As we saw in our last exciting episode in this series, not everyone agrees that human positive law is or even needs to be a reflection of an eternally valid natural law. For thousands of years some people have held that positive law is purely a matter of convention, of agreement among peoples. If you can get enough people to agree with you on what the law — and thus morality — is, then you can do it.
Mortimer J. Adler called this belief "conventionalism" and "positivism." Heinrich Rommen called it simply "positivism," while Pope Pius XI employed the somewhat confusing "theological" term, "modernism." (What the Catholic Church calls "modernism" really doesn't have anything to do with being modern, but is a weird grab-bag of philosophies and theological thought discredited centuries, sometimes millennia ago, and periodically resurrected and given an attractive new name until people catch on. Similarly, "liberalism" in "Catholic language" doesn't mean political or social liberalism, but a specific religious belief that all religions are really the same. "Liberalism" is the theory that a Satanist, a Hindu, and a Southern Baptist all have the same religious beliefs, and any differences are merely semantic.)
To get back to our story, Dr. Adler explains that, while Christians are the largest group of thinkers who base the natural law on what reason discerns and discovers of human nature, this particular orientation is not confined to Christians. We find it (as we might expect) in Aristotle, Cicero, even modern secularists such as Kant and Hegel, as well as in Jews who follow the philosophy of Moses Maimonides and Muslims who follow that of Ibn Khaldûn. The essential point of agreement is that there is somewhere a source of absolute truth. People can disagree, sometimes violently, on what to call this source — most people call it "God" or some variation thereon — but all agree that there is definitely something there, that this source is "good," and that such things as theft, murder, adultery, lying, and so on, are contrary to nature.
Unfortunately, what happens is that some people (especially devout religious believers and, paradoxically, militant secularists and atheists) have the tendency to claim that the natural moral law is not truly an aspect of human nature, but of divine command. The natural law is not discovered by observing what the human race has in all times and places decided is "good," but is, instead, contained in some revelation by some deity.
In the Middle Ages, this resulted in an intellectual "war" between the philosophers who believed that "law is found in reason alone" (Summa, Ia IIae q. 90 a. 1), and those who believed that the law is revealed directly to man by God. That is, there was a conflict between the philosophers who held that the natural law can be figured out by anybody with a brain through the process of reason, and those who believed that the natural law was found in whatever a believer believed to be an expression of the will of a deity, e.g., the Bible, the Torah, the Qu'uran, and so on — that is, in the positive expression of God's Will found in a document believed to be of divine origin.
Obviously, there are some problems inherent in the two approaches, one of which bases things on reason and the other on faith — or there wouldn't be a conflict. What some of these problems are will be covered in the next posting in this series.
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