Spock,
Please forgive a late response, and for any repetition of previous statements, and also length.
I asked many times. I was not given.
What would you consider “proof?” If one were to give a foolproof, airtight, irrefutable answer to all of your questions, would that change your mind? No, it would not, no more than such demonstrations convinced you of the absence of natural law, and presumably, God as well. This is because “faith” is known in two ways: natural faith, and supernatural faith. Natural faith is usually referred to as belief.
CCC 143: By faith, man completely submits his intellect and his will to God.
Faith is not something that “happens” to you, it is something that you assent to, by an act of the will. Your faith in the absence of God happened in the same way: through your human reason, you considered all the evidence available to you, and then you willed a choice to believe one way or another.
If I tell you that right now I have an apple on my desk, and you have only my word on that, you have to make a choice to believe that claim. I can send you pictures. Other people can testify. I can swear an oath. But your belief in that apple is an act of the will.
CCC 155: In faith, the human intellect and will cooperate with divine grace: “Believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will moved by God through Grace.”
Faith isn’t just something that happens to you, as I’ve said. Nor is it something you do on your own by willing it. This is where the second ‘phase’ of faith comes in: supernatural faith. By assenting to faith, we cooperate with Grace, which is God’s own life. It can’t be done solely from either side:
CCC 160: To be human, “man’s response to God by faith must be free, and … therefore nobody is to be forced to embrace the faith against his will. The act of faith is of its very nature a free act.”
Now if I fly you over here and show you that apple on my desk, can you logically deny it any longer? You can certainly choose to deny its existence, but then you are acting irrationally. In essence, I have taken your free will to choose rationally whether or not to believe in its existence. Now what if God chose to manifest himself to you at this time and say, “Yo dude.” He would have effectively stripped away your freedom to choose him freely. That’s part of the mystery of God: he loves you so much that he will never force you to be with him.
In Scripture, Peter says faith is “more precious than gold that is perishable even though tested by fire” (1 Pt 1:7). Can you imagine giving something precious to someone who only really wants to deny it? For faith is a gift of grace. And what is grace? Grace is God’s own life.
St. Augustine wrote that prayer is desire. When we want something, we ask for it. That’s why the phrase “ask for faith” is used so often. But we have to truly want it, and sometimes we’re not given faith immediately because we don’t really want it, we just want a quick fix. So if you really want faith, ask for it. Again, and again, and again, and seek those answers.
In response to the question asked:
First, I can’t comment specifically, because I don’t know the story of those feral children, other than general stories.
Natural law, according to Christians, derives from Eternal Law, which is God’s eternal decree which binds everything in the universe to his will, “to the fulfillment of its purpose” (Modern Catholic Dictionary). Basically, it is his will. According to the eternal law, the purpose of an acorn is to become a tree, the purpose of a star is to burn hydrogen, etc. This is teleology, a la Aristotle, and later St. Thomas.
Natural law derives from this eternal law, and we can know this law through (natural) human reason. For instance, we know that the end to which a person tends is life; therefore, the termination of that life should not be allowed. Hence, human reason discerns that murder should not be allowed. We don’t want people to take our stuff, so theft should not be allowed. We have a natural desire to know truth, so lying and distorting the truth should not be allowed. This is natural reason finding in the eternal law, which is the design of creation, a definite moral order and direction. It is not complete, which is why we have divine law to complete and explain it.
I don’t know the situation of those children who grew up without human interaction. I don’t know what their tendencies or psychologies were like. However, through human reason, we have also been able to discover that children need families not only for healthy physical development, but also healthy psychology. There are even physiological necessities of human development for language processing. When that is missing, things go awry. I suspect that such children would “instinctively” shy away from certain behaviors, such as murder, but I don’t know. Natural reason doesn’t necessarily apply to children who have not fully developed their rational capacity, nor does it mean that everyone is going to infallibly or instinctively know it:
CCC 1960: The precepts of natural law are not perceived by everyone clearly and immediately. In the present situation sinful man needs grace and revelation so moral and religious truths may be known “by everyone with facility, with firm certainty and with no admixture of error.” The natural law provides revealed law and grace with a foundation prepared by God and in accordance with the works of the Spirit."
Natural law is not the same thing as the laws of nature, but the two are inextricably linked and inseparable. The laws of nature and natural law are both, in a sense, ‘expressions’ of God’s design in creation, and manifestations of order and intelligibility.
