RJ Snell on the New Natural Law Theory

Anamnesis has a symposium on Natural Law:
God, Religion, and the New Natural Law by R. J. Snell and The Good, the Right, and Theology by Thaddeus J. Kozinski.

This post will have my comments on Mr. Snell's essay. Mr. Kozinski's essay I leave to another post.

I find the essay on othe NNLT too short and uninformative. NNLT as an account of Natural Law solely from the perspective of the moral agent, prescinding from metaphysical or theological considerations? I don't have a problem with that and I think the debate about whether natural law has a metaphysical basis or is tied to metaphysics because of the "good" has largely been a pointless one. It depends on the science in which the definition of natural law is being used. (Dr. Berquist gave me this nugget.)

I think the more traditional Thomists would hold that the goods which are assumed in ethics and can be "proven" only through dialectic can be demonstrated in metaphysics.
However, the Natural Law as considered within ethics would only be under the aspect of the first principle(s) of practical reason and what can be elaborated from them?

NNL correctly claims religion as a good knowable to reason, but reason claims religion as a good from within the mode of natural or proportionate reason—religion known according to the mode of the knower. So reason can indicate the desirability of knowing God from the standpoint of reason, and, further, reason also tells us the desirability and goodness of knowing God in a mode transcending our proportionate nature. Aquinas, for instance, is able to argue that beatitude or union with God is our complete happiness and ultimate end, just as he’s able to argue that we cannot attain beatitude without a relationship with God transcending our causal power.

Thus, natural law can tell us that (1) union with God is our final end, and (2) that attainment of this final end transcends what is proportionate to us. We can reasonably distinguish our natural desire to have religion from our desire to have union with God. Our apprehension of the good of religion is a wholly natural desire expressed in our dynamism to know all things; we can, by our own power, seek to know everything about everything including knowledge of God insofar as God is knowable by reason. This desire is human, proportionate, and natural.

Natural law is not identical to human reason itself; human reason can tell us something about God and our orientation to Him. But our natural desire to have "religion" (whatever that may mean in NNLT) is not the same as the natural love of God, or God as our ultimate end. Religion is not merely knowing about God. So what happened to the natural love of God? This is the wound that is forgotten in "purely natural" accounts of the natural law or attempts to explicate a natural morality or comprehensive philosophical ethics. So in that respect, NNL theorists such as Mr. Snell do overlook the Fall. (I believe that the same charge could be levelled at Maritain in so far as he has a seemingly contradictory notion of a Christian philosophical ethics.)

Natural reason can only get us so far in deepening our moral understanding. We can demonstrate that we ought to love God above all other things and that we fail to do so for some reason. If NNLT goes beyond elaborating the precepts of morality that we can know by reason alone, then it is no longer philosophy but theology. As a tool used by Christians for dialogue with non-Christians it is useful, but one should be careful with one's ascriptions, predications, or claims about natural morality.