Against Nature? — Biology and Thomas Aquinas

Homosexuality in animals

In 2006, there was an exposition in Norway titled “Against Nature?”, which brought attention to the fact that homosexual behavior occurs in the animal kingdom in a high variety of species, and this may include sexual activity, courtship, affection, pair bonding, and parenting. So, case settled. If homosexual behavior is found in nature, it cannot be “against nature” to practice homosexual behavior, and therefore it cannot be something objectionable.

I do not consider Steven Pinker to be a moral archetype (not at all), but he has a point when he speaks about the danger of making rash conclusions from “this is found in Nature” to “therefore, it is good and OK”. He says this can cut both ways: “Adultery is acceptable because people can naturally want more sexual partners” (naturalistic fallacy) and “Unfaithfulness is immoral, and so it is unnatural to feel desire for others when in a monogamous relationship.” (moralistic fallacy) [1]

We can conclude that using nature as a model for ethics : “X is found in nature — therefore X is natural — therefore X is good” (X being a behavior or an action) does not work. Some Christians then take an illegitimate short-cut to argue as follows: “Nature cannot tell us what is right or wrong — therefore: the Bible…” [2]. We should argue instead: “X is/is not an action in accordance to the order in nature — therefore X is good/evil.” And that means that we should examine what “in accordance with the order in nature” or “natural law” means.

Before we turn to the natural order that God has decreed for us to follow, let’s see what insights we can glean from the animal kingdom. We often hear statements like “I am gay; I am born this way”, which, to be more precise, means: “I am born with an attraction towards people of my own sex.” So, the real interesting and relevant question is: Do we find such a homosexual inclination also in animals? The answer seems to be yes, but very, very seldom. It has been so described for some sheep population, where a certain small population of rams will only mount other rams, and never female sheep. Although we cannot look into these ram’s interior, we can derive that they have homosexual orientation. It is difficult for a straight person to imagine that someone is attracted to someone of the same sex, but we should sincerely believe our lesbian and gay friends and neighbors. It will not be possible for us to ‘walk a mile in their shoes’ since this is difficult or impossible: can we walk in the shoes of someone struggling with depression — which also runs through families, and so the tendency is also inborn — ?

And let us be clear: this is a disposition. All dispositions are starting material, not qualifiers of dignity. Each one of us carries in his/her genetic, epigenetic, educational and emotional luggage some pieces that we consider gifts and others that we consider crosses. All these gifts and crosses belong to us, and here we start growing our own personality, and we try to make our life a life worth living. Great gifts and great crosses may well go together, if we remember the recently deceased Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash [3] — maybe his mathematical genius was somehow connected to his mental disease. He not only became a brilliant mathematician, but through ups and downs, finally managed to overcome his schizophrenia — although he said, the persons that accompanied in his thoughts, never really disappeared.

Natural Law

Let’s now take a walk into the (not-so) Dark Middle Ages with Thomas Aquinas, and how he viewed creation and nature. Nature, he argues, is intrinsically good, coming from God’s loving hands and displaying through nature’s diversity a small portion of His Goodness, Beauty and Truth. All creatures are principally good; but, simply by being created, they have limitations: like everything, including all living beings, they are temporal and will eventually die. But nature is not a wonderful garden full of lakes, flowers and fruits; it is dangerous and powerful. Nonetheless, Aquinas does not see evil as a force in itself, but rather as a “lack of good”, a defect or a side effect. From an ecological point of view, this is a very accurate picture! Volcanoes can costs millions of life; but they fertilize our earth; higher plant and animal life forms cannot exist without the death of others — think of the high-reaching trees in tropic forests that have their roots deep down in the soil of decayed trees and shrubs; or eagles feeding on the prey they have spotted with their careful eyes. Things were good and remained good in their lifetime, because they fulfilled the goal that pertained to them. [4] For a living being, “to be” is a value, a higher value than “not to be”, and their goal is to live, to survive and to propagate. Theologically speaking, they fulfill their end of “giving glory to God” simply by their being-there. (When I walk through nature, I am sometimes tempted to think: “easy life — give glory to God by just being there! We humans have a harder job to do!”)

Let’s now go one step further with Thomas Aquinas: we humans appear on stage. And humans have this concept of “good” and “evil”. Not only of physical evil — like “eagle kills rabbit” — but moral evil — like “Cain murders Abel”. Fundamentally, moral evil is marked by disobedience and pride towards God’s order (Adam and Eve). We humans also have the goal to “give glory to God”, but we need to use our freedom well to do so. We can choose between good and evil, between life and death (Deut 30:11–20), between God and devil. And choosing good helps us to give glory to God, to make us free, to let His image shine in us. Choosing evil brings us the slavery of sin. God is so good that He gives us always His grace to come back to Him, to ask His forgiveness; His grace fills us anew, and sets us on the path to goodness and freedom.

