Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Falling away from the good as defined by St. Thomas and by sociobiology


St. Thomas said: “The good for everything is what is fitting to it according to its form; evil is what does not correspond to the order of its form,” and “sin is nothing other than falling away from the good which is fitting to ones nature,” and evil is “a privation of form or order.” (The Breviary of St. Thomas, Peiper)  

My comment: while the traditionally religious view of human nature is remarkably like the sociobiological view of human nature, eg. human nature is universally and genetically kin-centered, gender defined, age-graded, heterosexual marriage-making, hierarchical, etc., the evolutionary sciences have also found that human nature is ethnocentric, even xenophobic, with group-selection as the primary unit of successful selection, because all of these traits, which are still with us, were the most successful in the survival and reproduction of our genes and cultures over time.  

St. Thomas also believed that human nature is spiritual, but if we wanted to use the St. Thomas specifications of “evil” and “sin” in terms of falling away from human nature as defined by the evolutionary sciences, that would mean that the liberal-left which opposes both the traditionally religious view of human nature and the the sociobiological view of human nature is sinful and evil.

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