SummaryJohn Clark suggests that not only is the existence of conscience evidence for God, but it is also a powerful force to bring people nearer to Him.
Over the past few months, I have written a number of pieces on the subject of conscience.
But before we proceed much further on a political level, it would help to take a step back and revisit and investigate the subject of conscience on a theological level.
It’s time for an examination of conscience, so to speak.
Where Does Conscience Come From?
The Catechism defines conscience as: “a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed.”(1778) That definition, excellent though it may be, does not tell us where conscience originates.
To understand where conscience comes from and why you have one, let’s begin by identifying what is called “eternal law.” The Catholic Dictionary defines “eternal law” as:
“The plan of divine wisdom, insofar as it directs all the actions and events of the universe. It is, therefore, the unchangeable effective decree of God binding the whole of creation to the fulfillment of its purpose, and to the use of such means for attaining this purpose as are adapted to each nature.”
God communicates part of this law to man as “natural law.” In short, natural law is that part of eternal law that is written upon the heart of man, and that conscience is oriented toward. Both conscience and natural law are the offspring, in a sense, of eternal law.
Though we are spiritually damaged by original sin, which causes us to have inclination toward evil, conscience has built into it a spiritually gravitational pull back toward the good.
Conscience is directly traceable to God; in fact, you could say that conscience bears the imprint of a Creator. As Saint Paul explains in the Letter to the Romans:
“When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them…”
It is important to recognize that the link between Creator and conscience is not merely one of Catholic theologians and Scripture scholars, but practitioners in other fields as well such as anthropology (the study of the nature of man), sociology (the study of the nature of society), and epistemology (the study of the nature of knowledge).
Many practitioners in these fields have regarded this link between Creator and conscience inescapable. In a nutshell, they ask: If there is no God, where in the world—both literally and metaphorically—does conscience come from?
For instance, some anthropologists and sociologists ask: Why do all cultures in history consider things like theft and lying wrong? The variables of times, place, and cultural influences may vary, but the constant is that the moral judgment of these behaviors is not exclusively reliant on religious explanations.
They often conclude that conscience is a clear cut case of nature—not nurture.
Some epistemologists, those who study the science of knowledge, ask: Where does morality come from? How can we know that good is good, and evil, evil? And how does man, even when he is separated by external religious influences and external moral codes, tell the difference between the two? Of course, the answer is not external, but internal—intrinsic—to man.
Relatedly, why does man feel guilt? In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis put it this way:
“All the human beings that history has heard of acknowledge some kind of morality…And it has one characteristic too remarkable to be ignored. The moralities accepted among men may differ— though not, at bottom, so widely as is often claimed— but they all agree in prescribing a behaviour which their adherents fail to practise. All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of 