Culture and StrategyAn organization’s culture can be defined as .docx

Culture and Strategy
An organization’s culture can be defined as “the unwritten set
of rules and informal policies that direct employer behavior.”
This definition is an amalgamation of organizational
behaviorists’ thinking with industrial psychologists’ position,
and human resource development researchers. Denise
Rousseau’s research on the psychological contract probably
comes closest to this amalgamation. Think about your own
organization’s culture
Using online library resources below and the Internet, respond
to the following for your organization:
· Required Readings
· Roh, J. J., Hong, P., & Park, Y. (2008). Organizational culture
and supply chain strategy: A framework for effective
information flows. Journal of Enterprise Information
Management, 21(4), 361–376. (ProQuest Document ID:
220044319)
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.edmc.edu/docview/2200443
19?accountid=34899
· Smith, B. D. (2007). Strategy-making: What works is what
fits. European Business Forum, 28,32–37. (ProQuest Document
ID: 224670404)
http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.edmc.edu/docview/2246704
04?accountid=34899
· Zuckerman, A. (2002). Strong corporate cultures and firm
performance: Are there tradeoffs?Academy of Management
Executive, 16(4), 158–160. (EBSCO AN: 17534385)
http://libproxy.edmc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/
login.aspx?direct=true
&db=bsh&AN=17534385&site=ehost-live
· What are the cultural norms that govern the organization, and
what types of behaviors does the culture promote?
· What behaviors does the culture punish? Do the specific
behaviors you describe help enable the business strategy?

· Do the behaviors you describe block the strategy?
Write your initial response in approximately 300 words. Apply
APA standards to citation of sources from the required readings.
Must follow the following grading criteria:
Due by Friday, July 26, 2013
Assignment 1 Grading Criteria
Maximum Points
Described the cultural norms of the organization and the
resultant behaviors. Explained the impact of these behaviors on
the organization’s business strategy.
4
Actively contributed to the discussion by providing points of
view with rationale, challenging points of the discussion, or
drawing relationships between points of the discussion.
12
Wrote in a clear, concise, and organized manner; demonstrated
ethical scholarship in accurate representation and attribution of
sources; displayed accurate spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
4
Total:
20
1
The ‘Atheistic’ Character of Christianity
and the Question of Christ
Alastair Roberts (University of Durham)
Perhaps one of the most basic assumptions that underlie much

debate between Christians and
atheists is that the two positions represent polar opposites,
between which no common ground
exists. Not only are the two positions ultimately irreconcilable,
they are also in total and
complete opposition to each other. There is no way in which
disagreements can be knocked
down to size, and the debate honed and focused, as the
antithesis is absolute. There is no scope
for appreciative dialogue, or to learn from each other. One of
the most immediate effects of this
assumption is to raise the temperature of our conversations
significantly.
Ben Myers of Faith and Theology, wrote a very thoughtful piece
a year or so ago, in which he
remarked upon the complex relationship that Christian thought
and atheism bear to each other, a
relationship that is far less obviously one of diametrical
opposition than is commonly supposed:
In the 20th century, the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth
would begin his courses
not with the Bible but with Feuerbach – that brilliant atheist
who argued that “God” is a
fantastically large projection of ourselves. Far from trying to

refute this argument, Barth
insisted that it is the beginning of wisdom, the true point of
departure for all Christian
thought.
Even more pointedly, a contemporary theologian like Jürgen
Moltmann can insist that
“only a Christian can be a good atheist!” That may be
overstating the matter, but it is
nevertheless true that Christians have always had a vested
interest in thinking critically
and subversively about the very idea of God and the uses to
which it is put. This is why in
the work of great religious thinkers – Kierkegaard or Milton or
Dostoevsky – one can
scarcely tell at times whether they are advocating belief in God
or the most devastating
atheism. The line between the two is often blurred.
At its best, atheism is a questioning tradition that thinks
‘unflinchingly about what it means to be
human in a world without God.’ It is a tradition that resolutely
challenges the self-delusions that
we entertain in order to avoid the pain and shame of the world
stripped naked by truth. The facile

