Part V of The Natural Law--God and Reason

God and Reason

The manufacturer of anything, GN, Apple Computers, The Natural Law, each have a lawgiver. In the case of The Natural Law it is the universe’s manufacturer—God. He, for lack of a better word, is our manufacturer and specifically our law giver. The question often arises both as a thesis and also as an anti-thesis—is there a God? Do you believe God and Reason
in God? Can you prove it? God? Can you, can we, know that there is a lawgiver of the Natural Law? Is it reasonable to believe in God? Is it reasonable not to believe in God?

It is reasonable to believe in God. There is something that is called “self evident principle of sufficient reason”. God is self-evident. The “creation” did not come about on its own—that there has to be a reason. Every effect has a cause and that cause cannot be its own. Why? Because it would pre-exist itself.

Can you imagine Galileo dropping the two spheres and being asked the question, “Gee, Gali, why did the balls drop?” And Galileo Gallilei answering, “Hey Columbus (not the same Columbus)—no reason. But that’s not the reason I was dropping them, anyway.”

The question relates to God as He is an eternal being. That statement is reasonable. Why is there something rather than nothing? There always has been. The alternative is that there was a time when there was absolutely nothing. If there was a time when there was absolutely nothing then there could never be anything. It’s self evident—or sufficient reason. The evidence of God is not self-evident but the proof of God is. That would be creation.

There are five principles of God according to St. Thomas Aquinas:
1) Necessity of God
2) Creation
3) Motion
4) Perfection
5) Design

We once talked about a watchmaker who took apart for a client his watch, put it in a brown paper bag, shook up the parts and told the client now watch this. As he dumped out the bag was it possible that the watch would come out whole? Perfect and in its entirety? Possible, yes. Probable, no. Can one think of something more intricate than the human eye. What, it happened by chance? The ear? DNA? You have to be kidding? Right?

We are not the creation and meaningless product, or a by product for that matter, of evolution. “Each one of us is the product of the thought of God.” Benedict XVI. Eyes and ears did not happen by chance. Possible? Yes. Probable? No. Through reason we can know that there’s one God. ‘Something’ cannot come from ‘nothing’.

Then the question, at times arises, well, then, can God make a square circle? The answer is ‘no’ because a square circle is (no thing) nothing. The same with the equally absurd question of God making a rock too big to carry. It’s a contradiction in terms. God, all knowing? Yes. How can we be sure? How can we have ‘free will’ then? There is no ‘time’ in eternity. I have heard the analogy that God looks down from above, picture in your mind’s eye a mountain top. He sees the incredible parade of human history before Him, from the beginning to the end. Why? Because he’s eternal. But before each individual in that parade makes a decision he or she is free. Have you ever regretted anything? Wanted to take back a biting comment? Another decision? Those are proofs of ‘free will’. One of my favorite old black and white TV programs, now I might add, is watching Bishop Sheen. He once said, “’Please’ and ‘thank you’ are two examples of refuting ‘determinism’.” They are proof, in other words, of ‘free will’.

What can we know through ‘reason’ about ourselves? There is an order of reality which is not material alone but also spiritual.
1) material reality has parts
2) spiritual reality has no parts.
We are composed of two elements: a material body and a spiritual soul. The soul is the life principle in anything that is alive. Do animals have souls? According to Aquinas they have ‘material souls’. Their souls are dependent on the ‘matter’ of that animal. When that animal dies, the soul dies.

How do we differ from the animal kingdom, specifically are we eternal? Created in the image and likeness of God? We are spiritual. We can do things that only a spiritual being can do:
1) Abstraction. A quarter is round. What is roundness? It does not exist in the material world. But we have the abstract idea of roundness. Roundness is an abstract idea.
2) Reflection. A piece of paper can be folded and the bottom, if it could see, can see the top or the top the bottom. But it cannot get out of itself because it is bound by matter. Animals the same way. They, according to Aquinas, have a spiritual matter which dies at the end of its life. Because animals do not have a spiritual component they cannot reflect upon their own selves or being. On the other hand, because human beings are in part spirit, have the capability of ‘reflecting’ upon themselves, the world, and even things that are non concrete—such as freedom, charity, truth, and especially love. Human beings even have the capability of reflecting upon their reflections.

St. Thomas Aquinas Feast Day

Christ came in order to bring us back from a state of bondage to a state of liberty.

Saint Thomas Aquinas


Do good. Avoid evil.

John Paul II


Dear Readers:

I have been on a much needed vacation for the past, almost two weeks. Part V of the Natural Law, hopefully, will be out within the next couple of days.

