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1.: How Roman Catholic Neocons Peddle Natural Law into Debates about Lif From: Stephen Meyer

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1.: How Roman Catholic Neocons Peddle Natural Law into Debates about Lif

Posted by: "Stephen Meyer" Stephen276@comcast.net stephen_meyer_stemcells

Wed May 28, 2008 1:26 pm (PDT)

How Roman Catholic Neocons Peddle Natural Law into Debates about Life
and Death

By Frank L. Cocozzelli

As the rightist philosopher Richard Weaver famously said, "ideas
have consequences." And I can tell you from personal experience some
of the consequences of at least one idea, that of "natural law."

I have a form of LMG muscular dystrophy. When I was first diagnosed in
1985, I walked with a slight limp. Today I am bound to a wheelchair, a
virtual quadriplegic. Nevertheless, I am a practicing attorney. Monday
through Friday my wife wakes up at 5 a.m. and gets herself ready for
work. An hour later she wakes me up, then dresses me for court. Since my
body does not mostly move of it own volition, she must roll me back and
forth to get my pants on, lift me onto a slide board to get me into my
wheelchair, lift my arms to get my shirt on and then knot my tie. After
she gives me breakfast, she attends to getting our kids ready for
school. She does all this before working an eight-hour day. I usually
leave for court shortly thereafter, driven either by my father or my
uncle.

My condition has led me to be politically active in the battle for
federal funding and oversight for embryonic stem cell research, which
potentially could help me manage my disease. This battle has required me
to confront the hierarchy of my own religion, Roman Catholicism, as well
as allied neoconservative groups. This battle has also required me to
come to better understand the intricacies of "natural law" as an
animating idea of their movement. I have also come to understand that
natural law arguments can be easily turned around to advance enlightened
positions on science and biology and pluralist democracy.

Roman Catholic* neoconservatives such as Richard John Neuhaus have
President George W. Bush's ear, and have succeeded in thwarting vital
research using stem cells, research that has shown such promise in
developing treatments for many diseases— including my muscular
dystrophy.

Neoconservative Catholics and fundamentalist evangelicals vehemently
oppose embryonic stem cell research because it destroys blastocysts, or
early-stage embryos in the first few days of cellular division. Research
opponents regard the harvesting of the undifferentiated,
"master" stem cells of the blastocyst, and their use in
research, as the destruction of human life (which, after all, begins at
conception). They argue that the embryo is being denied its telos, or
"end," in not being allowed to develop into a child. This is the
crux of the objection to embryonic stem cell research.

But the Catholic neocons promote another objection to the research: a
general antipathy toward any kind of meddling with nature. Beyond any
religious considerations, the issue is seen as an injunction against
"playing God"; a pragmatic reluctance to engage in futile
attempts to change nature.

Many neoconservatives hold a kind of nihilistic respect for nature, and
most importantly, the naturally ordered inequalities, such as between
the weak and the strong and the rich and the poor. Meddling is
ill-advised and doomed to create catastrophes worse than the original
problems they sought to address, from their point of view. It isn't
difficult to discern within the arguments of both Catholic neocon Robert
P. George and secular neocon Eric Cohen their distaste for what they see
as the radical egalitarian effect science and technology have had on
society, a state of affairs that must seem intolerably subversive of the
"natural order." Moreover, the Catholic neocons view natural law
as the true basis for a national moral order of all Americans.

Encountering such sentiments led me to explore how the Catholic neocons
(or as defector Damon Linker calls them, "theocons,") have
introduced Catholic notions of "natural law" into the larger
neocon movement—and thus into critical American debates about life
and death.

Why Natural Law Matters

Neoconservatives are tiny in number, yet large in influence due to their
prolific writing, thinking, and support from wealthy patrons that locate
them close to the corridors of power. It is a small movement of
intellectuals that emerged in earnest opposing political trends of the
1960s, without a mass base and with only the power of their ideas and
connections to win influence. Their vigorous defense of the free market,
capitalism, and a militarist foreign policy wins them powerful allies.
Yet other currents run through their thought, including a defense of
natural law and the championing of religion.

"Natural law," meaning the rules God set into motion in the
world and also instilled in our own natures, has been a central,
animating philosophical idea in Christian thought for a thousand years.
However it has taken some important turns along the way, and there are
now what we might call several branches of thought about the definition
of natural law.

