On the Practical Meaning of Secularism

formulation of the more well-known statement that one should love and respect one's neighbor as oneself. High-level moral principles such as the Golden Rule or the principle forbidding intentional infliction of harms are, then, specifications (themselves in many cases further specifiable) of that primary or master moral principle; they identify forms of willing incompatible with a steady and undeflected will for integral human fulfilment. So the directiveness of the first principles is both rationally motivating (contra Hume and Kant), and morally restraining (as well as spurring on). Thus one finds oneself being directed, as a matter of intelligence and reason. In this sense, the first practical principles, though not innate prior to all experience, have the status of givens"given to" and grasped in our understanding. Both in their directiveness and their "self-evidence" as knowable without deduction from higher premises, these principles have a kind of necessity. But as the propositional content of the acts of insight by which one comes to understand these opportunities and reasons for action (and of one's consequent habitual knowledge), the first practical principles-and likewise the master moral principle (with its specifications in less abstract moral principles) -are like all the other realities within our experience. For those acts of insight (understanding) are the actuation of a potentiality, and contingent on something which explains that change from potentiality to act(uality). So, like every reality which we can think of as what it is without knowing that it is, the practical principles have an actuality which calls for explanation, and that explanation can only be a reality whose what-it-is includes that it is, and so is without shadow of mere potentiality or of change from possibility to act(uality).14 And since the first practical principles not only are but are directive, and their directiveness cannot be explained by anything subhuman or by any human originating, it is also reasonable to conclude that the ultimate explanation or first cause which accounts for their being also accounts, of itself, for their directiveness. This inference is not to be confused with the contention of Kant's posthumous papers, or ofJohn Henry Newman, that the commanding voice of, or in, one's conscience requires one to conclude to a transcendent commander. Kant and Newman were heirs to a long tradition of voluntarist misunderstanding of directiveness and "ought" as ultimately a matter of commands or imperatives. In truth, first practical principles direct us to intelligent acts of will intending human flourishing. So we must 14 See GRIuN GRisEz, BEYOND Tm NEv THEisM: A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 36-91 (1975); JoHN FINNIs, NATURAL LAW & NATURAL RIGHTs 378-88 (1980); JOHN FINNIS, AQuINAs ch. X (1998). 1998] NOTRE DAME LAW REVIEW take the first cause of their directiveness to be a non-human intelligence and will-we can only say, person-directing us thus towards our own goods, towards human fulfilment. An argument to the existence of God from the data of practical reason converges, of course, with the more familiar arguments from other realities in which change and contingency are more evident. The conclusion on which all converge with a rational necessity15 is that everything within our experience, including every form of intelligibility which (like the first practical principles) is prior to human willing, has as its ultimate explanation the still active action of divine creation. Here I should recall the warning of St. Thomas, taken up with full seriousness in Germain Grisez's restatement of the philosophy of God. We can have no understanding of what a being is in which what it is includes that it is. So "we cannot know what God is, but only what God is not"16 "and how other things are related to God. ' 17 Whatever we say about God must be taken with a drastic shift of meaning leaving nothing but what must be predicated of God to explain the very existence and character of the realities within our experience. But clearly we must predicate of God this act(ion) of Creation as the projection of immense structures and patterns of intelligibility, structures and patterns whose intelligibility still far outreaches natural and mathematical sciences dedicated to disclosing it. We must take divine creation to be somehow an act which carries out an intention. And it is an act which cannot have been necessitated. Being free from every trace of potentiality, lack, imperfection, or need, the Creator must be of a perfection that cannot conceivably be enhanced. So the creating of a universe-this or any other-could not be required, by any reason whatever. So the intention to create and sustain our universe must be somehow the adoption of a proposal by truly unnecessitated, free choice. Plato's Laws insists, and sketches a demonstration, that mind is the primary explanation of the cosmos. This argument is resumed in Aquinas' "fifth way," and in the vindication of God's existence in John Haldane's recent dialectic with JJ.C. Smart18-a resumption deepened by Christian philosophy's clarity about Creation: the primary explanation of the cosmos involves both 15 This is a mattei not of logical necessity, but of requirements of rationality in seeking explanatory knowledge ("rationality norms"). See GRISEz, NEW THEISM, supra note 14, at 132-36, 168-72; FINNis, HisroRIcAL CONSCIOUSNESS, supra note 13, at