confusion of atheism with anti-theism represents a shrinking
back from the discomforting and
unsettling tradition of genuine atheism, a tradition that can
leave its adherents disoriented and
uncertain of their footing, into a movement that casually
dismisses and ridicules others, while
priding itself in its intellectual superiority. ‘Enlightenment’
becomes a boast freed from all
burden. This is an ‘atheism’ no longer confronting the prospect
of an abyss yawning beneath its
feet.
Christianity has its own related forms of failure of nerve, as we
close off our questions to the icy
draft of reality, and lock ourselves into a sterile dogmatism. If
the casual confidence of the anti-
theist, who will rigorously question everything save the ground
he is standing on, is unworthy of
being associated with the best of the atheistic tradition, the
unquestioning tribalistic opinion that
2
masquerades as ‘faith’ in many Christian circles is no less
unworthy of association with the best

of our tradition.
The ‘Atheist’ Voice of Christianity
Any serious thinking Christian should be able to recognize some
profoundly Christian elements
in the atheist tradition, and should be at once heartened and
troubled by that fact. Long before the
dawn of modern atheism, the early Christians were known as
‘atheists’, on account of their
denial of the gods of paganism. While many might regard this as
an accident of shared
designation, I believe that there are grounds for identifying a
deeper affinity between the
movements.
A central feature of Christianity is an attack upon idolatry, and
the manner in which it holds
people hostage. While some might regard biblical attacks upon
idolatry as a cynical means by
which to secure the allegiance of the faithful, the underlying
intention is liberational. The goal of
the teaching on idolatry is to exalt mankind above the petty
things to which we would otherwise
devote our service, ensuring that humanity is oriented towards
something greater, which will

serve to render us even more deeply human. Belief in falsehood
imprisons and impoverishes us.
We become like the things that we worship and when something
that is less than fully personal
and humanizing becomes our focus of concern, we will
gradually become dehumanized. False
gods will ensnare our entire existence in untruth. Consequently,
the interrogation of our beliefs
and practices, the honing of our worship, the questioning of our
conceptions of God, and an
uncompromising rejection of idolatry in all of its forms are
characteristic of Christian faith and
practice (perhaps most especially in the context of traditional
Protestantism).
Atheist thought shares a similar impulse, but believes that
Christian faith itself falls under the
category of false belief. I do not believe that it is an accident
that atheism has found some of its
most fertile soil in the context of cultures that have been
leavened by Christian – and especially
Protestant – thought. It is also interesting to observe how
atheists often charge Christians with
false (‘idolatrous’) belief in a manner that strikes notes that,
despite themselves, can sound

almost Christian. Who cannot read Marx or Feuerbach’s
descriptions of religion, for instance,
without hearing an echo of the sentiments of Old Testament
prophets?
The target of much atheist protest is the god that secures all
meaning and makes sense of the
world, the religion that serves as a crutch and underwrites the
social order, the faith that inures
one to truth and reality and gives birth to dulling and enslaving
illusion. This is the god in whom
they don’t believe. They might be surprised to find that
Christians stand alongside them in
attacking this deity: we don’t believe in that god either.
Christian thought involves a radical challenge to the way that
we naturally view and ‘use’ god. It
strikes at the idea of the distant and transcendent absolute
being, believing that God was revealed
in human flesh, with all that that entails. Christians believe that
God came in a regular human
body and pooped, sweat, and ate, just like the rest of us.
Christians overturn the deity that
underwrites and secures the pyramidical hierarchy, teaching that
God himself became a servant

for our sakes.
3
Christian faith teaches that God gave himself to die a criminal’s
death at the hand of man and
that he was dead for a few days. We believe that God’s
character was most fully revealed, not in
the beauty and perfection of nature, or the stillness of the
human heart, but in a mangled and
bloodied body on a Roman cross. It is in this eclipse of all light,
and even the knowledge of
God’s presence, that God’s face is most powerfully disclosed:
God makes himself known in this
moment of hell. It is also ultimately by this means that God
achieves his purposes in the world,
not by mere detached fiat.
If God himself felt the deep absence of God (‘my God, my God,
why have you forsaken
me…?’), such an experience is far from alien – indeed, it is
completely proper – to Christ-ian
faith. Only Christians have a Holy Saturday, the day when God
himself lay dead in the tomb, the