One of these, the Classic view, is embraced and promoted by the leading
thinkers of Catholic neoconservatives in the United States and their
political allies in conservative Protestant evangelicalism. Roman
Catholicism as a whole employs natural law principles as a means to
rationally explain and interpret the morality of Scripture. However,
many in the Vatican have recently pressed to superimpose their
particular interpretations on the greater secular society. This is
driven by the belief that natural law principles are so universal that
even non-Catholics are subject to their tenets.

On the religious Right's hot button issues of the culture
war—feminism, birth control, abortion, gay marriage, stem cell
research—natural law-based ethics are routinely employed by the
Catholic wing to refute the progressive position. This is important for
a very powerful reason: one of its guiding principles is that any law
that violates natural law (or at least the way orthodox Catholicism
interprets natural law) should be ignored as unjust. What's more,
evangelical social conservatives have been increasingly adopting natural
law arguments in support of their shared opposition to issues they view
as assaults on traditional values.

John Courtney Murray and America's Founders

The appropriation of Classical natural law arguments to advance the
modern agenda of Catholic neoconservatism and the broader Religious
Right originated with the Jesuit priest John Courtney Murray
(1904-1967).

Murray was a key advocate in developing the Vatican's modern approach to
pluralism in liberal democracies such as in the United States. He argued
that Catholic doctrine is compatible with the thought of America's
founders, citing their various allusions to natural law-derived,
self-evident, truths. Murray argued that as a result, Catholicism,
Protestantism, and Judaism would increasingly influence national
morality in the second half of the twentieth century. The only problem
with this is that Catholic notions of natural law had little to nothing
to do with the thinking of the framers of the Constitution. For one
thing, there is more than one interpretation of natural law and where it
leads us.

Nevertheless, Catholic neoconservatives such as Richard John Neuhaus,
George Weigel and Michael Novak have seized on this erroneous view of
natural law like a cudgel to further a revisionist narrative of American
history that supports Religious Right notions of Christian nationalism.
To this end, Thomas Jefferson and other of the founders are often
portrayed as fervent evangelicals who cited thirteenth century
interpretations of Aristotle's teachings; an inaccurate accounting
that belies Jefferson's (among others) Arian Unitarianism (a belief
in God as a single person as opposed to being three persons in one, a
Trinity). "When they [the Founders] are not being denounced as
infidels," historian Garry Wills bemusedly wrote, "men like
Michael Novak dress them up as crypto-Evangelicals, crypto- Jews, or
crypto-Catholics."11

The natural law beliefs of the American founders were—theoconic
thinkers like Murray, Novak and Weigel notwithstanding—different
than those of the Vatican. For one thing, the founders followed a form
of natural law much evolved from Aquinas's version. The first
significant revision was by Anglican theologian Richard Hooker
(1554-1600) whose belief that God cares more about individual souls than
church hierarchies was a direct rebuke to the Vatican. But perhaps more
importantly, Hooker took Aquinas one step further by saying of
Scripture, "Words must be taken according to the matter whereof they
are uttered." This means that people must use their reason in
reading the Bible, with a key component of that understanding historical
context.

Hooker's views on tolerance in particular directly influenced the
Enlightenment thinker John Locke, whose views in turn guided the framers
of the Constitution. (Locke directly cites Hooker in his Second Treatise
on Civil Government.) It is through Locke that Aristotelian thought is
reintroduced into the ethics of governance after it was elided by a
steady stream of philosophers beginning in the late Middle Ages, and
ending with Thomas Hobbes at the dawn of the Age of Reason. Hobbes' sole
concern was for the preservation of secular sovereign rulers and he had
no use for a morality based upon rational thought. The social contract
was the price paid for social order—even if the price paid for that
peace was abusive authority.

Locke applied an inverse form of Hobbes' social contract theory, one
in which if a ruler violates natural law principles by failing to
protect "life, liberty, and property," the governed are
justified in overthrowing the regime. Locke, in turn, heavily influenced
the thinking of the framers of the Constitution. His legacy is found in
Article VI proscribing "religious tests" for public office as
well as in Jefferson's pivotal 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists in
which he uses the metaphor of a wall of separation between church and
state to explain the meaning of the establishment clause of the First
Amendment.

