Tag Archives: Nature

On Marrying Young

marriage, Natural Law, , ,

Over the past 40 years, the median age of men and women getting married in the US has risen steeply.  Catholics, it seems, are no different in this regard.  A Pew Research Center study in 2014 found that only 14% of Catholics between the ages of 18-29 were married.  Marrying at a much later age has become the “new normal”.  Statistics are helpful, but they do not answer the most important question as to whether this is a good thing or not.  The answer, not surprisingly, is a resounding “No”.

To see why this question is answered in the negative, we must first make the distinction between what is normal and what is natural.  Normality expresses to what degree a man conforms to a cultural norm.  These norms are always relative to the culture in which they are established.  In the best of all possible worlds, they are also relative to what is natural.  It is when the natural and the normal coincide that the behavior in question leads to true flourishing and happiness (in the fullest sense).  While it may be normal to get married older, it is questionable whether it conforms to what is natural.

A Natural Time to Get Married?

Marriage in itself is natural for the human person, but the question is whether the nature of marriage itself demands that the spouses wait until they are older to marry.  To address this question we must first ask how we determine what is natural.

One way that we can do this is by looking at the biological reality of the human body.  What I mean by this can be best illustrated by an example.  We know that, despite being deeply immersed in a Freudian-Kinseyan paradigm, children are not sexual beings.  If they were, then they would develop sexual capacities before the normal age of puberty (12-16).  This is why, as I have written previously, something like Drag Queen Story Hour is an abuse of childhood. 

While we might readily admit that biology reveals the grievous nature of sexualizing children, we tend to make a the same error when it comes to marriage and sexual development.  Is it reasonable to think that God made men and women sexually mature by their late teens and early 20s only to have them enter a holding pattern for up to a decade?  Perhaps you could say yes, except for the fact that they also experience their strongest libido at the same time. 

Sexual desire is the strongest desire we experience because it is meant to fuel the courage to make the necessary gift of self necessary for marriage and family life.  It is at its strongest at such an early age because it is meant to propel the man and woman out from their parents so as to become parents themselves.  The problem is that we now tell young adults that, despite the fact that they experience strong sexual desire, they are too young for marriage.  There is the obvious disconnect then between God’s design and lived reality.    

With these considerations in mind, it becomes clear that there is something contra-natural about waiting so long to get married.  As mentioned, marriage in and of itself at any age is natural so we cannot say it is against nature.  It does however tend towards being contrary to the nature of marriage itself, especially because it is the foundation of the Family.  Rather than making it possible to be “fruitful and multiply” it contributes to what would more accurately be called the modern “fruitful and maintain” paradigm.  Again to be clear, I am not saying there is anything wrong with waiting to marry in individual cases, but in the general trend and attitude towards the later marriages.

Marriage as a Life Accesory

Once we are able to grasp that younger marriages conform with God’s design for marriage, we can begin to ask why many people fail to see this.  To say that “Marriage is natural” means that it is one of the things that fulfills our nature (i.e. become virtuous).  This fulfillment comes not just because we biologically passed on our genes, but because Marriage and the Family are foundational for our moral growth.  The Family is a school of virtue, not just for children, but for the man and woman as both husband and wife and then father and mother. 

Our culture, on the other hand, treats marriage as if it is merely an add-on.  The professional has taken precedence over the personal.  Marriage is not even considered until a certain level of professional success is achieved.  The person trains himself to link fulfilment with professional achievement.  They also become very set in their ways and their capacity for self-giving in marriage and family is diminished.  We should expect the age to continue to increase unless a fundamental shift in attitude occurs.  The longer the person waits, the less they are “ready” for marriage. 

This putting of the occupational cart before the conjugal horse fails to acknowledge that, as Pope St. John Paul II pointed out, the communion of persons in marriage is a fundamental human good upon which all human goods are built (Veritatis Splendor 14).  To add it into an already settled life is to risk disintegration because the true accessories have been placed before the essential.  Professional decisions are for the sake of supporting a family.  Rather than seeing education and careers as means to supporting a spouse and family, they have become competitors.  The attitude is “once I go to school and get a job, then I will think about marriage” rather than “I am choosing to be trained in this profession because it will allow me to take care of my family.”  And this attitude is encouraged even by well-meaning Catholics.