day when all lights are out. As Tomáš Halík observes in his
superb Patience With God, a living
with the silence of God is integral to Christian faith and piety,
an experience that bears much in
common with that of atheists, but that the distinguishing
character of the Christian response to
this silence is patience.
In other words, Christians believe in an upside-down God, who
stands utterly opposed to the
deity that human beings naturally believe – or don’t believe –
in. In the protests of atheists
against this supposed deity, Christians can recognize the voice
of the biblical prophets railing
against the idols and false gods of the surrounding nations. In
the moral protests of atheists
against the injustice of the world, and any attempt to palliate us
to this by reassuring theodicies,
Christians can recognize the voice of the psalmist, who is
inspired by God to challenge and
question God. In response to the atheists who complain of
God’s absence, Christians speak of
exactly the same the experience (the ‘dark night of the soul’),
the difference being that for
Christians this is something to be passed through with

struggling patience. In response to those
atheists who resist attempts to impose meaning upon suffering
and death, Christians can
highlight the example of Job’s resistance to his counsellors. In
response to the atheists who speak
of the opacity of the world, Christians can point to the book of
Ecclesiastes.
If atheists question God, believers in YHWH have been doing it
for millennia. Jacob, the father
of the twelve tribes of the Jewish nation, was given the name
‘Israel’ after wrestling with God.
The Bible is filled with examples and patterns of wrestling with
and questioning God, and
demolishing the comforting idolatrous notions that people have
about him.
Christ, the Question
Christians often proclaim that Christ is ‘the Answer’. This is
true enough, but perhaps the more
exciting truth is that Christ is the Question. A question is
something with the power to open up
your world. A question is something that you can follow into
the unknown. One could argue that
it is our choice of and relationship to our questions, rather than
our answers, that most defines us.

Not all questions are helpful, and many questions lead nowhere.
However, some questions have
proved so fertile that they have continued for millennia.
The most important thinkers in human history are not those who
have given the cleverest
answers, but those whose work has posed the profoundest
questions. It is a question that
underlies and drives every quest. It is in this respect that Christ
towers over all others, as God’s
own Question to man. Christ is the Word of God that opens the
conversation and poses a
4
Question that touches to the quick of our entire reality. It is
through this Question that we, like
Augustine, become questions to ourselves.
In looking at atheism, I am often struck by the manner in which
the strongest forms of
questioning atheism can seem particularly Christian, and could
not grow from another religion in
the same manner. It is within Christianity in particular that the
idea of God as the guarantor of

some tidy cosmic meaning is undermined. The book of Job is a
great example of this. All of the
attempts to give meaning to Job’s experience collapse. This
undermining of the notion of cosmic
meaning reaches its completion when God himself dies on a
cross. The opacity of meaning and
the throwing open of reality to radical questioning is profound.
The Christian distinction between God and creation had much
the same effect. The world ceased
to be a divine thing, or a prison of determinism, but became
simply ‘the world’. Scientific
questioning of reality was empowered by the Christian (and
especially Protestant) attack upon
idolatry and superstition.
The light of Christ’s advent brings with it the means by which
other realities can be exposed. It is
through the light that we discern the darkness. In our society’s
account of justice, ethics,
goodness, beauty, and evil the light of Christ still shines,
granting these notions a clarity that they
would not otherwise possess in a culture that was not haunted
by him. It was through Christ that
many of the core concepts of humanism most powerfully

impinged upon our consciousness:
personhood, the dignity of man, genuine freedom. We should
not presume upon this knowledge
not retreating with the withdrawing tide. As Christ is denied,
the descent to the gloaming begins,
and these notions, and the cultural quests they once encouraged
grow dim, and our feet begin to
stumble on uncertain ground.
Christianity provided one of the greatest challenges to state
domination, and one of the greatest
sources of questioning of it. As Peter Leithart has argued in his
book on Constantine, Christianity
desacralized the state, exposing it to a deeper questioning.
Many of the questions that underlie
Western political thought arise out of a specifically Christian
context of thought. Christianity
also powerfully relativized the social-symbolic substance, both
through its eschatology, and
through its practice of the Church. Ultimately a Christian was
not a Jew or a Greek, a slave or a
free person, a male or a female, but a person in Christ,
possessing equal dignity with all others.
This understanding of the person called the social structure and
its settled inequalities into