The clear influence of John Locke demolishes the theocon argument that
Catholic natural law principles are at the root of the Founders'
beliefs. Locke, in his Letter on Toleration advocated separating church
and state – an idea thoroughly rejected by the theocons who want to
insert Catholic theology as the cornerstone of American morality.

Garry Wills observes, the argument of "John Courtney Murray that
America was really founded on Catholic principles [is] an idea that
would have made Adams and Jefferson snort with derision."

The Catholic Neoconservatives

Catholic neoconservatives, like most neocons, are elitists who see
social inequality as a natural condition of society. As a result, they
often stress the need to control knowledge in order to better instruct
the general populace. But unlike neocons such as Irving Kristol who tend
to be either atheists or not terribly religious, theocons are
traditionalist-minded Catholics, many with ties to ultra-conservative
organizations such as Opus Dei. Theocons also share a history with the
rest of the neoconservative movement—their leading lights moved from
left to right in reaction to what they saw as the threat of the `60s
cultural revolution and inattention to the true threat of communism.

This group is spearheaded by the triumvirate of Richard John Neuhaus,
Michael Novak and George Weigel. They had a good friend in Pope John
Paul II— but now have even better ones in Pope Benedict XVI and
President George W. Bush.

Michael Novak started out the 1960s as both a democratic Socialist and
vocal proponent of liberalizing Catholicism but has been marching
rightward since the mid- 1970s as an avatar of laissez-faire
capitalism— as well as of Catholic orthodoxy. His 1982 book, The
Spirit of Democratic Capitalism is often credited with softening Vatican
hostility to free market economics and directing criticism towards
democratic socialism.

While some neocons embrace the late founding philosopher of
neoconservatism Leo Strauss's warnings about "the corrosive
effects" of liberalism, in dozens of books Novak extols the merits
of liberal democracy, pluralism, and individual liberty. But he does so
through the lens of John Courtney Murray (and the medieval Catholic
philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas) who viewed liberty as doing what one
ought to do, with orthodox Catholic theology defining the parameters of
what "ought" means. (See box on Murray.) As its director of
social and political studies, Novak brings a religious flair to the
neoconservative think tank, American Enterprise Institute.

George Weigel has been prominent on the Right since the Reagan
administration, when he was very involved in supporting the Nicaraguan
Contra guerillas against the revolutionary government of the
Sandinistas. He is the official biographer of Pope John Paul II1 and
from his perch at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington,
D.C. has been the greatest proponent of John Courtney Murray's idea
that when America's Founders spoke of "self-evident truths"
they were evoking Catholic notions of natural law.

But perhaps the most influential of this group is Father Richard John
Neuhaus, whose ideological and religious transformation is one of the
more remarkable journeys in modern religious and political life. The
one-time anti-Vietnam war Lutheran minister left behind radical left
politics (as well as his Lutheranism) to become in 1990 a Roman Catholic
priest and icon of the neoconservative movement. He promotes the civic
power of religion as president of the Institute of Religion and Public
Life, a neoconservative institute "whose purpose is to advance a
religiously informed public policy for the ordering of society."

Neuhaus has had the ear of President George W. Bush throughout his
administration, as well as enjoying a direct line of communication with
Pope Benedict XVI. Neuhaus, acting on directives from Rome, in 2004
pushed for the denial of the Sacrament of Communion to then-Democratic
Presidential candidate John Kerry for his prochoice, pro-embryonic stem
cell research positions. But unlike Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI,
who both opposed the 2003 Iraq War, Neuhaus (along with Novak and
Weigel) openly argued for preemptive invasion.

Many neoconservatives hold a kind of nihilistic respect for nature, and
most importantly, the naturally ordered inequalities, such as between
the weak and the strong and the rich and the poor

The theocons, unlike most mainstream Catholics, are evangelical in
nature, using religious conversion as an important tool to augment their
influence. For example, they are attempting to seize control of the
Catholic Church from within, first by trying to get mainstream Catholics
to return to traditionally orthodox practices, (including a return to
the Latin Mass) while simultaneously reaching out to traditionalist
groups such as the Society of St. Pius X which have rejected the
liberalizing reforms of Vatican II.

