Conscience - 2

                                                           

 CONSCIENCE REVISITED

“Every person must follow his own conscience!” This statement, unfortunately, is often misunderstood. Many take it to imply that personal conscience is the only thing a responsible person must be concerned with. This implication is entirely unwarranted. A good person will aware that his or her conscience guides him or her correctly to what is really good to the extent that he or she can discover it. Such a person is concerned with knowing and doing what is truly good.

Important distinctions in the use of the word conscience.

Psychological Conscience. “Psychological conscience´ is essentially related to feelings of moral approval or disapproval. Within the depth of one’s own being, virtually everyone experiences at times approval or anxiety of a condemnation of one’s own decision. Conscience in this sense involves the internalization of parental and social norms and even of traditional taboos. Conscience in this sense is frequently found to condemn what is not wrong or to approve what is wrong, it cannot in itself provide decisive moral guidance. A person’s critical moral judgment must determine the validity of the impulses of psychological conscience.

Particular Moral Conscience. The judgment of conscience is the result of the thoughtful evaluation a person makes about the moral goodness or badness of a particular action. Conscience in this sense can be defined as one’s best judgment as to what in the circumstane4s is the morally right thing to do. It is in this sense of a judgment about the rightness or wrongness of particular acts that St. Thomas Aquinas and much of Catholic tradition after him use the term “conscience”.

It is important to note that since the judgment of conscience is an act of the intellect, it cannot merely be a feeling or a persona decision to act or live in a certain way. Concern for the truth is essential. Intelligent judgments, not feelings or choices, should direct the lives of mature persons.

General Moral Conscience. A person’s awareness of the basic principles for making moral judgements. A conscience which sees and recognizes the demands of he divine law. Thus a person knows that one should do good and avoid evil; that one should aim at arming no one; that one should love God and neighbor, and that one must never do deeds that are of their nature base, that always attack basic goods in ourselves or other persons. Typical adult Catholics grasp personally not only the broad truth that killing innocent t people is wrong but also the more specific truths that abortion and suicide are always wrong. 

Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and avoid evil. It often happens that conscience goes astray through ignorance which it is unable to avoid, without thereby losing its dignity. This cannot be said of the man who takes little trouble to find out what is true and good, or when conscience is by degrees almost blinded through the habit of committing sin. In order to have a good conscience, man must seek the truth and must make judgments in accordance with the same truth.

Transcendental Conscience. The dynamic thrust toward self-transcendence at the core of a person’s very subjectivity. Some rejects any normative significance to conscience understood in a merely psychological sense. They say that conscience refers to the whole person as a moral self, as a being inwardly impelled to act responsibly in accordance with the truth. Our conscience is intimately linked to our quest for truth. Human persons are unique in that they are question-asking beings, anxious to discover the truth. Conscience refers to the inner dynamism of the human person, impelling the individual to discover the truth abut what is to be done and what he or she is to be. This position however misrepresents the relation between the particular judgment of conscience and the knowledge of basic moral principles. It rejects the proper role of principles it makes conscience an almost mystical and unanalyzable component of the person. Unless there are such principles it is hard to see how the “dynamic thrust toward self-transcendence” could be determined to be a movement toward authentic self-transcendence, for without critical principles it could become a dynamism toward self-destruction on self-deception. If the moral law has no definite implications, it is difficult to grasp any intelligent patterns whatsoever in the workings of conscience.

 

CONSCIENCE

 

 

 

The very idea of “moral truth” is a puzzlement and offense to many of our contemporaries. We are now paddling in the murky sea of “modern emotivism.”

Morality has become almost totally a matter of feelings and preferences. You have yours and I have mine. If I say that something is “wrong,” I am expressing no more than my personal preference. “I am not comfortable with that.” “I feel that is not right.” “I would prefer you not do that.” In short, the making of arguments is replaced by the expression of emotions. In such a cultural context, the appeal to “conscience” is only an appeal to my personal preference. Conscience, I this view, does not discern moral truth but subjectively establishes the truth. This deep shift in the understanding of conscience and truth is addressed in the 1993 encyclical of John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth).

