even if they grant the idea of natural law, isn’t going to even come close to the particular nuances of Catholic teaching when it comes to intrinsic evils. I mean, Aristotle isn’t able to come to it, nor do I think any other scholars out there in the field. And even within the field of let’s say ethics or meta ethics among philosophers, natural law theory seems to really only be people that have a need to get to the conclusions of Catholic teaching. And that’s kind of my assorted thoughts that I was thinking of this morning on natural law and how we approach this question.
Joe:
So I think there’s something kind of internally curious about claiming on the one hand that the only people trying to do natural law and virtue ethics are Catholics seeking to justify a belief they really have from the Bible and then trying to come up with some sort of philosophical explanation to justify or rationalize that belief. And then the only figure you cite is Aristotle, a Greek pagan who is clearly not trying to rationalize his belief in the Bible because as far as we know, he’d never heard of the Bible. And it’s not just Aristotle. Some of the biggest names in natural law and virtue ethics are people who weren’t Catholic or they became Catholic because of their interest in natural law and not the other way around. And there’s several important figures we can cite just in the history of 20th and 21st century philosophy in this field.
So almost without a doubt, the biggest name in this field would be either Elizabeth Anki, we’ll talk about her in a little bit, or Alistair McIntyre. Now, Alistair McIntyre’s after virtue is kind of the touchstone text in terms of a book length treatment of virtue ethics. And when he writes the first edition, he’s an atheist who is just kind of coming out of Marxism. A couple years later, he converts to Catholicism, but notice the cause and effect there is not, he’s already a committed Catholic who seeks to rationalize his beliefs. No. And intellectually honest inquiry leads him to the realization that virtue ethics is true and this helps to open him up to the idea that maybe human nature does exist and there is a God who designed us with the nature and so on. But that is the result of his honest intellectual inquiry, not a sort of rationalization of a preexisting belief.
And McIntyre’s by no means alone. One of the other major players in the field, Philip afoot, who I just discovered in preparing this episode, was the granddaughter of Grover Cleveland, the US President, even though she’s a British philosopher, fascinating, neither here nor there, pretty interesting. She’s the one who gives us the famous trolley problem. If you’ve got a trolley on the track and you can flip the switch should you do it. And she is a critic of utilitarianism in those kind of ethical systems, and she’s a major force for virtue ethics and for natural law. And she’s an atheist. She doesn’t believe in a God who actually gives us nature. She does believe that things have nature, they have purposes, but she doesn’t believe they’re divinely given. So she’s clearly not trying to rationalize her Catholicism because she’s not Catholic. Third figure I’d point to here is Jay Betsky, his book written on the Heart was I believe 1997.
It’s all about, as the subtitle says, the case for natural law. And it’s something like seven years later that he converts to Catholicism. So again, clearly there are plenty of people who end up Catholic because they take this as Cade says internally, consistent way of viewing the world seriously and realize that it points to their being a God and that it ultimately points to the Catholic claims about God being true. It’s not the case that these are all just blind committed Catholics seeking to rationalize their worldview and make it look more secular than it is. It’s just as a matter of fact not the case. And one of the ways we can see this is not just by looking at the major thinkers, but by doing a sort of application of natural law. So the whole point of natural law is that things have natures, they have purposes, they have design, they have what’s sometimes called a Telus an end.
And as I pointed out to Cade, this can be observed from just looking at the body, not from reading scripture or consulting the stars. If I ask you, what does your respiratory system do? I bet you can tell me its purpose is to respire. It’s right there in the name. If I ask you, what does your circulatory system do, it circulates blood right there in the name. But for some reason when we get to the reproductive system, people will get very confused about what it does. But once again, I would just say it’s right there in the name that if you want to know what is the telos and the purpose, biologists can tell you a good deal of that. Why do mammals have reproductive systems? Well to reproduce, to bear offspring? And so that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it, it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be good.
In fact, one of the reasons we enjoy it is to incentivize the creation of another generation in the same way that you have taste buds that are there for your pleasure so that you’ll do the work of eating because otherwise you’ll starve to death because it’s an inconvenience. And so all the pleasure and pain, the pains of hunger, the pleasure of taste and all the pains and pleasures of sex are tied to the telos of the reproductive system, which you don’t need the Bible to tell you. You can look at a human body. And so to that end, the thing that we can then say going one step further is every other system in your body is complete. You have a complete circulatory system, you have a complete respiratory system, but you only have half of a reproductive system, which means that when we talk about orientation, we often talk about psychological and psychosexual orientation that you’re romantically attracted to or sexually attracted to somebody else.
But physically everyone is heterosexually oriented, that you have one piece of a two piece puzzle and you can tell where that fits based on the design, based on the structure of the organ or based on a deeper biological understanding. So you have half a reproductive system and it’s only completed with one party of the opposite sex. And so right there we have what we might call a biological basis for what becomes the human institution of marriage. So again, you can come to that conclusion just by understanding that the respiratory system is for respiring. There’s no verse in the Bible. You don’t need to read about the breath of God going into Adam to be able to understand that. You can look at the lungs or you can look at the circulatory system circulating blood, and you can look at the reproductive system, you can observe animal behavior, you can do just biology and come to a lot of these conclusions.
It’s not a matter of you needing to even pray about it to be quite frank. Alright, so that’s the first objection. This is just a thinly veiled Catholicism. No, I agree with him that it often comes to extremely Catholic conclusions, but that’s because all truth converges. So a proper truth from reason and a truth from scripture should end up in the same place. If I know from reason that it’s wrong to steal, and I know from the Bible is wrong to steal, that’s not an argument against theft. Being actually okay is like, oh, well, you just think that because the Bible tells you so it’s like, no, no, maybe the Bible’s just right. And so likewise, if you find that this internally consistent philosophical system, this way of viewing the world, this way of viewing ethics leads to Catholic conclusions independent of the people being Catholic, that’s just confirmation of the Catholic claim. But the next objection that Cade raises, it seems to be kind of the opposite. So rather than this just being a way for Catholics to announce the Catholic church’s teaching, he objects also that natural law theorists disagree.
Cade:
Like I said, with it be... Read more on Catholic.com