If you haven’t noticed yet, we’re not big on modernist notions of truth around here. Thus, as you can probably guess, I am not much of a believer in Natural Law. There is certainly a strain of Mormon thinking that has attempted to identify with the Natural Law tradition. Do we do this because there is something valuable about the Natural Law tradition besides its intellectual heritage? Does this actually have anything to offer us Mormons, or is it leading us down precisely the path that the Restoration veered from in the first place?

The problem with Natural Law is that it always seems to be changing. It’s representation is always mediated by human beings. However, the risk of arguing that Natural Law is simply a reflection of a particular culture’s values is that there is no basis for critiquing another culture’s practices. The result is relativism, which for some reason makes a lot of people uncomfortable. I tend to see relativism as simply a fact and deal with it. To me, the wrong response to relativism is to keep asserting that it isn’t there.

So, is it possible to disambiguate Mormonism from Natural Law? Is this desirable? Is Natural Law really as dispensable as I assume?

Today I had a thought about the problem of evil that I wanted to run by you all. In traditional Protestant theology, the Fall contaminates human nature. The Fall explains the problem of evil. Contrast this with some “Gnostic” theologies that explain evil by means of a wicked creator-god who produced a defective world. In these same theologies, human beings have their origin in the upper divine realm, and are fundamentally good. They sin out of ignorance, but by nature human beings are divine. In the first model, God is good, but human beings are bad. In the second, God is bad, but human beings are good. How does this play out in Mormon theology?

For Mormons, it seems that we are committed to both a good God and good human beings (sort of). We explicitly deny the negative view of human nature found in Protestant theology and we certainly believe in the fundamentally goodness of the divine. Does this leave a gap in our ability to account for evil? All sorts of solutions to this problem have been put forth to explain the problem of evil in LDS theology. Some, like finitism, resemble in some sense the Gnostic view of a imperfect creator. The world is not perfect because the cosmos is not perfect. Others emphasize human agency as the source of evil, but this stands in tension with the fundamental goodness of humanity. If humans are fundamentally good, and fundamentally free, why would they choose evil?

Certainly, there is no easy solution, but these typologies of good God/bad humans and bad God/good humans seem durable and resilient in the history of the West. As Latter-day Saints, must we eventually embrace one of these models more fully, or can we continue to claim both the goodness of God and the goodness of humanity without philosophical tension?

Readers may recognize that this title riffs off of Jean-Paul Sartre’s influential essay “Existentialism is a Humanism.” Though the German existentialists might have rejected this association, Sartre’s desire to locate Existentialism within the humanist tradition shows the powerful impact that humanism has in the imagination of the West. It’s influence is so profound that for Sartre, humanism is the genus and existentialism is a species. Can the same be said about Mormonism? Is Mormonism simply an expression of the backbone of the Modern West’s philosophical framework?

What got me thinking about this topic was a recent performance I attended by Julia Sweeney called “Letting Go of God.” Julia was the SNL comedian that is famous for playing the lovable androgynous “Pat.” In it she recounts her failed search for religion and belief in God. (As a side note, there was a long discussion of her encounter with the Mormon missionaries and her reactions to the first discussion. But I’ll save this for another post). Now she considers herself a secular humanist and has even been given awards by humanist societies.

Humanism really traces its roots to modernity and the turn to ethics of and concerning the individual subject. The concept of rights, democracy, the intrinsic worth of humans, and universal rationality are all the products of humanism. Humanism is the philosophical framework behind feminism, civil rights, the end of torture, invasion into Iraq, public schools, and universal health care. There is no one humanist ideology since humanists claim all sorts of competing positions within the same issue. For example, pro-choice and pro-life movements might be suprised to learn that they are both rooted in humanism, though they are configuring its constitutive elements differently.

Mormonism seems to sit squarely in the humanist tradition with its emphasis on the sacred character of each individual, its positive view of the nature of human beings (the rejection of Original Sin was a halmark of modern humanism), and its focus on human progress. Indeed, the Mormon doctrine of God can in some ways be seen as the theological zenith of humanism.

Secular humanists (and religious one’s as well) locate the basis of ethical behavior outside of revealed religion. “Thou shalt not kill” doesn’t really take a revelation to figure out. In fact, one of the most important developments in modernity (esp. Hume and Kant) was to separate ethics from theology. Even most Mormons accept that being a good person can be determined without reference to theological criteria.

All of this is a round about way of asking what Mormonism’s value add is to humanism, even in its secular form. Do we learn anything more about ethics that cannot already be argued from within the humanist tradition? Or, is Mormonism just another expression of the ways in which humanism has already framed our view of the individual subject? If not, then why be a Mormon and not just a humanist?