Part of this effort entails the marginalization of moderate and liberal
Catholics. They hope to offset these losses by converting socially
conservative Protestants and even some Jews. Such notable converts
include U.S. Senator Sam Brownback, the Kansas Republican; former Bush
advisor and editor of Crisis magazine Deal Hudson; columnist Robert
Novak; and CNBC's Lawrence Kudlow. The conversions of Brownback, Novak
and Kudlow were overseen by the prominent Opus Dei priest, Rev. C. John
McCloskey.2

Catholic theocons also frown on any and all dissent. For example, when
the lay group Voice of the Faithful demanded accountability from the
Church during the recent pedophilia scandal, Weigel dismissed them as
part of "a culture of dissent."

The theocons are easy to identify by their terminology. Pundit Dinesh
D'Souza for example, invokes a twelfth century understanding of
"just war" doctrine to explain the need for preemptive military
action. We can hear it at work when theocons and neocons falsely
describe value pluralism as "moral relativism," and agnosticism
or atheism as "nihilism."

In the stem cell debate, neocon Eric Cohen and Catholic theocon Robert
P. George both argue that an individual human being exists from the
moment of conception, as if it were based upon a scientific consensus,
even though that is clearly is not the case. Underlying their argument
are Classical Greek natural law principles as interpreted by the
Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas. This becomes significant because the
theocons view such Catholic orthodoxy as the template for a national
morality.3

Defining Natural Law

The notion of natural law comes to us from the Classical Greek
philosopher Aristotle, who sought to explain the logical order of the
universe based upon empirical analysis. Unlike his teacher Plato who
believed that this world was an imperfect vision of another ideal world,
one in which God, justice and morality are unchanging, Aristotle
believed in one universe, one in which what is before us is all there
is, but set in motion by "an unmoved mover." And unlike Plato
who believed in the immutable nature of things, Aristotle taught that
change is the one constant. In his treatise, Physics, he famously
declared that that which has changed, is changing.

Aristotle's teachings virtually disappeared with the fall of the
Roman Empire, while Plato's worldview found its way into orthodox
Christian teaching, notably in the writings of Saint Augustine. Plato's
influence on Augustine leaps out in the latter's lack of faith in the
goodness of man. However, with the Catholic reconquest of Spain from the
Moors, Church scholars came into contact with the works of Jewish and
Islamic scholars who studied and expounded upon Aristotle's works;
thinkers such as Moses Maimonides and al-Farbi. These writings
influenced a series of Middle Age theologian philosophers such as Peter
Abelard and Thomas Aquinas. It was Aquinas who succeeded in adapting
Aristotle's teaching to Catholic theology.

Then just how does orthodox Catholicism interpret natural law? The New
Advent Catholic Encyclopedia offers a somewhat dense definition, but
when broken down into basic parts becomes much more understandable.
First the basic premise:

According to St. Thomas, the natural law is "nothing else than the
rational creature's participation in the eternal law"… The
eternal law is God's wisdom, inasmuch as it is the directive norm of
all movement and action. When God willed to give existence to creatures,
He willed to ordain and direct them to an end. In the case of inanimate
things, this Divine direction is provided for in the nature which God
has given to each; in them determinism reigns.

Humanity is instilled with intelligence with which to make rational
choices:

Like all the rest of creation, man is destined by God to an end, and
receives from Him a direction towards this end. This ordination is of a
character in harmony with his free intelligent nature. In virtue of his
intelligence and free will, man is master of his conduct. Unlike the
things of the mere material world he can vary his action, act, or
abstain from action, as he pleases.

But humanity cannot do as it pleases. Instead, justifiable choice is
defined by what one ought to do. Divine determinism is interpreted to
mean that humanity is prohibited from interfering in natural
occurrences:

Yet he is not a lawless being in an ordered universe. In the very
constitution of his nature, he too has a law laid down for him,
reflecting that ordination and direction of all things, which is the
eternal law. The rule, then, which God has prescribed for our conduct,
is found in our nature itself. Those actions which conform with its
tendencies, lead to our destined end, and are thereby constituted right
and morally good; those at variance with our nature are wrong and
immoral.

Natural Law—at least as seen by orthodox Catholicism inspired by St.
Thomas Aquinas—is so resolute that even God is bound to its
principles. It is the order of the universe. Thus if God is bound to its
precepts, so too is humanity. Every being has its telos or end to
fulfill and it is not for humanity to interfere with this process of
fulfillment.