Aloha,
Management

A Conservative Observation in regards to Islam

The conservative response to Islam
By Daniel Johnson
My first experience of Islam, exactly thirty years ago, was a
spectacular one: the Dome of the Rock. This is the place on
Temple Mount in Jerusalem whence Mohammed was,
according to the Koran, taken up into heaven, and the golden
shrine which was built there in 691–692 A.D. by Caliph Abd
al-Malik is the earliest and most elegant example of Muslim
architecture extant. Non-Muslims are not permitted to visit
the Dome today, but since last year they have been
readmitted to the Temple Mount, or Noble Sanctuary, as
Muslims call it. In the last generation the whole situation in
Jerusalem has changed. Muslim leaders and scholars now
routinely deny that the Temple of Solomon ever existed in
Jerusalem, and the Christian population of the Old City has
fallen from more than half to less than 10 percent, the rest
driven out by Muslim persecution. Back in 1977 nonhttp://
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Muslims were still allowed not only onto Temple Mount,
but inside the Dome too. At the time I was studying the
history of the Crusades, so I had some grasp of the
significance of Jerusalem to medieval Muslims such as
Saladin, who promised that after he had recaptured
Jerusalem, he would “cross this sea to their [Christian]
islands to pursue them until there remains no one on the face
of the earth who does not acknowledge Allah—or I die [in
the attempt].” What I did not understand was that for many,
perhaps most Muslims, this view had not altered one jot in
the eight intervening centuries. The reconquest of Jerusalem
for Islam is seen as a necessary prelude to the destruction of
the state of Israel and the conversion of Christendom.
The Dome is a simple enclosure, its non-figurative images of
Paradise are authentically Islamic. They are accompanied by
verses from the Koran with a warning against the Christian
doctrines of the divinity of Christ and the Trinity: “The
messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was only a messenger of
Allah… . So believe in Allah and his messengers and do not
say ‘three’: refrain, it is better for you.” The Byzantine
historian Judith Herrin comments: “This monument
symbolizes the decisive shift of power and religious
observance in the Near East.” It is a shift that neither the
Byzantines nor the Crusades could reverse, and the
Islamization of Africa, Asia, and Europe continues to this
day.
After they took Jerusalem, the Crusaders wrongly imagined
that the Dome of the Rock was the Temple of Solomon, as
the round Templar churches all over Europe testify. But the
differences between the Dome and the real Temple
symbolize the clash of civilizations. Beautiful as it is, the
Dome stands as a trophy of victory. Its sacred
relic—Mohammed’s rock—is almost incidental to its
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function as a monument to the triumph of Islam over
Judaism and Christianity. Its inscriptions differ little in their
propagandist purpose from the videos of Osama bin Laden.
This is jihad, frozen in marble and mosaic. The
magnificence of Solomon’s Temple served quite another
purpose: for the people of Israel, this was the house where
God himself dwelt. The functions of these two buildings are
as far apart as war and peace.
From its very inception, Islam has defined itself by what it is
against. It divides the world into two camps: those who
submit to the will of Allah, the Muslims, and the rest, who
are presumed to be damned—including the other “peoples of
the book.” As one British imam told Muslims in his
Birmingham mosque: “Those whom the wrath of Allah is
upon, is [sic] the Jew and the Christian.” (Interestingly, the
West Midlands police showed less interest in prosecuting the
imam than in complaining to the TV regulator about the
Channel Four program Dispatches, which had secretly
filmed his sermon.) The only hope for the non-Muslims is
conversion, an irrevocable decision that reflects the
existential gulf between the inhabitants of the two
metaphysical abodes, the earthly equivalents of heaven and
hell: the House of Islam and the House of War. Muslims
cannot leave the House of Islam for another faith with
impunity: as a recent Dispatches program on Channel Four
showed, even in Britain, such apostates live in fear of their
lives. Islam is a faith that demands unconditional allegiance.
Muslims must be ready to kill or be killed if necessary for
their faith. Sharia, the law of Islam, takes precedence over
all other laws. Likewise, jihad, the war of Islam, takes
precedence over all other wars. When confronted by these
stark, unchanging ordinances, the equivocations of
supposedly liberal Islamic scholars such as Tariq Ramadan
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tell their own story. Nothing that mere men say can
ameliorate or mitigate a code handed down unaltered from
seventh-century Arabia.
These two characteristics of Islam—its immutability and the
fact that it defines itself against the rest of humanity—help
to explain its extraordinary appeal to angry young men and
women. They find refuge in the moral certainties and selfjustification
that other religions, especially Christianity and
Judaism, no longer seem to provide. Because Islam has no
hierarchy, every Muslim may submit to an Islamic authority
of his own choosing. That choice is likely to be driven as