         

                    Certain currents of modern thought have gone so far as to exalt           freedom to such an extent that it becomes an absolute, which would   then be the source of values. This is the direction taken by doctrines      which have lost the sense of the transcendent or which are explicitly       atheist. The individual conscience is accorded the status of a    supreme tribunal of moral judgment which hands down categorical         and infallible decisions about good and evil. To the affirmation that    one has a duty to follow one’s conscience is unduly added the           affirmation that one’s moral judgment is true merely by the fact that it           has its origin in the conscience. But in this way the inescapable        claims of truth disappear, yielding their place to a criterion of sincerity, authenticity and “being at peace with oneself”, so much         so that some have come to adopt a radically subjectivist conception          of moral judgment.

                   As is immediately evident, the crisis of truth is not unconnected with this development. Once the idea of a universal truth about the          good, knowable by human reason, is lost, inevitably the notion of conscience also changes. Conscience is no longer considered in its          primordial reality as an act of a person’s intelligence, the function of    which is to apply the universal knowledge of the good in a specific   situation and thus to express a judgment about the right conduct to     be chosen here and now. Instead, there is a tendency to grant to the       individual conscience the prerogative of independently determining the criteria of good and evil and then acting accordingly. Such an      outlook is quite congenial to an individualist ethic, wherein each      individual is faced with his own truth, different from the truth of others.        Taken to its extreme consequences, this individualism leads to a           denial of the very idea of human nature.

                    These different notions are at the origin of currents of thought    which posit a radical opposition between moral law and conscience,    and between nature and freedom.

The liberal idea of conscience dispenses with truth.

 

Guise of Chance

 Computers cannot be constructed by random particles flying about for billions of years. The complete works of Shakespeare, nicely printed and produced in a handsome volume, did not result from a gigantic explosion in a cosmic print shop eons ago. Winds and rains and dust blowing over and upon a large piece of marble did not bring the Pietà into being. No normal person has the least doubt about these three statements. People know that chance can explain neither beauty nor intricate complexity.

Plain as all this is we can enhance the worth of our evaluation of chance "explanations" by getting a feel for the impossibly enormous numbers involved in assertions about randomness. Adding zeros to a digit increases numbers at a rapidly accelerating rate 10 , 100, 1000, 10,000, and so on. As the numbers grow with zeroes soon the rate of increase begins to boggle the mind. Thus with 26 zero We have the number of drops of water in all the oceans of the world. The visible universe , billions of light years in extent, measures about 1028 inches. In our visible universe of 50 billion galaxies, with several billion huge stars on average in each Galaxy, there are 1070 atoms. The numbers have outstripped our capacity to deal with them. Living plants and animals are so fantastically complicated that astronomer Fred Hoyle and astrophysicist Chandra Wickramasinghe have calculated that odds against life happening by chance one in 104000 -- and unspeakable impossibility.

Faith, Reason and Evil

Faith properly understood, does not contradict reason in the least; indeed, it is nothing less than the will to keep one’s mind fixed precisely on what reason has discovered to it.

Pure reason can reveal to us that there is a God, that we have immortal souls, and that there is a natural moral law. Does belief in such a revelation go beyond reason? Is this where faith comes in? the answer is no, for the claim that a divine revelation has occurred is something for which the monotheistic religions typically claim there is evidence, and that evidence takes the form of a miracle, a suspension of the natural order that cannot be explained in any way other than divine intervention in the normal course of events.

Given that God exists and that He sustains the world and the causal laws governing it in being at every moment, we know that there is a power capable of producing a miracle, that is , a suspension of those causal laws.

