The Authority of Nature?

I’ve always been intrigued by argument to the effect that something is good/right because it is “natural” or wrong/bad because it is “unnatural.” People have tried to argue for the validity of all sorts of things based on its authorization of “nature.

To begin with, the very notion of “nature” is polyvalent. The vocabulary we use for the external world is freighted with various connotations. What we call “nature” often has romantic connotations of tranquility without toxicity; while “creation” implies a certain theology and relation towards the divine; and “environment” evokes the notion of the world as an autonomous machine or living organism. You might think that a forest is nature, but so is an urban metropolis, both are composed out of earthly materials and both are part of the physical world. If nature is simply our external fixtures, then a city is no less part of nature than a waterfall, irrespective of whether we build a mud hut or a multi-story hacienda. Also, what we think about “nature” is mediated and constructed by the institutions, traditions, and media around us, and formed by our own experience of the external world. The so-called “nature” is perceived and constructed differently by artists, scientists, explorers, tribal people, city folk, and so on.[1] For one person, a forest may be a scenic place of peace and serenity; for someone else, that same jungle might be a place of predatory beasts and pitiless terror that one daily struggles against for survival. In other words, there is no universal definition and uniform or experience of nature and how we relate to it.

In addition, appeals to the authority of nature must be treated with caution because such appeals often mask demands towards uniformity in ethics, politics, and social behavior, whether that pertains to inalienable human rights, or even to political absolutism.[2] According to Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, “Almost every ideology seeks to sign up nature for its cause, to bolster its shaky political credentials with nature’s authority. Just because that authority can be so widely commandeered, critics imagine nature as a kind of blank screen or mirror on which the most diverse human fantasies may be projected. Paradoxically, the most obdurate authority  -nature’s necessity – has been joined in these accounts to the most malleable of cultural constructs – nature as anything you care to make it.”[3] It is unsurprising to learn that people have always tried to make nature something of an authority to determine human conduct. It was common in the nineteenth century to argue that certain things were “in accordance with nature,” including capitalism, Marxism, democracy, monarchy, patriarchy, slavery, feminism, and a lot more. Even before that, in the Hellenistic world, people tried to proscribe certain behaviors as being out of step with nature. So it is interesting that Paul uses such an argument in Rom 1:26-27 when he critiques homoeroticism between women as “contrary to nature” and between men as “abandoning natural relations with women.” Against Paul, some have retorted that homosexual relationships are in fact “natural” because they are found in the animal kingdom and humans can be biologically disposed towards same-sex attraction.[4]  I want to side-step the relative merits or demerits of Paul’s appeal to nature to censure homoerotic practices.[5] My point is that appeals to the normativity of nature are not straightforward and can sometimes mask hidden agendas that affect human existence.

[1] Alister McGrath, The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 115–39; idem, A Scientific Theology (3 vols.; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001-3), 1:81-133.

[2] See Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (eds.), The Moral Authority of Nature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004).

[3] Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, “Introduction,” in The Moral Authority of Nature (eds. L. Daton and F. Vidal; Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 11.

[4] See Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013).

[5] See Preston Sprinkle, People to Be Loved: Why Homosexuality is Not Just an Issue (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2015), 93-98.