E
Earnest_Bunbury
Guest
What this post highlights is the unity of the natural law with God’s Eternal Law, the concept of law presupposes a lawgiver with the authority to enforce that law.In a same-sex relationship, the sex may be unitive, but cannot be procreative. THus is goes against God’s natural law. If the act (heterosexual, but unmarried relationship) is procreative, but not unitive, then that is also morally wrong. If a child results from that union, s/he is morally blameless, but if s/he does not grow up with a mother AND a father, s/he is at a disadvantage, even if the father (or mother) is not The Best.
Aristotle may have recognized this natural law but had no realization of the authority of a Divine Lawgiver. His was a recognizing of knowledge and what was true in that knowing. It was Aquinas who took those principles of knowledge and applied Aristotle’s truth with the revelation of Divine Truth. The apostles saw and passed on this revelation.
Cause from effect, this is the search we are engaged in and it is the modern philosophical rejection of final causality and formal causality that stunts the moderns search for truth. It is our nature to search for the first cause of effects seen by our sense capacities and reason. When the search becomes only material as well as based in only what is useful or pleasurable, then our search turns from the eternal truth to a nature devoid of “eternal” or “other”. Transcendence cannot be correctly identified and that which is immanent, pantheistic, replaces it.
Philosophical proof is in relation to first principles, not to conclusions proven by a scientific repeatable experiment. Proof in philosophy is that which is more probable and more reasonable, something that is rejected in today’s relativistic, subjective mindset. Just like the Church, we can only propose the truth, we can not impose it. A truth must be accepted, it isn’t something that convicts someone beyond their own God given free-will.
God is the Lawgiver and as we know is also the One who searches for those lost in the wilderness. This we can accept by our reason or reject by use of that same reason based on our own will to reject or accept, to see that which is more probable or to accept the opposite. The proof of natural law over homosexuality is in the order of the design leading to the revelation of the Designer.