question and gave a face to people who were faceless,
sensitizing Western culture to the
oppressed and alienated and exalting the person above their
place in the social structure. Further
examples, such as the scapegoat theory of Réné Girard could be
mentioned here, could be
brought forward of illustrations of the manner in which
Christianity exposed all reality to deep
questioning, thereby rendering every aspect of our existence a
quest.
The manner in which the ‘Christian revolution’ (as David
Bentley Hart terms it) threw the
natural world, political authorities, social and economic
structures, the complexities of existence,
and our very own selves wide open to questioning (to a degree
that the Greek philosophical
tradition couldn’t quite do by itself) is one of the reasons why I
still find it so important in my
own thinking. Although many atheists engage in such radical
questioning, one wonders whether
atheism itself can provide either the sort of enlightenment or the
source of questioning that
Christianity has and does. The character of much recent atheism
provides little encouragement

5
on this front. In certain quarters, the sort of radical and
transformative questioning that forged
Western society has shrunk to the trickle of the disengaged
cynicism and irony of self-assured
elites, delighting in the frisson of a sterile novelty. This worries
me, precisely because it is the
slow progress of the deep questioning started by the Christian
faith that has led to much of the
freedom that we enjoy in the West. Any atheism or Christianity
that neglects this tradition of
questioning exposes us to the risk of losing our freedoms and
the introduction of a new darkness.
The bold and terrifying metaphysical questions that one finds in
the atheists that knew and
experienced what Christianity is, and how much Western
society, its ethical vision, and their
own questioning tradition owes to the Christian legacy are far
more profound (often seeking to
ask with even greater force the questions that Christianity first
threw open). For instance, they

recognize the loss of a degree of our ability to question our
actions with the abandonment of
terms such as sin and evil. Such a form of atheism recognizes
that certain questions are not
accessible to everyone, and that, with their atheism, they must
risk forfeiting certain lines of
questioning that once illuminated reality.
Conclusion
In short, I do not believe that Christianity and atheism are as far
apart or unrelated as people may
think. There are good reasons why atheism found its most fertile
soil in the lands of
Christendom, and of Protestantism in particular (a movement
particularly sensitized to the
dangers of idolatry and superstition). Atheists work with the
legacy of Christianity a lot more
than most Christians and atheists realize.
What does this mean for Christians and atheists? I believe that
Christians can often see in atheists
disavowed aspects of their own faith, which have been
neglected or rejected on account of their
troubling character. The questions of the atheists are often
Christian questions, questions that we

should be asking too. One wonders whether, if Christians had
the courage to embark upon the
quests that Christ opens for us, atheism would be quite so
powerful a movement in Western
culture. I suspect that atheism is a ‘question’ from God to us.
Perhaps when we don’t faithfully
ask God’s questions, God will get others to ask them for us and
of us. In our relationship to
atheists, I believe that we should recognize a kinship, and
should explore the place of ‘atheist’-
type voices within Christian faith itself (without obviously
denying the existence of God).
Unbeknownst to them, atheists are squandering an
unacknowledged patrimony in the far country.
This is another sense in which atheism can be seen as a
‘question’ to us: can we see ourselves in
our atheist friends, and recognize them as our kin?
For atheists, I believe that the challenge is to relate to the
explicit character of Christian thought,
and not to some supposed natural conception of deity that is
exploded in Christ and the upside-
down God of the gospel. I believe that atheists should seek to
discover the source of their
questions, and ask themselves whether these questions will

survive the departure of God. Finally,
I believe that many atheists have a grasp – and a stronger one
than one than many Christians – of
certain aspects of the truth. I believe that these can be shown to
be fragments of a far deeper
account, an account through which, paradoxically and
unexpectedly, God is revealed to be all in
all. The unresolved note left hanging in atheism rings clear but
finds rest in the Christ of the
gospel.
Whose Nature? Which Law?
Edward Feser
You’ve got your natural law. You’ve got your natural rights.
You’ve got the state of nature. Then there’s naturalism.
And laws of nature. And the supernatural. There’s St. Paul’s
natural man and the Scholastics’ natura pura. There’s nature
and nature’s God. There’s natural science, natural
history, natural selection, natural theology, natural philosophy,
and the philosophy of nature. There’s the Baconian
scientist putting nature on the rack, and Galileo telling us that
the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.
And let’s not forget the literal books, like Lucretius’s On the
Nature of Things, Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, Richard
Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and Edward O.
Wilson’s On Human Nature. There’s Emerson’s essay
“Nature.” For fans of underground comics, there’s Mr.
Natural; for fans of obscure superheroes too preposterous ever
to get their own billion-dollar-grossing film adaptations, there’s
Nature Boy. There’s Oliver Stone’s movie Natural Born