Aquinas provides a rationale for faith, instead of one of mere belief.
Still, it is the philosophical step away from a more fundamentalist
approach to faith to a comfortable and evolving relationship of faith
and reason. Aquinas provides an effective argument against
fundamentalism in general, and its theocon variants in particular.
Historically, Aquinas is a pivotal figure in the change in rational
thought that eventually led to the strengthening of faith by separating
it from the state.

Strident Dogma Versus Open Empiricism

Theocon thinkers such as Notre Dame's George V. Bradley, Robert P.
George of Princeton, and George Weigel, have mostly frozen their
definition of "reason" with Aquinas rather than allowing for any
broad applications of humanity's "free intelligent nature." And
in good Platonic fashion, they embrace a peculiar definition of
reason—one encumbered by dogmatic obedience to ecclesiastical
authority—and which differs significantly from the commonly held
definition, especially where dissent is concerned.

This prioritizing of obedience over individual conscience was on full
display when Neuhaus wrote:

Given a decision between what I think the Church should teach and was
the Church in fact does teach, I decide for the Church. I decide freely
and rationally—Because God has promised the apostolic leadership of
the Church guidance and charisms that He has not promised me; because I
think the Magisterium [the teaching authority of the Church] just may
understand some things that I don't; because I know for sure that, in
the larger picture of history, the witness of the Catholic Church is
immeasurably more important than anything I might think or say. In
short, I obey.4

Where Aristotle followed a path garnering new evidence with which to
test accepted truths, Plato emphasized censorship and the usefulness of
"noble lies" to ensure a top-down social order. This censorious
nature was on full display when Weigel recently demanded to know what
the Jesuit Order's newly elected leader, Father Adolfo Nicholas,
would "do about Jesuits who are manifestly not obedient to the Pope
or to the teaching authority of the Church?"5 It is also on display
when Pope Benedict XVI, then-Cardinal Ratzinger, spoke at Rome's
Sapienza University about the church prosecution of Galileo in the 1633
Inquisition. While acknowledging that Galileo's theory of the
universe was correct, he nevertheless called his trial "reasonable
and just."

[Stem Cell] (Photo: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
California took the lead in passing Proposition 71 in November 2004 to
support stem cell research. Here producer Jerry Zucker speaks at the
victory party in Los Angeles.

Indeed, as late as the seventeenth century, the Vatican adhered to the
earthcentered view of the solar system described in Scripture. The
Church had begun to accept Aristotelian thinking in terms of theology,
but it still held fast to the Bible's earth-centrism and Platonic
censorship on matters of science.

Inherent in this approach is a distrust of the common person seen among
other neoconservatives inspired by the University of Chicago philosopher
Leo Strauss. Seen through the neo-Platonist eyes of traditionalist
Catholics and neocons alike, people are neither good nor rational.
Therefore, to trust the common person with the ability to reason is
tantamount to societal suicide. Instead, knowledge should be left to the
control of an intellectual elite who —in their eyes—can handle
it. The masses need, not reason, but belief. The question then becomes
how to transform society to effect this goal?

Their answer is simple: remove reason from religion. Such a belief
echoes the twelfth century Platonic theologian Bernard of Clairvaux's
view that "faith is to be believed, not disputed." It is this
line of reasoning that winds its way through neoconservative think tanks
such as the Institute on Religion and Democracy and the Ethics Public
Policy Center. Anything but traditionalist-based orthodoxy is viewed by
these groups as disputing faith, even reasoning that seeks to reconcile
science with faith. And in the antithesis of Aristotelian logic,
empirical scientific knowledge is attacked. Evolution—long accepted
by the Vatican and even reaffirmed by Pope John Paul II—has been
increasingly derided under Pope Benedict, a red flag revealing a desire
to return to a more fundamentalist form of Catholicism; stem cell
research is attacked; and literal interpretations of Scripture are
emphasized.

However, unlike the Catholic neo-Platonists who see this life as a less
perfect version of God's Kingdom, many neoconservatives have adopted
Leo Strauss's marriage of Plato to Nietzsche's nihilism. Strauss
and many of his students believe that there is no afterlife, but argue
that teaching this view to the general population would lead to
widespread atheism resulting in societal collapse.

Movement founder Irving Kristol is up front about this, going so far as
to argue the Church should return to mindset of the Middle Ages,
specifically citing the Syllabus of Errors by Pope Pius IX that included
attacks on reason, Protestantism, and the separation of church and
state.6 Pius IX was a well-known authoritarian who led a virtual one-man
war on modern science and democracy.

