That's J. Budziszewski talking in his new book What We Can't Not Know: A Guide (Dallas: Spence Publishing, 2003). Boundless readers, who know Budziszewski in his persona of Professor Theophilus, will recognize this as a running theme in his columns: No matter how fervently people protest that morality is either a strictly personal preference or (at best) a mystery far too unfathomable to set practical standards for daily life, deep down all of us know a lot more about it than many of us like to admit.

If those columns just whet your appetite for more, you'll likely find What We Can't Not Know a richly satisfying experience. Given 200-plus pages to work with, Budziszewski has room to flesh out his argument from multiple angles, showing a myriad of ways we reflect what's long been known as the natural law — the moral sense built into us by our Maker — and thus our Maker Himself. That comes in handy in a couple of ways for Christians. It helps us talk to nonbelievers seeking to deny the existence or (more often) the nature of God; and it helps shore up our own faith when we realize just how many clues about Him we can find in ourselves and the world around us every day.

People have been pointing this out for centuries — millennia, actually. But Budziszewski makes a point of finding plenty of present-day applications. For example:

Consider the woman who told her counselor "I couldn't be a good parent," amended her remark to "I don't deserve to have any children," and still later revealingly added "If it hadn't been for my last abortion, I don't think I'd be pregnant now." We don't need a prophet to read the writing on this palace wall. When she says she couldn't be a good mother, what she means is that good mothers don't kill their children. She keeps getting pregnant to replace the children she has killed; but she keeps having abortions to punish herself for having killed them.

That's the voice of conscience, which can't be silenced no matter how loudly the culture proclaims "a woman's right to choose." Of course, conscience doesn't always lead to repentance, as this case reminds us; but it's built into us nevertheless. As Budziszewski says, "Those who will not accept conscience as a teacher must face it as an accuser, and if they still run away they run into even deeper wrong."

Conscience isn't the only witness to God's design. There are certain facts, like gender differences, that can't be wished away even if we try. Still, often we do try. Budziszewski reports a case in point:

An honors student once asked me why sodomy couldn't promote the unitive good. I explained that different kinds of friendships have different natures and requirements; sexualizing a friendship does not necessarily help it come into its own. Although it consummates the friendship of wife and husband, it perverts the friendship of comrades, just as it perverts the friendship of parent and child. Then she wanted to know why sex couldn't consummate the friendship of two comrades. This time I explained that the difference between the spouses is crucial to the power of their union to take each out of Self for the Other. Sodomy resists that liberation; it is merely self-love with another body. Finally she wanted to know why sex couldn't take each comrade out of Self for the Other. And so finally I explained complementarity. A husband and wife can balance and complete each other, but the sexual reinforcement of identicals merely unhinges them; it makes them not less extreme, but more. The same dynamic of reinforcement takes place in the explosive promiscuity of men who mate men, and in the implosive dependency of women who mate women. That more or less satisfied her, but during the course of the conversation, I realized her problem was not just moral but ontological. "You keep demanding 'Why couldn't,' " I suggested. "It's a little like demanding 'Why couldn't water run uphill, or the moon be made of green cheese.' I don't know how to make sense of the question. In this universe, it isn't, and this is the only one I know."

As outlandish as the student's stretch is, something like it is pretty common. Budziszewski notes that ever since that incident with the apple, "We don't want the freedom of the creature but the freedom of the Creator — not the freedom to be good but the freedom to determine the good." Thankfully, having what we want is not within our power.

A natural inclination is not whatever I happen to desire; it is not even what everyone desires. The point of the adjective "natural" is precisely to call attention to design. It is natural for me to be attracted to the opposite sex, even if I am actually attracted to my own. It is natural for me to eat a varied diet, even if I actually prefer eating nothing but chips and dip. It is natural for me to use my lungs to take in oxygen, even if I am actually addicted to sniffing glue. Our desires and tendencies do have significance when they are consequences of our design. But the mere fact that I want something or tend in a certain direction means nothing by itself, and the mere fact that all men do so means little more. On the contrary, if all of us want something in the teeth of our design, the reasonable inference is that something has gone wrong with us (a claim which my own faith considers literally true). So what matters is not how we "incline" — that may need correction. What matters is how we "naturally" incline — by the blueprint, by the layout, by the plan.

I won't attempt to summarize Budziszewski's arguments in detail; I couldn't do justice to them in the space available. You'll have to get the book if you want to see for yourself. Suffice it to say that he covers a lot of ground. My favorite sections are probably his commentaries on the Ten Commandments, his analyses of the different ways people go into denial about sin, his explanations of how our culture became morally unhinged and of how we might work to regain our moral bearings (those last two topics each get a chapter of their own, "The Public Relations of Moral Wrong" and "The Public Relations of Moral Right"). Also worth noting is a chapter dealing with a variety of objections to his arguments, which he writes in a dialogue format similar to what he uses in his outings as Theophilus.

Anyone who thinks philosophy has to be dry and abstract shouldn't think so after reading Budziszewski. He writes about things so familiar that it's never long before you're relating to the material, either because it speaks to you about yourself or about people you've known; you can flip to practically any page to see what I mean. The best description of his work is the one he himself provides of the natural-law thinkers who came before him:

The wisdom of the philosopher lay mainly in his grasp of the deep presuppositions and remote implications of our universal common sense, not in something completely alien to it; what he tried to understand is what common sense is getting at. The ideal was that when the philosopher had finished his work, the common man would say, "Yes, that is what I wanted to say, but I didn't know how."

Reading a writer like that is empowering and inspiring. And make no mistake, What We Can't Not Know is inspiring in other ways. Budziszewski knows we're up against serious challenges today, but he also knows that evil has its limits. "To the permanent advantage of evil is that it can rationalize," he writes. "To its permanent disadvantage is that it must." Truth, meanwhile, has an inherent power and a Creator behind it Who's actively at work in this world.

Thus it is that Budziszewski can write, toward the end of his book: "I am reminded of a debate in which the pro-abortion speaker grew impatient. 'Don't you people understand that you've lost?' she demanded. 'The fat lady has sung.' Her opponent replied, 'It's not over when the fat lady sings but when the angel blows his horn.' "

Good news! Starting this week, Boundless is resuming weekly publishing for the new school year. Enjoy today's new articles and look for the next batch on Thursday, Aug. 28!