Killers and Robert Redford in The Natural.
There are natural disasters, natural resources, natural gas, and
dying of natural causes. There’s natural beauty, but also freaks
of nature. There’s going back to nature and getting a natural
high. There are Mother Nature, nature hikes, all natural
foods, natural family planning and natural childbirth. There’s
the natural order, and second nature. There are natural
numbers. There are all the examples I didn’t think of.
With “nature” and “natural” used in so many different ways, it’s
no wonder people often misunderstand what classical natural
law theorists mean when they define the good for man in terms
of what is natural and what is bad as what is contrary to nature.
Hence the blizzard of clueless objections: “If what is unnatural
is wrong, then wouldn’t eyeglasses and prosthetic limbs be
wrong?”; “But everything is natural, since everything follows
the laws of nature”; “If I was born this way, then it must be
natural”; etc. Remarks of this sort reflect fundamental
misconceptions about what the classical natural law theorist
means by “nature.”
The basic idea is really not all that complicated, and can be
understood at least to a first approximation by reference to
everyday examples. Everyone knows that it is in the nature of
grass to require water and sunlight but not too much heat, and
that for that reason it is good for grass to be watered and well
lit and bad for it to lack water and sunlight or to be exposed to
great heat. Everyone knows that is in the nature of a tree to
require soil into which it can sink its roots and from which it
can draw water and nutrients, and thus that it is good for a tree
so to sink them and bad for it if it is somehow prevented from
doing so. Everyone knows that it is in the nature of a squirrel
to gather nuts and the like and to dart about in a way that will
make it difficult for predators to catch it, and thus good for it to
do these things and bad for it if for whatever reason it fails to
do them. The natures of these things entail certain ends the
realization of which constitutes their flourishing as the kinds of
things they are.

Hence, no one would make stupid remarks to the effect that to
say that some things are naturally good for squirrels would
entail, absurdly, that putting a little splint on a squirrel’s
broken leg to help it heal would be “unnatural”; or that to say
that some things are naturally good for grass would entail,
absurdly, that watering it with sprinklers rather than rainwater
would be “unnatural.” For it is quite obvious that, though man-
made and thus artificial, neither of these things is unnatural in
the relevant sense. A splint doesn’t frustrate the realization of
the ends a squirrel has to fulfill in order to flourish as the kind
of thing it is, and sprinklers don’t frustrate the ends grass must
realize in order to flourish as the kind of thing it is. On the
contrary, the splint and the sprinklers facilitate the realization
of those ends.
Similarly, no one would object that it is trivial to talk about
what is natural for a tree, a squirrel, etc., since, after
all, everything follows the laws of nature anyway. For though it
is of course true that all material things are subject to the laws
of physics, different kinds of material things have their own
distinctive natures that determine distinctive kinds of
flourishing. Darting about is something a squirrel needs to be
able to do in order to flourish as the kind of thing it is, but it is
not the sort of thing a tree or grass needs to do in order to
flourish as the kinds of thing they are. In addition to the laws
that govern all material things as such, there are less
fundamental laws that govern only specific parts of nature, and
it is these that reflect the goods distinctive of these various
parts.
Nor would anyone would raise silly objections to the effect that
if a certain squirrel is born without a leg, then it must be natural
for that squirrel to lack four legs, or that if a certain sickly tree
fails to sink roots into the ground and ends up falling over or
drying out, then it must be natural for that tree to fail to sink
roots. For though these circumstances are “natural” in the sense
that they sometimes occur in the ordinary course of nature and
arise from factors internal to the things in question rather than

