Wednesday, January 08, 2020

“The right order of things is in harmony with the order of nature”


St Thomas Aquinas had much to say on nature that I can agree with. Take these lines by Thomas from Josef Pieper's Breviary of St. Thomas:

The right order of things is in harmony with the order of nature.”

In the sphere of intellectual knowledge and voluntary action, what is natural comes first, and from it all else is derived.”

Sin is opposed to the natural inclination.” 

The conservative virtues and values of St Thomas and traditional religion link up quite well with the definition of human nature coming in from the science of sociobiology, which found that human nature is universally biologically kin-centered, gender defined, age-graded, heterosexual, marriage-making, hierarchical, and religious-making, among other things, although traditional religion left out human nature also being ethnocentric, even xenophobic, with group-selection as the primary unit of successful selection. 

St. Thomas also said “Reason imitates nature” and therefore I cannot agree with separating the material from the spiritual, making God spiritual and not material, making God not in nature but the creator of nature, and not affirming ongoing material evolution as not only the developer of nature and human nature but evolution is also the material path to evolve toward supermaterial Godhood.

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