"What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work? If this happened a few times a year, any wife would have sympathy for her hardworking husband. But what if this happened as often as many wives announce that they are not in the mood to have sex? Most women would gradually stop respecting and therefore eventually stop loving such a man."

The natural law theorist operates on a basic, a priori assumption. He assumes that, because matter operates on certain “rules” – the positive and negative charges of protons and electrons, the speed of light, measurable half-lives of radioactive substances, mathematical equations such as the area of a circle or the slope of a triangle – that man, who is after all made up of matter, must operate on similar principles – or, in the case of morals, “truths.” He makes no distinction between biology and consciousness. This is a fundamental failure of natural theory.

Some might object to the use of modern, scientific language in the above comparison. One could just as easily insert Aristotle’s “Prime Mover,” Pythagoras’ mathematics, or the Greek atomists. The search for answers to physical questions was and still is crucial to Western philosophical inquiry.

St. Thomas Aquinas is probably the best-known exponent of natural law and theology. His view, almost Gnostic, was one of scientific inquiry; the universe appeared to move in accordance to laws, which must be ordained by God. By understanding these laws better, we could better comprehend the will of God. His predecessor, St. Anselm, also followed this line of ontological thought. They both run afoul of cleric Peter Abelard’s nominalism: words signify thoughts, not presences in the real world. Language, such as the statement that “God is the greatest of all” or “laws govern all things,” leads people to believe things are real when they exist only in their minds.

Morals are the result of a complex interaction of human biology with human consciousness. Human behavior has instinctual, genetic, and learned components, which we can observe in the gestural, social, and communicative behaviors. We can observe these same behaviors in the lives of animal relatives such as the communal chimpanzee. But are these ingrained behaviors or morals?

Morals stem as much from human consciousness as from their genetic and behavioral components; consciousness’s components are both phenomenological and structural. We have the unique ability to project: Not only can we extrapolate multiple probabilities for consequences of our actions; we can also place ourselves as the theoretical recipient of those actions. This is not as simple as the animal’s stimulus-response behaviorism (though anyone who has seen someone suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder knows that behaviorism plays a role in human behavior).

Linguistics is a fundamental component of human consciousness, providing the structure with which we frame our experiences and construct our personality. Language is, by its nature, subjective, even as it conforms to internal structures that may have biological components. It creates representations, symbols, interpretations, and projections. When we say that matter operates around laws we are projecting a human interpretation - a false framework – onto something fundamentally not human, as it lacks consciousness.

Consciousness is the crux here. The interplay it makes with human behavior and biology makes mankind quintessentially other from mere matter. While man’s body and physiological responses must adhere to the “rules” of matter, his morals are aspects of thought, of consciousness, which is by its nature not subject to the rules of matter. Morals are subjective, projective. They can vary in surface structure, subject matter, consequences, and focus. They vary from culture to culture, from person to person, despite similarities.

Those similarities, and the human phenomenon of the emotion guilt, have been posited as proof of natural law. The Scottish philosopher and empiricist David Hume neatly disposed of both in the 18^th century. The key here is our consciousness’s ability to project. We can imagine someone doing the same thing to us and how we would feel. Guilt is projection of how we would hypothetically feel; similarities in morals are acts that have negative results on others that we do not wish to happen to ourselves.

Morals are metaphysical in nature. Metaphysics are beyond the realm of the knowable. They are outside of the empirical, the scientifically knowable. They are therefore outside the rules of nature. Some call the questions of metaphysics – morality and immorality, free will, causation, etc. – the principle questions of philosophy. But metaphysics defies logic, empiricism, or reason. To paraphrase Hume, it ends in little more than sophistry and illusion. Still, the questions persist and are intriguing – even important – if ultimately incapable of resolution.

To answer those questions, metaphysics looks to foundations, to simple answers, principles, and origin. As Derrida states, this is a quest for “logos.” This Greek word can be translated as, variably, “logic, reason, the word, or god.” This is the search for the origin – a human trait to search out causation in all things. This is why many natural theorists (like Aquinas) insist that such rules must come from something that sets them in motion, which creates them. Metaphysics, by its nature, attempts to ascribe truth and simplicity to a complex world. Metaphysics, Derrida contended, pervades Western thought.

But, as Derrida points out, metaphysics requires binary construction, a pairing of two like subjects, one derived from the other, in primal opposition but also similar. One member of the pair is always “true,” or superior to the other. Thus we have “good and evil,” “God and man,” “cause and effect,” “mind and body.” The first term, the “superior” one must be true, pure, and simple – it is of the logos. The subordinate term is false, corrupting, derivative; it is against the logos. Metaphysicians, such as natural theorists, proceed from an assumption of a simple truth – a human construction, a preference for simplicity over complexity, for good over evil, for God over man. It is telling that the Greeks place reason, logic, and words (language) on the same plane as God.

This is why something like moral relativism, humanism, or secularism is so threatening to natural theory. It privileges the subordinate term over the preferred member of the binary pair in metaphysics: Corporeal life over the afterlife, man over God, complex over simple. These re-imaginings shake the core of metaphysics and therefore natural theory, because natural law relies upon the assumption – again, a human judgment – of the presence of the binary pairing and it’s inherent value to begin with! For example, there is an inherent assumption of the “truth” of the “word of God.” Indeed, it is assumed that “the word” is there to begin with.