much by political considerations as purely religious ones.
There is no conceptual separation between religion and
politics in Islam. The few Muslim scholars who interpret the
Koran according to the hermeneutic principles that govern
modern biblical scholarship are shunned by the literalist
majority, and enjoy little influence in the madrassas and
universities of the Muslim world. But even in western
countries the version of Islam that is taught is usually
fundamentalist. The result is that in Britain, nearly half of
the mosques are controlled by the extremist Deobandi
movement from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, while
many more are under equally fundamentalist Wahhabi or
Salafi influence from Saudi Arabia. While all Muslims
certainly do not subscribe to all tenets of Islam, enough of
them do to make it virtually impossible for the dissenters’
voices to be heard.
How should conservatives respond to Islam? I don’t know
the answer, and I am not sure that the notion of a correct
response to anything as complex as a religion is a very
conservative idea. Until quite recently, most people in the
West felt no particular need to have any response to Islam,
and so any response they do have is bound to be quite
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personal.
I respond to Islam, therefore, not only as a political animal,
but also as a product of a particular history and a particular
civilization. I respond to Islam as a citizen of a liberal
democracy in which religious toleration is a given, but in
which church and state occupy distinct spheres and religious
traditions or doctrines have no force of law; in which the
freedom of speech includes the right to criticize a religion or
even to insult its founder; and in which personal autonomy
under the rule of law implies the non-culpability of heresy or
apostasy. I respond as a neighbor who objects to the
presence in my community of those who repay my
hospitality by preaching or practicing or excusing terrorist
violence. (The most notorious of them all, Sheikh Abu
Hamza, lived in my London street until he was arrested,
tried and convicted of terrorist offenses three years ago.) I
respond as a father and a husband with certain views about
how girls should be educated, how women should be treated
in marriage, and so on. Finally, I respond to Islam as an
adherent of another faith, and specifically as a Christian,
who wishes to live in peace with other faiths but not at any
price, and who observes the harsh fate of his fellowbelievers
in countries that were once heartlands of
Christendom with alarm and anger. No less integral to my
faith is a special reverence for the Jewish people, our “elder
brothers” whom Christians have often treated with such base
ingratitude, and hence my response to Islam cannot be
divorced from my dismay at the most destructive of the
many consequences of jihad: the revival of anti-Semitism,
not just in the Muslim world, but in the West too.
All these responses are personal, but they are also not
untypical. They have emerged over the years as part of a
growing, inescapable awareness of the unique antagonism
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between Muslims and their neighbors. My natural
disposition to exculpate Islam from responsibility for the
failings of its adherents has given way to doubts: doubts
about whether there is something intrinsic to the theological
structure of Islam that is inimical to the delicate membrane
of moral law and rational order, deriving ultimately from the
Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers, that lies at the
core of Western civilization. Islam is often spoken of as one
of the three Abrahamic religions, and Mohammed himself in
the earlier, less belligerent phase of his life, used to speak of
Jews and Christians as “peoples of the book.”
Unlike Jews and Christians, however, who despite their
orthodoxies were always open to every possible external
influence, Muslims have been moving steadily in the
opposite direction for nearly a thousand years, turning their
backs on the modern world and indeed seeking to reverse the
verdict of history on the medieval empires of the Arabs and
Turks. After centuries of domination, they found themselves
poorer, less educated and hence less powerful than the
infidels they despised. Muslims had become the people of
the closed book.
It is the radicalism of Islam that makes it so threatening
today. Whether or not Islam is necessarily a radical religion,
one that constantly returns to its roots, empirically its history
is one long sequence of such radical revivals. In the
vocabulary of the Left, “radical” is good, and Islam has
always held an attraction for liberals with a hankering for the
terrible simplicities of a revolutionary faith. E. M. Forster
(whose response to Hitler was to offer “two cheers for
democracy”) adored the radical simplicity of Islam.
Admittedly, he encountered it mainly in the relatively
benign form that prevailed when much of the Muslim world
was under British rule—a dispensation that the Left
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destroyed with the premature independence and partition of
India, after the ground had been prepared by novels such as
A Passage to India. Much of the political ideology of
Islamism emerged during the retreat from empire—a retreat
which was accompanied by the wholesale abdication of what