Such brook-no-dissent authoritarianism has not gone unnoticed by
socially conservative Catholics. As former Neuhaus aide Damon Linker
noted in his authoritative book, The Theocons:

Catholics were, first of all, the single largest religious group in the
country, making it exceedingly difficult if not impossible to launch a
successful program for political and religious reform in the country
without significant support from within the ranks of the Catholic
faithful. Then there was the church's long history of theological
and political reflection, which made Catholics far more competent than
evangelicals and other Protestants to take the lead in pressing
religiously based moral arguments in the nation's political life.7

Two passages later, Linker hits the nail on the head:

But most promising of all was the Vatican's robust defense of
ecclesiastical authority. Unlike the Protestant mainline, whose
leadership had come to preach unorthodox, anti-traditionalist views, the
heads of the Catholic Church in Rome [Pope John Paul II and Cardinal
Ratzinger] refused to compromise with or capitulate to blatant
theological deviancy.

Still, traditionalist Catholics alone do not have the numbers to bring
about the societal change they seek. Protestant Evangelicals, with their
literal Biblical interpretations and their view that "faith is to be
believed, not disputed," are natural allies.

And yet there are significant tensions within this alliance particularly
on matters of theology. One such tension is the Protestant doctrine of
"Sola Scriptura" ("by scripture alone") that clashes
with Catholic notions of Magisterium (meaning the Church as interpreter
of Scripture). This has required a great deal of diplomatic bridge
building mostly via the most conservative and traditionalist evangelical
Protestants, and neoconservative precincts of Catholicism. And while
some Catholics have yielded to fundamentalists' opposition to the theory
of evolution, socially conservative Protestants seem to be increasingly
amenable to Vatican notions of natural law principles that underlie
their opposition to abortion, end of life issues, and stem cell
research.

Writing in the November 1996 issue of Neuhaus's periodical First
Things, Charles Colson draws on Aquinas in his discussion of a federal
court system that "sanctions abortion, euthanasia, and homosexual
marriage" and in arguing against the need for social conservatives
to resist what he deems to be illegitimate rulings:

Augustine's dictum remains the most famous formulation of the
broader view of a Christian's relation to the state: "An unjust
law is no law at all." Aquinas argued that God's delegation of
authority to civil authorities was linked to the fostering of virtue.
When a ruler meets that test, when his laws and actions are in accord
with the lex divina, and when human law promotes the tranquillitas
ordinis, then human law is just; but if it "runs counter in any way
to the law in us by nature, it is no longer law but a breakdown of
law."

Colson, the former Watergate felon who founded the evangelical Prison
Fellowship, has also written, "It goes back to the Greeks and
Plato's saying that if there were no transcendent ideals, there
could be no concord, justice, and harmony in a society."8 The
language in either quote could have easily have been authored by
Catholic theocons such as a Robert P. George or George Weigel.

A key bridge between the conservative evangelicals and orthodox
Catholicism has been neoconservatism. This is on prominent display in
the world of Washington think thanks where, for example, Neuhaus, Novak,
and Weigel advise or serve as directors of a number of key
neoconservative agencies such as the Institute on Religion and Democracy
and the Ethics Public Policy Center. It is through such organizations
that traditionalist Catholic natural law principles are married to
conservative talking points and percolate into the national discourse.
This brings me around to how evangelical Protestantism and Roman
Catholicism have both argued natural law principles in the battle over
embryonic stem cell research.

The State of the Debate

Finding a plentiful source of stem cells is only the first step towards
understanding and treating complicated human diseases such as
Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and diabetes, and treatments may still
be years away.1 Since President Bush banned funding for most embryonic
stem cell research in 2001, eleven states have authorized funding for
stem cell research to fill the vacuum left by the federal funding
restrictions. Seven states explicitly permit research on embryonic stem
cells.2

In an attempt to sidestep the contentious debate, scientists have
devised new laboratory techniques that would not use embryos. Yet the
new techniques—which gather stem cells from the amniotic fluid
around a developing embryo or transform adult skin cells into stem
cells—are untested and might not be effective for research and
treatments in all the same ways embryonic stem cells are.3

Furthermore, these alternatives will take time, maybe years, to develop
to the point where embryonic stem cell research is now. And because
these alternatives are at an early stage of development, there is a
chance that they might not be effective, supporting a continued push for
using federal funding for the promising and more developed embryonic
stem cell research.4

