Madison has always seemed to me quite admirable. I don't know whether I'd say we're "spiritually akin". I have trouble feeling that with any of the early Americans, actually, perhaps because most of them were somewhat hostile to Catholicism? I think about this question a lot in reference to the Middle Ages or Ancient Greece; never really considered colonial America that way before.

I keep telling people that God is obviously punishing us, what with the winter and "spring" we've had.

I agree with much of what you say, WC, but just based on this post, it sort of sounds to me like you're impatient with the nitty-gritty of investigation and enforcement, and want to move this to the level of abstract argument. They're not mutually exclusive, of course, but I think the investigation and enforcement are very important. People do need to be going to jail. Not only because they're bad people, but because Americans need to understand that we're talking about very serious criminal action here, and I don't want to be the sort of nation that winks at such serious violations.

I'm perfectly okay with conservatives using this opportunity to make the case for abolishing the IRS, or at least limiting its powers. But our eagerness to do that shouldn't stop us from reminding the public again and again that the investigating and punishing the malefactors is absolutely necessary and has nothing to do with partisan politics. None of us should want to live in a nation that isn't willing to do that.

That's perfectly true, and I've already said that arguments that rely on explicitly revelation-based theological premises can reasonably be viewed as "religious" in a way that makes them unsuitable for public debate. But quite often, you really don't know how esoteric a particular kind of teaching really is. Maybe you do mostly believe truth X because you trust the authorities who taught it to you, or maybe they merely acquainted you with truths that are available to any discerning person. Or maybe your understanding of X is based on their teaching, not in the sense that it relies on their authority per se, but at least in the sense that they were a fairly unique source of insight, such that others who were not similarly taught could not be expected to grasp truth X.

A lot of my arguments are drawn from Aristotelian and/or personalist philosophies, both of which aim to make sense of ordinary human experience. So they really shouldn't be "religious" in a narrow sense, but often it's true that they run pretty heavily against the grain of modern ways of thinking, so maybe in that sense they are "religious". 

Now, on Salvatore's question, I think I would say: it is very difficult to trace the precise origins of our beliefs, precisely because they are so complicated. I don't think a person is merely being obtuse when they say that they just don't know what they would believe about X if they weren't religious. Humans are belief-formers by nature, so you can't generally extract some huge portion of their belief structure and still be left with a well-functioning rationality. If I didn't subscribe to such-and-so philosophy, I'd probably subscribe to some other one, but can I really be expected to say which? 

Further, though, you'd need to refine your notion of causality in order to make the question meaningful. In some sense my sixth grade teacher was a "cause" of my belief in the Pythagorean theorem, but just because you didn't have the same one doesn't mean that that's that objectionably esoteric. You might reasonably reply, "Well, fine, but you don't believe the theorem on her authority; she just showed you how it worked."

(cont)

Wow, I missed lots of interesting stuff here. Hmm. Maybe I could offer my most pressing two thoughts, just in case anyone is still following out these lines of argument.

First, on the question of natural law, I certainly hope my position isn't anti-natural law, because that would be bad for a Catholic Aristotelian! But the thing is, natural law isn't locked into any very cut-and-dried epistemology. The ancients and medievals tended towards more expansionist, externalist epistemologies than what you find in Descartes or Kant. Kant would be alarmed by my suggestion that beliefs can properly be derived from a complex fusion of personal experience, authority and reflection. I don't think Aristotle or Aquinas would, however. There does need to be some appropriate causal story linking my reflections/experiences to the truth of the things I believe, in order for them to be justified (and, Alvin Plantinga would add, warranted). But that story can be complicated. It normally is.

I think it's hard for people not to believe in natural law of some kind. Even the ones who formally reject the notion act at times as if they believe in it.

What do you mean by "inherently religious"? Obviously I agree that one need not be religious in order to fruitfully draw on it (though at the same time, people who study the Western tradition seriously do have a way of becoming Christians with above-average frequency.) But certainly a great many of the "major players" were religious, and explicitly religious discussions have marked the development of Western thought in ways that can't be neatly bracketed out.

Of course my view on this is that the term "religious argument" just isn't very precise, and is often used just as a lazy way of dismissing arguments that deserve serious consideration. I can draw principled distinctions between the terrain of philosophy and that of theology, but I think this term is thrown around to refer to a whole variety of different "offenses" (including all of the ones listed above, though I wouldn't regard them all as offenses) in a fairly haphazard way.

No, I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to run those counter-factuals. God and religion are too central to the way a seriously religious person thinks; you can't just bracket off something like that and still be able to reason clearly. To some extent we can learn by experience what sorts of views people different from us tend to accept, and maybe we can even sympathetically occupy that mental "space" to some degree. But if we're talking about a borderline case (say, an argument that, statistically, is mostly accepted today by religious people, but that makes no explicit use of revealed premises) I don't think a person can reasonably say how the would view the matter if their perspective were completely different from what it is.

What do you mean by "requires" a deity to work, though? If it adopts that as an explicit premise, it presumably fits into category (1). But of course,God is part of the background and history of a lot of philosophical ideas that most non-believers accept. So I'm not sure that's a helpful method for categorizing.

Well, Fred, what I always say is: if you must step on someone, try to make sure it's a bad guy.

I'm being glib, obviously. But we're just talking on too high a level of abstraction to get much further this way. I agree that government bureaus can't "build civil society", but I don't agree that the impact of government on such processes has to be either neutral or negative. Nor do I take "coercion" to be a basic evil in the way that libertarians do. Because I'm not a libertarian.

SL and others: I think obsessively about how to rebuild civil society, restructure education, strengthen the family and so forth. I write posts on relevant subjects all the time. But you can't put everything you think in one comment. Fred's the one who wants to issue a blanket dismissal of everything involving government; I'm joining the crowd who think that that's unwarranted.

Rejecting an argument because it sounds kind of like something the left would say is just reactionary. And I haven't proposed anything positive. I've only pointed out that Fred's suggestion about how human society works  is a little too simple. Let me add this, though: there have been many human societies that I wouldn't want to live in. Overregulation isn't the only route to awfulness.

But even Fred's metaphor doesn't work. I just thought it was worth pointing out, especially because the fact that it doesn't work it points us to a deeper truth about reality: order doesn't just spring up beautifully of its own volition. 

Obviously, there are problems with oversized government. Every conservative understands that. But the problem is more complex than Fred wants to believe.

Ever seen an abandoned lot, Fred? It's not very beautiful. Did you know that many of the nasty weeds you see there can't actually be found in the midst of pristine wilderness? They are (mostly) European "imports" (not deliberate, obviously) that have pretty much adapted to this precise life cycle: move into human places when the humans stop tending them. Sort of the rats of the plant world.

Point is, even in nature, beautiful things don't necessarily spring up out of the earth just as soon as you leave it alone. Nature is fragile. It takes a long time to build a pleasing balance of species, and once you squelch that, it can take a long time for anything nice to grow in its place. (And what happens in the meanwhile can be downright ugly.)

Human society is the same way. "Leave it alone and it'll all be hunky-dory" just isn't necessarily right.

Whites sepulchers? An oldie but a goodie.