And we know what is good or evil through conscience. Conscience is not something that pertains solely to me (as in “I have to solve this between God and me”) according to Aquinas — that would just be the “counterfeit of conscience” [5]. We need the concept of Synderesis: “Synderesis is called the law of our understanding inasmuch as it is the habit of keeping the precepts of natural law, which are the first principles of human activity.” [6] And this “natural law” that is given by God can be seen by the light of reason. It can also be distorted and darkened through sin — our personal sins, but also through “structures of sin” [7].

There are certain rules that help us to understand natural law, and, conversely, to understand what runs “against nature”, if you will. Marriage is not only the gift of oneself to his or her spouse; it is also the basis of the family, and thus of the society, and contributes to the common good. Sex, then, should be reserved for marriage. There are many transgressions that violate the individual person or marriage, like cohabitation prior to marriage, rape, and adultery. They do not violate the nature of sexual intercourse, but in most cases they violate justice. And each one violates its own person. Only doing good is good for the person and makes her good; every evil makes her a slave to sin.

Sexual relations should have both a unitive and a (potentially) procreative end. From this basis one can start a checklist of activities that run “against nature”: masturbation — neither unitive nor procreative. Sex with someone of the same sex — neither unitive nor procreative. Artificial birth control: only unitive (natural family planning preserves both ends). Surrogacy motherhood — none (it is also a grave injustice) [8]. Artificial insemination — only procreative. In short: whenever none or only one end is reached, it is not in accordance with nature. Do we have this consistency in our thoughts, words, actions? This is counter-cultural today, just as it was for the first Christians.

Living according to these norms is not easy, but it makes us free. Remember: only acting good lets us grow and makes us truly free. We are called to live chaste lives (“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?” — 1 Cor 6,19.), whether we are called to holy matrimony, to the single life — and this applies to many of my friends, including gay people, who are according to the Catholic Church — my Church! — called to be single — or to a life of apostolic celibacy. All of this raises the question of whether we can say that some are called to single lives — good question. For some, that is a transitory state; not so for others. None of us can remain spiritually sterile. None of us. All our lives are filled with joys and crosses. That is also part of God’s created order and Providence.

- BMM

[1] Q&A: Steven Pinker of ‘Blank Slate’ United Press International, 10/30/2002, http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/tbs/media_articles/2002_10_30_upi.html, Access: 04 July 2015: “The naturalistic fallacy is the idea that what is found in nature is good. It was the basis for Social Darwinism, the belief that helping the poor and sick would get in the way of evolution, which depends on the survival of the fittest. Today, biologists denounce the Naturalistic Fallacy because they want to describe the natural world honestly, without people deriving morals about how we ought to behave (as in: If birds and beasts engage in adultery, infanticide, cannibalism, it must be OK.)” and “The moralistic fallacy is that what is good is found in nature. It lies behind the bad science in nature-documentary voiceovers: lions are mercy-killers of the weak and sick, mice feel no pain when cats eat them, dung beetles recycle dung to benefit the ecosystem and so on. It also lies behind the romantic belief that humans cannot harbor desires to kill, rape, lie, or steal because that would be too depressing or reactionary.” [1]

[2] I found this on the webpage “Stand to Reason”, searching for ‘naturalistic fallacy’.

[3] John Forbes Nash, Jr. (1928–2015) was an American mathematician with fundamental contributions in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations. In 1994, he received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. In 1959, Nash began showing clear signs of mental illness, and spent several years at psychiatric hospitals being treated for paranoid schizophrenia. After 1970, his condition slowly improved, allowing him to return to academic work by the mid-1980s. His life is depicted in the movie “The Beautiful Mind” (2001).

[4] It is not only the whole, but also each part which should fulfill its function: My feet are perfectly made for walking, but not for climbing on trees (like the feet of some apes, evidently). If I climb trees all day long in the tropical forest, my chances of survival or not getting hurt will be low. It is an unnatural movement. (On the other hand, If someone has no arms, and paints with his toes, this is also not natural, but primarily in the sense of going beyond nature.

[5] This is brilliantly explained in the lecture by Reinhard Hütter, “The Freedom of Truth: The Nature of Conscience in Aquinas and Newman”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNlBWTOtckQ Access 13 July 2015.

[6] Summa Theologica, First Part of the Second Part, Q. 94, 1

[7] Our post-modernistic society may contribute to such “structures of sin”, in my view as a non-theologian (CAVE). Pope John Paul II defined structures of sins as follows: “If the present situation can be attributed to difficulties of various kinds, it is not out of place to speak of “structures of sin,” which. . . are rooted in personal sin and thus always linked to the concrete acts of individuals who introduce these structures, consolidate them, and make them difficult to remove. And thus they grow stronger, spread, and become the source of other sins, and so influence people’s behavior. “Sin” and “structures of sin” are categories which are seldom applied to the situation of the contemporary world. However, one cannot easily gain a profound understanding of the reality that confronts us unless we give a name to the root of the evils which afflict us.” (Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 36).

[8] A comprehensive list of studies can be found at: http://www.stopsurrogacynow.com/studies/#sthash.j4jxZ9BV.dpbs