‘Natural’ as an adjective is in important word in Catholicspeak. We talk of ‘natural desire,’ ‘natural law,’ ‘natural reason,’ among other things. The usage is confusing: acceptable in some senses, even unavoidable; unacceptable, even noxious, in others. How might we discriminate?
A first distinction: to call something natural in the order of being is distinct from calling it natural in the order of knowing. Instance: to claim that it is natural to humans to desire God (or to know that the principle of noncontradiction obtains) is distinct from saying that it is natural to humans to know these things about themselves. You can, I suppose, coherently (though not accurately) deny that it is natural to yourself to desire God (or to know that the principle of noncontradiction obtains), even if it is true that it belongs to your nature to do the one and know the other. Not much follows here, as is usual, from claims in the order of being to claims in the order of knowing. You ought, then, to be wary of assumptions that these two orders are intimate. When you come across argument-patterns such as, it follows from that fact that p is true of you that you know that p is true of you, walk the other way: fast.
A second distinction: to call something natural in the order of being is distinct from calling it natural in the order of seeming (that is, the phenomenal order, to which phenomenology attends). Its being natural to you to be a creature, brought into being and sustained in being by the Lord, has nothing to do with what it seems to you that you are. What it seems to you that you are need have nothing (much) to do with what you are: this is because catechesis is the principal cause forming (informing) the order of seeming, and it can proceed in close embrace with what you are, or at a radical distance from it.
More distinctions to follow, deo volente. The importance of making them lies in the frequent argumentative misuse, by Catholics and others, of appeals to the natural.