from human action or some other external factor, they are
nevertheless unnatural in the relevant sense. For a squirrel’s
being born without a leg or a tree’s having weak roots constitute
failures to realize the ends that define the flourishing of these
sorts of thing, and thus are failures fully to realize a thing’s
nature. That is why we call them defects in a thing.
Now, none of these examples involves moral goodness or
badness, because morality involves intellect and will, which
grass, trees, and squirrels all lack. Rational creatures like
ourselves are capable of moral goodness or badness precisely
because we do have intellects and wills. The will itself has as
its natural end the pursuit of the good, and determining
what is in fact good is part of the natural end of the intellect.
Morally good action thus involves the will to do what is good
for us given our nature, while morally bad action involves
willing contrary to what is good for us given our nature. And to
the extent that the intellect knows what is good for us we are
culpable for these good or bad actions. To will to do what is
“natural” for us thus means, in classical natural law theory,
something like towill to do what tends toward the realization of
the ends which, given our nature, define what it is for us to
flourish as the kind of things we are. And to will to do what is
“unnatural” thus means something like willing to do what tends
toward the frustration of the ends which, given our nature,
define what it is for us to flourish as the kind of things we are.
If a squirrel were rational, it would be natural and good for him
to will to escape predators and to gather nuts for the winter and
unnatural and bad for him to will to offer himself up to
predators and to eat only toothpaste or stones. And the latter
would be unnatural and bad for him whatever was the reason
why he willed these things – brain damage, genetic anomalies
giving rise to odd desires, bad squirrel upbringing, squirrel peer
pressure, the influence of squirrel pop culture, arguments from
squirrel philosophers who were hostile to natural law, or
whatever. They would also be unnatural and bad for
him however strongly he wanted to eat the toothpaste and offer

himself to the predators, and even if he found the idea of eating
nuts and fleeing from predators repulsive. The provenance and
strength of the desires wouldn’t show that they were somehow
natural (again, in the relevant sense) but on the contrary
indicate instead how deeply distortedandunnatural the squirrel’s
character had become – like a hose that’s gotten so many kinks
in it that it is hard to get water through it anymore, or a vine
whose growth pattern has gotten so twisted that it ends up
choking itself to death.
Now where human beings are concerned, to know in detail what
our nature determines to be good for us would require a careful
analysis of each of our various faculties and capacities – reason,
speech, labor, sex, and so forth. I’m not going to get into all of
that here because it is not relevant to the point of the post, and
each of these would in any event require a treatment of its own.
No natural law theorist claims that merely saying “Act in
accordance with nature” is the end of the story. It’s just the
beginning of the story. The point for now is that while the
details about what counts as acting in accordance with nature or
contrary to nature in particular cases raise all sorts of questions,
the general idea of acting in accordance with nature is not
subject to glib objections of the sort referred to above.
Thus, when natural law theorists talk about acting in accordance
with nature, they do not mean “natural as opposed to artificial
or man-made.” For example, when Catholic natural law
theorists claim that contraception is bad, they don’t mean that
it’s bad because it involves the use of pills, or mechanical
devices, or man-made substances like rubber. They mean that it
positively frustrates the natural ends of the sexual faculties (or
at least partially frustrates them, since it is not denied that sex
is naturally oriented toward bonding the spouses, expressing
affection, and the like, as well as toward procreation). And
methods that do not involve the use of any man-made or
artificial devices (such as withdrawal) can frustrate this end just
as much as the others can, and therefore are in the relevant
sense “unnatural.” (Again, I’m not trying here to answer every