On the Possibility of Miracles

Apologetics, , , , , , , ,

The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, better known as the Jeffersonian Bible, was compiled in 1820 by the founding father of the same name.  Using a literal cut and paste method, Jefferson extracted sections of the New Testament that he thought presented Jesus as a great moral exemplar.  Left behind are only mentions of the miracles He performed, including the Resurrection, and any passages that even have a whiff of his divinity.  The famous tinkerer could find no reasons to believe in the divinity of Christ and the operation of the supernatural so he imposed his naturalism upon the texts of the Bible.  Although he hid it away for fear of reprisal, there are many, even inside confines of the Church, who openly adopt and preach naturalism. 

Naturalism

Simply put, naturalism is the position that all that exists is nature.  It usually goes hand in hand with scientism, that is, the belief that the only field of knowledge is empirical science.  Within this philosophical framework the supernatural is a priori excluded such that there must be a natural explanation for everything.  This would include the divinity of Christ and miracles.  Rather than scientifically investigating the possibility of miracles, they simply conclude that miracles are impossible because they are impossible.  As we shall see, however, the miracles of Jesus are in fact quite possible.

CS Lewis makes a helpful distinction in categorizing the miracles of Jesus into two very broad categories: miracles of the Old Creation and miracles of the New Creation.  The former are those miracles in which, seemingly, the laws of nature are altered.  The latter are those that pertain to the laws of supernature.  As an example of the former we could have the changing of the water into wine and of the latter, the walking on water.  Both however respect nature and are no mere suspension of natural laws.  The super-natural always builds upon and assumes the natural. 

Using the Miracle of Cana as an example, let us examine whether or not such a miracle of the Old Creation is possible.  But before doing so, a disclaimer of sorts must be made.  The goal of this discussion is to show that miracles are possible and if possible then probable.  This is not a definitive proof that any particular miracle, including the changing of water into wine, actually happened.  That must be taken upon faith.  Instead the goal is more modest and that is to show that there is nothing irrational about believing in miracles, and, in fact, it is irrational not to believe in their possibility.

Returning to our example, let us examine what is happening.  A substance, namely water, is being changed into another substance, wine.  Change is a reality within the natural world and occurs everywhere we look so there is nothing per se out of the ordinary here.  All substantial change is governed by the enduring principle of matter.  In each substantial change, the matter takes on a new form; water gets into a grape seed and the matter becomes the grape vine which then bears grapes which undergo another substantial change through the process of fermentation and become wine.  So, we see, using the laws of substantial change, it is quite possible that water becomes wine. 

The Lord of Nature

This is not to explain away the miraculous, but to set it in its proper context.  Properly speaking the miracle is not in the change itself, but in the rapidity of the change.  Christ is revealing that He is the Lord of Nature and so it is fitting that He would respect the laws of nature and yet show His mastery over them.  He is the Sovereign King of Creation and thus He can do all things.  He came to fulfill the law, not to abolish it means not just the religious laws like the ritual washing that made the stone jars necessary, but also the laws of nature as well.  In fact, He uses the miracle as a sign that it is His power over nature that also gives Him the authority over the religious law. This mastery over nature is precisely what lends credibility to His claims of divinity and is the reason why He always uses some form of matter in His miracles rather than just creating it out of nothing.  The fact that He also produced a superabundance of 520 liters of wine shows how His absolute mastery.  A similar thing can be shown with the other miracles such as the multiplication of the loaves. 

What about the miracles of the New Creation, those like the walking on the water and the Resurrection?  How can we reconcile these?  Here again we must admit that we cannot prove them, but we can show how the follow from the possibility of the Miracles of the Old Creation and how they are not a repudiation of the laws of Nature.  If we view the miracles of the Old Creation as signs, motives of credibility if you will, then we can say that these miracles of the New Creation are the fulfillment of those signs.  They are meant to show that the laws of nature are not what is altered but man and his relationship to nature that is altered.  Water is still wet and still permeable, but man is given power over it.  Peter, a mere man in the process of becoming a new man, is able to walk on the water as long as he kept his eyes fixed on Christ.  Death, a natural consequence of man’s material being, no longer can hold him.  In both cases the laws are still in place, but man himself has changed.  Previously governed by the material laws because of his material body, he is governed by the laws of a spiritual body.  Spirit asserts its dominance against matter. 

We see now that we must admit at least of the possibility of miracles of Jesus and any philosophy that eliminates them by definition is necessarily false.  There is nothing contrary to the character of nature that would preclude them.  To eliminate them a priori means that you must in some way deny some of the attributes of nature itself.  To eliminate the possibility of the supernatural in this case means a denial of the natural as well.  The only way they could be excluded is if God did not allow them, a question that the Naturalist is not even willing to consider.