Finally, the argument against embryonic stem cell research was
contradictory to begin with because much of the research could be done
on embryos that were made, but never used from fertility clinics (which
routinely develop extra embryos to increase the chances of inception and
routinely dispose of extra embryos). If the Bush administration were so
concerned with protecting embryos, how could it praise the fertility
clinics which routinely dispose of embryos they do not need while
prohibiting researchers from using these same embryos and then claim it
was defending the embryos on moral grounds?5

– Aaron Rothbaum

End Notes

1 Andrew Pollack, "After Stem-Cell Breakthrough, the Real Work
Begins," The New York Times, November 27, 2007

2 "State Embryonic and Fetal Research Laws as of January 2007,"
Kaiser Family Foundation,
http://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparetable.jsp?ind=111&cat=2
"State Funding of Embryonic and Fetal Research as of January
2007," Kaiser Family Foundation
http://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparetable.jsp?ind=112&cat=2

3 Alan I. Leshner and James A. Thompson, "Standing in the Way of
Stem Cell Research," The Washington Post, December 3, 2007

4 Gina Kolata, "Scientists Bypass the Need for Embryo to Get Stem
Cells," The New York Times, November 21, 2007

5 Michael Kinsley, "Why Science Can't Save the GOP," Time
Magazine, November 28, 2007

Refuting The Right's Natural Law Arguments

Theocons argue that the embryo is being denied its telos, or
"end," in not being allowed to develop into a child, and that
humankind meddling with nature in this way will end in disaster. Yet
such beliefs ignore an alternative natural law argument that I and other
pro-research advocates constantly put forth: that the use of spare
embryos for medical research may indeed be the telos or end of these
blastocysts.

Today there are approximately 400,000 frozen blastocysts lying in a
state of frozen limbo at in-vitro fertilization clinics. For thousands
of these embryos, the decision has already been made that they will
never be transferred to a woman's body and that means they will never
grow beyond a tiny clump of undifferentiated cells briefly existing in a
petri dish.

Most orthodox Catholics and fundamentalist evangelicals believe that
those clumps of cells constitute a human being, but most of us don't
think that microscopic cellular life is equal to, or the same thing as,
a human life. As William Neaves of the Stowers Institute (and fellow
Catholic) observed:

Other religious traditions acknowledge the product of fertilization to
be a life but do not accord it the status of a human being. For example,
both Judaism and Islam hold that full human status is acquired
progressively during embryonic development, not at fertilization Until
40 days after conception, Judaism considers the developing embryo to be
"mere fluid." The early embryo is respected as a potential human
being, but it is not yet a person. Accordingly, both Judaism and Islam
permit the use of embryonic stem cells for therapeutic and research
purposes.9

To merely assume that those who consider themselves religious and who
take ethical issues seriously are inevitably on the anti-research side
of the equation would be way off the mark. Different organized religions
take different or no position at all on the research. In fact, many
religious organizations, including the Presbyterian Church USA, the
Church of England (as well as its American counterpart, the Episcopal
Church USA), the American Jewish Congress, United Church of Christ, the
Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America and a clear majority
of America Roman Catholics support this potentially life saving
research.10

If the primary frame of an issue such as stem cell research is based on
neoconservative/ neo-orthodox Catholic arguments, then, as linguist
George Lakoff would have it, we have to address the frame. One
classic—and classically effective—way to do so is by employing
Aristotle's timetested methodology.

Empirical studies long ago revealed that a newly created embryo can
either split into multiple embryos or unite with another embryo to form
a single embryo. Until that happens, individuality is far from
guaranteed. What's more, before an embryo can successfully develop into
a fetus there is yet another intervening event that must first occur:
attachment to the uterine wall of which only 30 to 40 percent of zygotes
ever survive to do. It follows that an embryo situated in a petri dish
is no more an individual human being than an unplanted acorn is an oak
tree.

In addition to applying Aristotle's empirical methodology we add
Charles Curran's historicism to the stem cell debate, and we wind up
at a different place on the issue than either George Weigel or Robert P.
George would have us be.

In fact, there is nothing in the Gospels to indicate that Jesus would
oppose stem cell research. His constant healing of the sick and disabled
was not only one of his primary activities, it was in accordance with
the Jewish notion of Pikuach nefesh, the moral imperative to save lives.
The healing and the amelioration of the sick and disabled is far more
deeply rooted in the world's spiritual traditions than the modern
concept that life begins at fertilization.