question one might raise about this specific example, just
indicating the sense of “natural” that is operative.)
Artificial or man-made devices as such are not only not
“unnatural” in the relevant sense, they can restore or even
facilitate the natural end of our capacities, as eyeglasses, tools,
computers, prosthetic limbs, etc. do. (And this is as true in the
sexual context as in other contexts – an impotent man who used
Viagra would be facilitating the natural end of his sexual
faculties rather than frustrating them.) Nor is there anything in
natural law theory that entails even a preference for what is
“natural” as opposed to artificial (Luddism, living in the
woods à la Thoreau, a fetish for “organic foods,” etc.). On the
contrary, given that we are distinctively rational animals,
technology and other products of artifice are manifestations of
our nature.
In commending what is in accordance with our nature, natural
law theorists also do not mean “natural in the sense of
commonly occurring in the ordinary course of nature.” All sorts
of things commonly occur in the ordinary course of things that
tend to frustrate our nature – injuries, diseases, floods,
earthquakes, and, for that matter, immoral choices. Hence when
people say that it is “natural” for a child to be selfish or for a
man to have a roving eye, while there is a sense in which this is
true, it is not the sense that is operative in natural law theory.
A goldfish will “naturally” tend to keep eating the food you
drop into its tank even after it is full, but that hardly fulfills its
nature in the relevant sense (since it will overeat and thereby
kill itself). Similarly, we have, given our limited nature as
created things, inherent susceptibilities to defects and failures
of various kinds – overeating, overreaction to injustices,
excessive fear in the face of danger, sexual vices, bodily injury,
the contraction of various diseases, etc. These are not “natural”
in the relevant sense of fulfilling our nature even though they
are “natural” in the different sense that they are defects or
failures to which we are prone to given our nature.
For the same reason, the natural law theorist does not mean

“natural in the sense of flowing from a deep-seated tendency.”
For a deep-seated tendency could result from habituated vice or
heredity defect, either of which would be contrary to nature in
the relevant sense. A predisposition to alcoholism or heart
disease doesn’t help the person who has it to realize the ends
inherent in his nature, even if such a predisposition has a
genetic basis. A character trait may have become so habituated
that it has become “second nature,” but that doesn’t make it
natural in the relevant sense either.
The natural must also be carefully distinguished from the
supernatural, where in classical natural law theory the
“supernatural” has nothing to do with ghosts and other
paranormal phenomena, but rather with what is above or
additional to our nature and the ends inherent in it. For
example, knowledge of God is something of which we are
capable given our nature and which we require for our complete
flourishing as the kinds of things we are – that is why natural
theology is possible – but the intimate, “face to face”
knowledge of God that is the beatific vision is not “natural” in
that sense. That is rather a matter of grace, of being raised to
an end higher than what we would be due or capable of given
our nature.
This brings us to the “law” side of natural law, and thus to
another term used in various senses which need to be carefully
distinguished. Is the natural law a law given by God? Yes and
no. Yes insofar as the natural law reflects the natures of things,
and God, as creator, is the author of things and their natures.
But the natural moral law is to that extent no different from
what was said above about grass, trees, and squirrels. You
don’t need to study theology in order to find out what is good or
bad for grass, trees, and squirrels; indeed, you could be an
atheist and know it. And the same thing is true for what is good
or bad for us given our nature (at least to a large extent –
though there are religious obligations of a general kind under
natural law given that the existence of God is knowable through
unaided reason).

The natural law differs, then, from law that is directly given by
God via a special revelation, as with the law given to Israel
through Moses. Knowledge of the latter requires knowledge of
certain specific historical events and of certain miracles
associated with those events. The natural law is not like that; it
is in principle available to all men simply by virtue of being
rational and capable of knowing what is good or bad for them
given their distinctive nature. Thus does Aquinas
distinguish natural law from divine law. (He also distinguishes
natural law from human law, which is or at least ought to be
grounded in natural law and which determines, when it isn’t
already clear, how natural law gets applied in concrete
historical circumstances; and from eternal law, the archetypes
or ideas in the divine mind according to which God creates
things and which is thus the ultimate ground of the natural law,
even if we can know much about the natural law merely by
knowing human nature and without reference to God.)
It is thus an error to suppose that natural law arguments are
inherently theological, at least in the sense many of their critics
suppose. Though the natural law theorist would regard natural
(as opposed to revealed) theology as part of a complete account
of natural law, there are still large areas of morality which can
be known without reference to theological claims of any sort,
and these include the ones that are matters of the most intense
controversy between natural law theorists and their critics (e.g.
abortion and sexual morality).
So, for the natural law theorist, certain things are “natural” for
us in the sense of tending to fulfill those ends the realization of
which constitutes our flourishing as the kinds of thing we are.
But perhaps it is also natural for us – in a different sense, the
sense of being a weakness to which we are prone given the
limitations of our nature – for us to want to deny that we are
subject to natural law. To that extent at least we are all natural
lawyers, but of a rather sleazy kind – seeking, not justice, but to
find any way we can to get ourselves off the hook.

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