The case for the resurrection of Christ doesn’t exist in a vacuum then; it presupposes this philosophical background. Pure reason proves through philosophical arguments that there is a God and that we have immortal souls. This by itself entails that a miracle like a resurrection from the dead is possible. Now the historical evidence hat Jesus Christ was in fact resurrected from the dead is overwhelming when interpreted in light of that background knowledge. Hence pure reason also shows that Jesus really was raised from the dead. But Jesus claimed to be divine, and claimed that the authority of His teachings would be confirmed by His being resurrected. So the fact that He was resurrected provides divine authentication of His claims.

Suppose you know through purely rational arguments that there is a God, that He raised Jesus Christ from the dead, and therefore that Christ really is divine, as He claimed to be, so that anything He taught must be true; in other words, suppose that the general strategy jus sketched can be successfully fleshed out. Then it follows that if you are rational you will believe anything Christ taught; indeed, if you are rational you will believe it even if it is something that you could not possibly have come to know in any other way, and even if it is something highly counterintuitive and difficult to understand. Reason tells you to have faith  in what Christ teaches because He is divine. That is what faith is from the point of view of traditional Christian theology: belief in what God has revealed because if God has revealed it, it  cannot be in error; but where the claim that He revealed it is itself something that is known on the basis of reason faith doesn’t conflict with reason, then; it is founded on reason and completes reason.

Summary of “Teleology And Transcendence: The Thought Of Robert Spaemann.” By Anselm Ramelow

Robert Spaemann (1927 - 2018) German Catholic Philosopher

                                                                

It explores the philosophical contributions of Robert Spaemann, particularly his focus on teleology (the study of purpose or design in nature) and transcendence (the idea of going beyond physical or material existence). The work reflects on Spaemann's critique of modern attempts to replace teleological perspectives with paradigms centered on self-preservation. It also delves into how Spaemann's personal experiences, such as his early life challenges and exposure to the dangers of the Nazi era, shaped his philosophical outlook. The text emphasizes Spaemann's belief in the interconnectedness of life's parts and their orientation toward an ungraspable whole.

Spaemann emphasizes the importance of teleology, the idea that natural entities have intrinsic purposes or ends. He critiques modern attempts to replace teleological perspectives with mechanistic or utilitarian views.

A central theme in his work is the distinction between "someone" and "something." Spaemann argues that all human beings, regardless of their stage of development or limitations, are persons with inherent dignity.

NATURAL LAW

 

The nature of a thing, from an Aristotelian point of view, is the form or essence it instantiates. Ex.: it is of the essence, nature, or form of a triangle to have three perfectly straight sides. 

In biological organs, we have things whose natures or essences more obviously involve certain final causes or purposes. Ex.: the function or final cause of eyeballs is to enable us to see. Objections: Ex.: if it is wrong to go against nature, then it is wrong to wear glasses. Again: If homosexuality is genetic, doesn’t that show that it’s natural too.?

To wear eyeglasses isn’t contrary to the natural function of eyeballs; rather, it quite obviously restores to the eyeballs their ability to carry out their natural function. The question of homosexuality’s genetic basis is quite irrelevant; it does not by itself prove anything about whether it is natural. The possibility of a genetic basis for clubfoot doesn’t show that having clubfeet is “natural”. It is obviously unnatural in the Aristotelian sense of failing perfectly to conform to the essence or nature of a thing. No one who has a clubfoot would take offense at someone’s noting this obvious matter of fact, or find it convincing that the existence of a genetic basis for his affliction shows that it is something he should “embrace” and “celebrate”.

Of course, that by itself does not show that homosexuality is immoral either. After all, having a clubfoot is not immoral, and neither is being born blind or with a predisposition for alcoholism. 

Intelligent Design

 

Sir Fred Hoyle

After considering what he thought of as a very remote probability of evolution he

concluded:

“ If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being

deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at

the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be

the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to

think of...[9] ”

Hoyle calculated that the chance of obtaining the required set of enzymes for even the

simplest living cell was one in 10^40000. Since the number of atoms in the known universe

is infinitesimally tiny by comparison (10^80), he argued that even a whole universe full of

primordial soup would grant little chance to evolutionary processes. He claimed:

The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could

be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently

nonsense of a high order.