By applying strident dogmas and historical revisionism, what the
theocons are essentially doing is not using natural law as a means of
interpreting Scripture, but instead using it to override Scripture by
creating a false historical context.

Aristotle believed in empirical evidence in determining the natural end
of any thing or being. Galileo employed this method when he presented
the Vatican with evidence that the earth was not at the center of the
solar system. Galileo's Italy, unlike America in the twenty-first
century, was not a literate, pluralistic, post-Enlightenment society.
And thankfully, unlike the case of the great scientist, the Inquisition
can no longer stifle challenges to its Biblical geocentrism and natural
law views with the threat of death at the stake. Both the diversity of
religious beliefs, rooted in the constitutional rights related to
individual conscience; and a more literate populace give us the capacity
and the opportunity to openly challenge orthodox Catholic notions of
natural law when they collide with Constitutionally derived liberties.

Alternative Future

While the theocons remain ascendant in the hierarchy. there is an
intellectually formidable movement within Catholicism that challenges
traditionalist notions of natural law. This got theologian Fr. Charles
Curran fired from teaching at Catholic University in 1986 for opposing
the Church's opposition to artificial birth control. Curran took the
hit, but he was on the right track. The way to pull the rug out from
theoconish natural law arguments both within the Church and without is
to challenge their premises with a broader understanding of both natural
law and when necessary, the Eternal as stated in Scripture.

Curran offers a much simpler definition of natural law that shows a
healthy respect for the role of reason in human affairs:

The natural law maintains that human reason reflecting on human nature
is able to arrive at moral wisdom and knowledge. There are two aspects
to the question of natural law. From the theological point of view,
natural law responds to the question of where the Christian and moral
theologian find wisdom and knowledge. Here I accept wholeheartedly the
Catholic position that human reason can and should arrive at the moral
truth. The philosophical aspect of natural law concerns the meaning of
human reason and of human nature.

Curran's definition better reflects Aristotle's view of natural law,
where reason is unobstructed by dogma; it is allowed to reach its own
logical ends based upon new information. Curran, like others before him,
employs an evolving historical context of time and place, in which new
knowledge does not obviate our understanding of ethical behavior rooted
in natural law (as many neoconservative, Catholics and otherwise
believe), but actually clarifies it. It is one of the most effective
mechanisms in refuting many of the Religious Right's charges of
moral relativism.

Historical consciousness is often contrasted with classicism, which
understands reality in terms of the eternal, the immutable, and the
unchanging. Historical consciousness gives more importance to the
particular, the contingent, the historical, and the individual.... The
Catholic theological tradition has recognized historicity in its
rejection of the axiom, Scripture alone. Scripture must always be
understood, appropriated, communicated, and lived in the light of the
historical and cultural realities of the present time. The church cannot
simply repeat the words of Scripture. Catholicism has undergone much
more development than most people think. Creative fidelity is necessary
for any tradition, and such fidelity is consistent with the
philosophical world view of historical consciousness.11

Curran does not challenge the Religious Right by claiming that God is
not immutable—far from it. Instead, following the centuries-old lead
of Anglican theologian Richard Hooker, he explains that humanity's
understanding of God and morality is ever changing (see box). More
importantly, that change results from advancements in knowledge being
used to challenge and to reform existing doctrines.

Conclusion

For those of us who come from Christian traditions, we need to learn to
be confident that the history and doctrines in both Catholicism and
Protestantism show that challenging conventional wisdom does not
necessarily make one an enemy of the faith. If anything, mindless
dogmatic resistance to new empirical evidence is an ongoing invitation
to greater skepticism as we have certainly seen as American Catholics
ignore and are openly contemptuous of the Vatican encyclical prohibiting
artificial birth control. Indeed, we stand in a grand tradition of loyal
dissent that stretches from Galileo to Father Charles Curran (and many
more). It is the path that many of us who support embryonic stem cell
research now take. For all of us, the debunking of theoconic notions of
natural law is still a powerful argument; especially when combined with
dismantling the bizarre Catholic forms of Christian nationalism; and
fully embracing the broad Constitutional doctrines that guide and govern
our society away from sectarian doctrines toward inclusive, secular
ideas of the common good.

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