Such assumptions are a creation of human consciousness – projections and linguistic constructions. If they are creations of consciousness, how can they follow rules? How is there a “logical” or “natural” progression from observed behavior to projected interpretation of another’s internal state? An assumption of another’s guilt, moral compass, or pathology is a construction, a projection of one’s own conscious moral and cultural matrix on another; it has no foundation other than what the observer gives it.

Man is what I like to call “a simplicity seeker.” He might also be described as a “categorical being,” searching for truths that are easy to comprehend and sort. Immanuel Kant supposed that man is both an empiricist and a rationalist, that man is constitutionally predisposed to see causation. Current psychological research proves Kant right. Show individuals a randomly generated pattern of dots and they will instinctually perceive a leader or moving force behind the dots’ random gyrations. Kant, preceding Derrida by two centuries, pointed out the inherent contradictions in metaphysical “truths.” He pointed out how the human mind automatically categorizes and interprets information from the world. We do this in order to best make sense of it, making it conform to an internal architecture of perception in order to avoid being overwhelmed or paralyzed with questions.

Kant argued that there must be some sort of universal law, because human perception – the categories and architecture we use to make sense of the world – would disappear in an illogical vacuum without it; faith, therefore, was possible through reason. But, as Hegel and Foucault point out, the “architecture” is in a constant state of flux; we change it with experience, with learning, and with evolved concepts. There can be no truths because of the subjectivity of language and the changing nature of the dialogue of discovery (“dialectics” to Hegel, “discourse” to Foucault). This led Hegel to conceive of some silly “End of History” idea, but that doesn’t diminish the value of his dialectical model.

Nietzche would later seize on a similar theme, pointing out that “truths” are dependent on social and cultural systems. Foucault, Derrida, and Wittgenstein owe much to Nietzche. Kierkegaard points out that faith, by its very nature, is a belief in something impossible to prove; it is by definition irrational. Natural law is an attempt to give physicality to moral and ethical thought; thought cannot be of anything other than the ephemeral – it has no presence, no “there.”

The American pragmatists, like C.S. Pierce, do away with natural law. There are no “natural truths” that can be established about reality. Human ideas and systems will always be tested in the crucible of their results and effects. Pierce’s “contrite fallibilism” and Viennese philosopher Karl Popper’s “Falsification” mirror our knowledge of the world: it is always provisional.

• For reasons utterly unknowable, The New Republic has a fondness for Damon Linker, former editor of First Things and author of The Theocons. They love him so much he has his own intermittent little blog on their website. I find Linker to range from tendentious to dishonest, myself, but he’s a good example of the kind of wishy-washy Catholicism that sort of makes you want to punch its adherents in their steam-cleaned genitals. It manages to be both self-righteous and yet decry the judgments of others.

• Researchers from the University of Texas have found that human beings who feel out of control will posit strange and unlikely theories in order to regain a sense of order. This is obvious in the sense of conspiracy theories, as my recent email from the deeply ill David Mabus touting the predictions of Nostradamus attests. It is, in light of other research, quite indicative of the nature of religious belief, as well. I’ve elsewhere referred to religion as a “metaphysical toddler’s binky;” this is reinforced by findings that indicate a natural human preference for order and categorization. Sensory and mental data whose natures are unknown or unfathomable are difficult to process. Having an overarching “Goddidit” schema is incredibly helpful and acts as a palliative to the natural response of paralysis in the face of data that is difficult to process.

• It would seem that my latest interlocutor on the subjects of Natural Law and absolute morality has decided to throw in the towel with a "You're a poopyhead!" non-responsive parting shot. If you can't encapsulate your beliefs in your own language, you are, to use the common parlance, an epic fail of a thinker. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

• The “Raving Atheist” has become the “Raving Theist.” I can’t confess to have been anything other than a very occasional reader of the site in the past, and then only through links from other sites. While I hope that The Raving Theist finds some kind of peace and happiness in the decision to convert to Christianity, I cannot help but think that the aforementioned raver will find anything but. I’m not even a novice in graphology, but it seems to me that perhaps a similar field of study could be made of bloggers in the font, formatting, and so on of their blogs. Given that admittedly hugely tenuous thesis, I find the Raving Theist’s conversion post hugely illuminating: look at the font and formatting, with its large, bolded, italicized letters. This is a person passionate about their faith. But then trawl through the archives. Look at the passion, indeed, even zeal, with which the poster embraced an anti-abortion stance. The posts are aggressively passionate. As are older posts from the atheistic perspective. This is a person who wanted, desperately, something to define themself by. The story told on that website is the perfect exemplar for the thesis laid out by Eric Hoffer in The True Believer: that many people seek to define themselves through the worth of their belonging to something external. And as the Raving Theist’s conversions, first to anti-abortionism and then to Christianity attest, that validation is never truly satisfying. Lacking an internal perception of self-worth to bolster themselves with, these people become truly self-righteous. The truth of the statement that “no one is more zealous than a convert” is that the convert has to be passionate about their new ideal in order to justify their newfound sense of self-worth.