Not surprisingly most naturalists are also atheists (or at least deists).  In other words, they form their philosophy based on their belief, rather than as true scientists who would allow the data to take them wherever it goes.  In other words, they invent a philosophy to fit their belief rather than fitting their belief to a correct philosophy.  One may not know whether Christ was God or not, but to eliminate the possibility of the miraculous ultimately is unreasonable. 

The Heresy of Scientism

Faith and Reason, Mary, , , , , ,

Modern science has brought us many wonderful things, but we would be naïve to think that it has made us wonder-full.  In fact, our obsession with the empirical has left us wonder-less because we mistakenly believe that everything can be explained.  We can, of course, explain how a lot of things in nature work.  The problem comes in when we accept these merely mechanistic explanations as the only explanation.  Our forefathers may have lacked the empirical skills that we have, but they most certainly were wiser because they were able to order all things.  Like ourselves, these wise men and women were obsessed with answering the question why, but unlike us they were unsatisfied with just knowing how nature worked.  They wanted to know why it worked the way it did more than how it worked.  For all their supposed backwardness they knew that nature could have worked differently, but it worked the way it did for a reason.  They sought to discover the reason first.  To use Aristotelian language, they wanted to understand formal and final causes and not just material and formal causes.

Scientism

The overemphasis on the how without any concern for the why has led to the heresy of scientism.  Notice that I called it a heresy and not just a philosophy.  It is a heresy because it rejects the truth that there is a universe.  It looks only at objects, but never objects as they fit into the whole.  He loves the trees but knows nothing of the forest.  To borrow from Chesterton, the scientistic heretic is “moved to discuss details in art, politics, literature…He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe…Everything matters—except everything.”  It is a heresy because it ignores the religious implications of Nature.  Religious because God is its Creator and He has written into it His-story.  Implications because it is just Creation and never meant to be worshipped.  It is a sign, a sacrament if you will, that reveals to man His Creator.  In fact, creation exists for man so that He might come to know the Creator.  That is its purpose and so we must read it that way.  Just as in the Book of Scripture God has revealed Himself, so too in the Book of Creation.

Like any heresy, there is always a temptation to overcorrect and reject scientistic explanations whole cloth.  But when we do this we are creating a false opposition between the scientistic and sacramental standards.  Both creation and Scripture have the same Author telling the Truth in different forms.  Just as it is foolish to remove Scripture and only “find God in Nature”, it is likewise imprudent to diminish the story that God is telling through Creation.  Aristotle thought all four causes were necessary to come to a more complete understanding of things.  The medievalists may have been wiser because they were able to focus on the formal and final causes, but they were limited in their understanding of the material and efficient causes and therefore were not as wise as they could have been.  We, on the other hand, have at our disposal a great power to more fully plum the depths of the material and efficient causes.  In short we have an opportunity to be wiser than our predecessors, but only if we avoid the heretical pitfalls we are speaking about here.

Our Lady, the Morning Star

An example will help to illustrate what this might look like.  The Litany of Loreto describes Our Lady as the “Morning Star”.  This moniker came about because of the wedding of the book of Scripture with the book of Creation.  The Church has long interpreted a verse from the Song of Songs (6:9) as descriptive of her: “Who is She that cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun?”.  Turning towards creation we find that there is, in fact, a  “star” that is found in the sky just prior to the rising of the sun.  This “star” reflects the light of the sun and suggest the rising of the sun.  Our Lady, as the truest reflection of the brightness of her Son, always points to His coming (c.f. Jn 2:5). 

Some might accuse Catholics of over-spiritualizing things by doing this until we actually look at this empirically.  The planet Venus, which is named for a Roman goddess of fertility (could there be anything more fertile than a Virgin Mother?), has its orbit inside of the Earth’s orbit.  This means it is always relatively close to the sun in the sky.  When it is on one side of the sun it appears to follow the sun and brightens in our sky just after the sun sets.  When it is on the other side of the sun it precedes the sun in our sky so that it brightens the sky just before sun rise.  One can readily see how this one aspect of the book of nature perfectly describes Our Lady.  Apropos of our impending Solemnity, Our Lady is a Heavenly Body.  Nevertheless, even if she is closer to the sun, she still remains inside our orbit as one of us.  She always reflects the “Light of the World”, but especially in times of darkness.   

We could go on, but you get the point.  In fact, the more we wonder about this one particular aspect of creation, the deeper we could make of the connections.  Clinging to the complentarity of nature and Scripture enables us to see this in its fullest meaning.  If nature is nothing but the random collision of atoms, then you won’t care about why Venus is the way it is.  If you think nature something completely doomed for destruction, then you won’t care what it has to say.  But if you take the authentically Catholic both/and approach then you will be led deeper into the awareness of how close God is to us.