Does Nature Make Laws? – Prof. Raymond Hain

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Prof. Raymond Hain examines whether nature “makes” laws by exploring classical and contemporary accounts of natural law, arguing that human moral norms arise from our rational participation in the ordered structure of life and the universe as understood in both philosophy and Catholic thought.

This lecture was given on September 8th, 2025, at United States Military Academy.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speakers:

Raymond Hain is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Associate Director of the Humanities Program at Providence College in Providence, RI. Educated at Christendom College, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Oxford, he is the founder of the PC Humanities Forum and Humanities Reading Seminars and is responsible for the strategic development of the Humanities Program into a vibrant, world class center of teaching, research, and cultural life dedicated to the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. His scholarly interests include the history of ethics (especially St. Thomas Aquinas), applied ethics (especially medical ethics and the ethics of architecture), Alexis de Tocqueville, and philosophy and literature (especially Catholic aesthetics). His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Templeton Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Charles Koch Foundation. His essays have appeared in various journals and collections including The Thomist, International Journal of Applied Philosophy, and The Anthem Companion to Tocqueville. He is the editor of Beyond the Self: Virtue Ethics and the Problem of Culture and is currently working on a monograph titled The Lover and the Prophet: An Essay in Catholic Aesthetics. He joined Providence College in 2011 and lives just across the street with his wife Dominique and their five children.

Keywords: Aristotelian Ethics, Catholic Moral Theology, Darwinian Evolution, Evolutionary Biology, Human Flourishing, Human Sexuality, John Finnis Natural Law and Natural Rights, Michael Thompson, Natural Law, Philosophy of Biology, Steven Jensen

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast. Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition
0:08.7	in the university, the church, and the wider public square. The lectures on this podcast are
0:13.7	organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world. To learn more and to
0:19.7	attend these events, visit us at
0:21.6	Thomistic Institute.org. I want to say some opening brief remarks about the official views of the
0:29.5	Catholic Church in order to give you a sense of how Christianity might be related to the natural law
0:35.0	and more generally how you might think about the relationship between faith and reason.
0:39.3	It'd be hard to overestimate, I think, the importance of the natural law to the Catholic
0:44.7	Church and to Christian intellectual life.
0:47.4	The Church's modes of argumentation, moral teachings, many of our greatest thinkers, reams
0:53.2	of official documents, they're all steeped in the
0:56.0	natural law. For example, this is in 2019, the Supreme Court of the Philippines dismissed a petition
1:05.9	asking the court to declare articles one and two of the family code unconstitutional.
1:12.6	These were provisions that limited marriage to a union between one man and one woman.
1:18.1	This was by no means the first skirmish in the debate on same-sex marriage in the Philippines.
1:23.2	In 2015, so just 10 years ago, when Ireland voted overwhelmingly to approve same-sex marriage,
1:29.7	a Philippines archbishop warned his countrymen not to jump on the bandwagon.
1:34.8	Same-sex marriage, he said, is against the natural law.
1:39.7	In other words, we might say same-sex marriage he thinks is contrary to natural human morality as
1:46.0	well as Catholic moral teaching. What might it mean to say something like that is part
1:52.0	of what I want to think about this evening? If you look at the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic
2:00.3	Church, it's a great place to begin reflecting on Catholic understanding of the natural law.
	...

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