Kipling naively called the “white man’s burden,” but which
the United States still today acknowledges as the thankless
task of encouraging freedom and democracy.
Until quite recently, Islam seemed to be a warrior creed that
was singularly short of warriors. Not any more. But there is
still an inferiority complex, fueled by a large dose of the
victim culture that the West cultivates so assiduously.
Having ostentatiously rejected the decadence of the West,
Islam has in practice absorbed some of its most insidious
vices. The fact that Islam never developed the capitalist
work ethic and enjoined almsgiving to the rich rather than
self-reliance to the poor has enabled radical Muslim
preachers to move seamlessly from oriental despotism to
occidental welfare state, living comfortably on the tithes of
the faithful and the taxes of the infidel.
But the process works the other way, too. Western culture
has always included among its various currents the
iconoclasm that was once Islam’s most visible challenge to
Christianity. One need only think of the Reformation. Still,
the dominant tradition in the West had always been a
figurative, iconographic, narrative art—until the rise of
abstract and conceptual Modernism in the late twentieth
century. This was of course an indigenous movement, but it
has much in common with Islamic art—not least the fact
that, like all forms of iconoclasm, its ideology defines itself
by what it is against. And so we have the strange spectacle
of aging Sixties radicals aligned with Muslims who preach
radicalism of a rather more sanguinary sort. When Karlheinz
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Stockhausen greeted the destruction of the Twin Towers as
“the greatest work of art imaginable in the cosmos,” his
effusions were seen by conservatives as the reductio ad
absurdum of a generation that fulfilled its self-appointed
destiny by the deconstruction of entire traditions of western
culture. But Stockhausen was also unwittingly endorsing
Islamic iconoclasm, symbolized not only in al Qaeda’s
attack on the Manhattan skyline but also in the Taliban’s
dynamiting of colossal Buddhas.
There can be few more potent symbols of Western
civilization than Cologne Cathedral. Built on the site of the
eponymous colony of Colonia, where the Roman world
confronted the barbarians beyond the Rhine, this was the
shrine of the Three Wise Men from the East. Conceived on a
vast scale, left unfinished for five centuries, the erection of
its western façade became the national project of German
romanticism. Now the cathedral’s two great gothic towers
are to be challenged by the minarets of a new mosque to
serve the 120,000 Muslims of Cologne. The Cardinal
Archbishop, Joachim Meisner, admitted to “an uneasy
feeling” at the prospect of the mosque. That was
controversial enough, but the cathedral’s new stained glass
window by Gerhard Richter, Germany’s best-known living
artist, has given a fascinating new twist to the story.
Commissioned to replace a nineteenth-century window
destroyed in the war, Richter came up with a computergenerated
abstract design. But Cardinal Meisner refused to
attend the unveiling ceremony. “It belongs in a mosque or
another house of prayer, not this one,” he declared. The
point to remember is that Richter and Meisner are both of
the same generation, but their experience is utterly different:
the former is a 1968 radical, the latter an East German who
spent forty years resisting the communists. In modern
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Germany, even a cardinal archbishop is not master of his
own cathedral, and his preference for a figurative depiction
of the two saints who fell victim to the Nazis, Edith Stein
and Maximilian Kolbe, was overruled.
The Cardinal hit back in a sermon which denounced
“degenerate” modern art—a notorious phrase associated
with the Nazi exhibition in 1937. In the hullabaloo that
followed this breaking of a seventy-year taboo, Meisner’s
point—that “where culture is detached from religion, from
reverence for God, there religion shrivels into ritualism and
culture degenerates”—was of course drowned out. But if
Cologne Cathedral is ever turned into a mosque, the Richter
window is the one artefact that may be allowed to remain.
This is not an absurd thought: after all, Napoleon’s armies
used this same cathedral to stable their horses, and the Hagia
Sophia in Constantinople, once the greatest church in
Europe, was a mosque for nearly 500 years until Atatürk
secularized it. The combined threats of modern secular
culture and militant Islam mean that the fate of Christianity
in Europe does indeed hang in the balance.
I have already suggested that the resurgence of Islam has
coincided with a renewed threat to Jews everywhere, and the
Jewish communities of Europe in particular. Hostility to
Jews is not, of course, a uniquely Muslim phenomenon, but
neither is it true, as Muslims sometimes claim, that anti-
Semitism was alien to Islam until Zionism and the creation
of the state of Israel poisoned relations between the two.
Anyone who doubts that the tendency of Muslims to blame
Jews for their misfortunes has been around for a long time
should read Niccolò Capponi’s account of the Battle of
Lepanto in 1571, which quotes a description of what
happened when news of the greatest naval defeat ever
suffered by the Ottomans reached the court of Sultan Selim
