The Second

Brilliant minds chew on the great human questions: how should we find meaning? How should we order our lives together? What are the essential and real qualities of being human, and what does that imply for what we do?   And, although answers vary, one dominant, modern idea informs most of the modern answers: Human beings emerged through time on a continuum with everything else, from non-life to life, from non-consciousness to consciousness, from practical survival behaviors to morality, from awareness to self-awareness, from awe to religion, from irrational to rational.   In short, to say that man evolved from the lower animals is to say something mundane, like saying the earth is round. This now commonplace theory of origins has found renewed energy in the teachings of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, whose essential message is that of acquiring virtue.   Unlike traditional treatments—ancient wisdom, religious teaching and practice—Peterson’s is grounded in a remarkably broad...

Moral relativism versus moral absolutes has been a hot topic among Christians for all of my lifetime, meaning at least 40 years.  But relevant writings go back at least 100 years, Dostoevsky, for example.  The key concept is that morality has a firm basis in something firm, not in a person’s opinions or feelings, and not even in the current trends of a society.  Because the monotheistic religions have a God who both created and gave moral imperatives, it’s obvious that people of these religions do believe in moral absolutes. So, indeed, from Roman Catholic teaching we find a classification for the two sources of moral absolutes, Revelation and Natural Law, where the first refers to things revealed by the Creator, and the second to things that all human beings can know from lived experience.  This second idea of Natural Law, although intuitively appealing, resists analysis.  Discussion invariably winds up in the riddle, “How do you know what you say you know?”...