Sayers finally enters the ring

There is a universal moral law, as distinct from a moral code, which consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man; and by behaving in conformity with which, man enjoys his true freedom. This is what the Christian Church calls "the natural law". The more closely the moral code agrees with the natural law, the more it makes for freedom in human behaviour; the more widely it departs from the natural law, the more it tends to enslave mankind and to produce the catastrophes called "judgments of God".

Now this, I think, is a viewpoint that makes rational disagreement possible. I think it captures an important element of Christian or religious thought that is often ignored, partly because comes out at its most loathsome and degenerate form in the arguments over homosexuality. It’s better put as the slogan "truth is one"; and this is, I think, a good metaresearch programme. It says that Christian doctrine must be agreeable to what we see of the world around us. It’s not arbitrary and, though Christians would not stress this, it offers the means of correcting dogma when it is found not to correspond with the facts. Note that this is exactly the process we see happening when progressive Christians argue that St Paul didn’t know what we know about homosexuality. In other words, they claim that our understanding of human nature has changed, therefore St Paul must have meant something else. Now, a progressive atheist can claim that this is silly, and a long way round to the plain facts of modern scientific knowledge; what you can’t claim is that it doesn’t get there in the end, nor that it is not trying to.

With all that said,. I found, when I was composing this post, that I disagreed with almost all the concrete examples that Sayers went on to give; and I wish that she were still around so that I could argue about this. In any case, and for tidiness, I shall put the rest of this below the fold.

bq. Christian morality comprises both a moral code and a moral law. The Christian code is familiar to us; but we are apt to forget that it is valid or not valid according as Christian opinion is right or wrong about the moral law– that is to say, about the essential facts of human nature. Regulations about doing no murder and refraining from theft and adultery belong to the moral code and are based on certain opinions held by Christians in common about the value of human personality. Such ‘laws’ as these are not statements of fact, but rules of behaviour. Societies which do not share Christian opinion about human values are logically quite justified in repudiating the code based upon that opinion. If, however, Christian opinion turns out to be right about the facts of human nature, then the dissenting societies are exposing them­selves to that judgment of catastrophe which awaits those who defy the natural law.

This is one of the bits of her argument which seems to have dated most when I read it — because it doesn’t mention slavery, which seems today a test case for this kind of argument. I don’t think that there is now a single mainstream Christian thinker who would say that slavery was not contrary to natural law, but the historical record hardly suggests that slave societies are doomed, or more doomed than free ones. It’s an extraordinarily resilient and persistent institution and this makes a difficulty as Sayers’ argument continues. The greater difficulty — she was writing in 1940 — comes towards the end of the next section of the argument, as you will see.

At the back of the Christian moral code we find a number of pronouncements about the moral law, which are not regulations at all, but which purport to be state­ments of fact about man and the universe, and upon which the whole moral code depends for its authority and its validity in practice.   These statements do not rest on human consent; they are either true or false.   … There is a difference between saying: "If you hold your finger in the fire you will get burned" and saying, "if you whistle at your work I shall beat you, because the noise gets on my nerves". The God of the Christians is too often looked upon as an old gentleman of irritable nerves who beats people for whistling.   This is the result of a confusion between arbitrary ‘law’ and the ‘laws’ which are statements of fact.   Breach of the first is "punished" by edict; but breach of the second, by judgment.

"For He visits the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Him, and shows mercy unto thousands of them that love Him and keep His commandments."

Here is a statement of fact, observed by the Jews and noted as such. From its phrasing it might appear an arbitrary expression of personal feeling. But to-day, we understand more about the mechanism of the universe, and are able to reinterpret the pronouncement by the "laws" of heredity and environment. Defy the com­mandments of the natural law, and the race will perish in a few generations; co-operate with them, and the race will flourish for ages to come.

As I said, she was writing in Britain, in 1939-40. In the light of what we now know about what was happening — or about to happen — to the Jews of Europe, her argument looks a whole lot less persuasive. It has been made. There are ultra-Orthodox rabbis who have blamed the holocaust on assimilated German Jewry, regarding it as a punishment for the abandonment of orthodoxy.²

However, the fact that these statements can be disconfirmed means that they are neither arbitrary nor meaningless. It also implies that they can be confirmed as well, and so that believers get warrant for their beliefs — even reasonable, educated believers. And this is the point that I would urge against pharyngular atheists. Of course some believers are nuts. Almost everyone, whatever they believe, has swamps of magical thinking in the brain, and I wouldn’t be without mine. A good refreshing wallow in the mud down there is one of the things we need for creativity. Some people’s minds, though are all swamp, with no dry land, only horrible sharp-toothed things moving through the muck, and I’ve known Christians like that. But example is not exemplification. I know some eminently sane, smart, brave believers

¹ "Consonant" covers a lot, I know. But there is a strain of romantic or existential atheism which says our values have nothing to do with the facts of the world — "we can rebel against our selfish genes" — and Sayers would say we can’t.

² I know: I can’t find a reference on my hard disk. But it’s not the kind of thing you forget reading.