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II. Jews in Constantinople sent word to Venice that for three
nights the Sultan was kept in the dark, until eventually he
demanded to know the truth: “It was answered that it was
impossible now to hide the news that his fleet had been all
burnt, sunk, and taken by the Christians, with the death of all
his great soldiers, captains, and his General. Hearing this he
gave a deep sigh and said: ‘So, these treacherous Jews have
deceived me!’ And having the Lord’s utterance spread
through the palace and the streets, everyone started shouting,
‘Death to the Jews; death to the Jews!’ and there was much
fear that this would degenerate in a general massacre.” The
only thing that has changed since is that the twisted logic of
the scapegoat enables Muslims now to blame the Jews not
only for their defeats by the Christians, but also for terrorist
attacks perpetrated by Muslims. European Islam has not yet,
it seems, absorbed the fact that after 1945 the new Europe’s
moral foundation was the promise to the Jewish people:
“Never again.”
By contrast, Jews have taken the lead in proposals for coexistence,
integration, and peace between Muslims and the
rest. The latest example is Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi
of Britain and the Commonwealth, whose latest book, The
Home We Build Together, uses the metaphor of the home to
argue against both assimilation and multiculturalism as
models of society. Assimilation treats people as if they were
guests at a country house, he argues, while multiculturalism
treats them like guests in a hotel. Instead, society should
welcome newcomers by inviting them to build a home
together with the indigenous people. Sacks quotes Milton’s
Areopagitica on the building of Solomon’s Temple to
demonstrate that “out of many moderate varieties and
brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportional
arises the goodly and gracious symmetry that commends the
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whole pile and structure.” Sacks shows that the process of
contributing together to the recreation of a society will
necessarily integrate the outsiders. This is not a social
contract, but a covenant that respects the “dignity of
difference” between faiths, while requiring in return from
the inhabitants both responsibility and civility.
There’s the rub. How do you build a common home with a
community that refuses to follow the architect’s plans, that
rejects the indigenous style, that dissociates itself from the
entire project? At best, you will end, not with a Temple of
Solomon, but with a Tower of Babel. Islam, as defined by its
leading scholars, cannot be “integrated” into a non-Islamic
society; indeed, it defines itself against such ideals. An
Islamic republic or monarchy bears superficial resemblances
to the kind of society that Western conservatives try to
sustain. There is much talk of morality, tradition, religion,
family. But the absence of liberty and democracy leads to
the perversion of all these things into instruments of tyranny.
The politics of Islam has nothing to do with conservatism as
it is understood in the West, but is simultaneously
eschatological and totalitarian, revolutionary and
reactionary. Ayatollah Khomeini warned: “We shall export
our revolution throughout the world.”
To meet this challenge, the West will need—as it always has
done—alliances with Islamic countries, movements and
individuals. Much of the fighting against al Qaeda and the
Taliban is being done by Muslims, just as Muslims fought
against the Nazis and Soviets. Their courage deserves the
highest praise. But such alliances will always be pragmatic.
And we need to be aware that some of the most subversive
Islamists in the West hail from Muslim lands that have been
long-standing allies: Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Saudi
Arabia. All of these regimes and others like them are weak,
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and their populations are vulnerable to anti-Western
propaganda.
At the risk of being too prescriptive, I would like to
summarize what I would hope the conservative response to
Islam might be. The West will gain no respect from Muslims
if its foreign policy is seen as weak and divided—still less if
at home its cultural and religious identity is seen to be in a
state of dissolution. Rather than allowing a moral vacuum to
open up at the heart of our societies, just waiting to be filled
by the revolutionary, reactionary and exclusive prescriptions
of Islam, our leaders should be reaffirming the absolute
values on which our uniquely inclusive system was founded.
Relativism is the tribute paid by reason to toleration. But
relativism, whether moral or epistemological, can never be
the basis of politics. Skepticism, being quietist, can never
prevail against belief. The only answer to atavism is
activism. It is better to obviate the need for radical solutions
to pseudo-problems by offering conservative solutions to
real problems. If Islam is the solution to the decadence of the
West, then we have been asking the wrong questions. If
Islam is now the problem, however, then the solution can
only be a conservative one. Islam will not overwhelm a
society that draws its morality from biblical and its
rationality from classical sources. The West does not need
an Islamic revolution, but a Judeo-Christian and Greco-
Roman renaissance.