The Force of Natural Law

A Reflection on Epistemic Fortitude

When I was struggling to be “Dr.” Johnson and agonizing through me dissertation, I had to spend a lot of energy devoted to the “3 A’s” of Aristotle, Aquinas and Augustine. As a fading Presbyterian, committed to the presuppositional epistemology of the Dutch Reformed Amsterdam school, popularized by Cornelius Van Til and Hermann Dooyeweerd, I found my house of cards crumbling before my eyes. CS Lewis once quipped,

“The person who tries to break the natural and moral law will break himself over it or be broken by it.”

I found myself using the very logic Van Til said was not prior to God’s Revelation due to the reformed doctrine of total depravity. Now to those not familiar, this house of cards is fortified by an epistemological framework like Fort Knox. But like everything else, if the premises are false, so are the conclusions.

As image-bearers we reflect the λόγος of Creation itself (cf. John 1.1) and as Van Til would say, “think God’s thoughts after Him.” However, as I spent time in the 3 A’s, working with natural law ethics, right out of Romans 1.18ff and Psalm 19, I found my reformed assumptions about logic and reason not functioning in the way Van Til said they do. In reading Aquinas and Augustine, “Being is,” that is, Being exists objectively of the knower (Exodus 3.15). St. Paul seems to say by natural reason, one can deduce God’s existence as well as proper ethics as these are self evident in what God has made.

As Being is, and consequently what is is objectively and manifestly true since it corresponds to what is actually “there,” I had to work backwards based upon reformed presuppositions and mere reason to assume God’s existence and the right use of reason. Both Aquinas and Aristotle provided ample ground for showing why reason alone God’s existence was demonstrable and why ethics was objectively true, regardless of one’s “worldview.” Van Til’s odd appropriation of Kant’s transcendental approach to knowledge made the use of reason impossible, by building on the assumption of total depravity and the consequent inability of the human person to rationally discover God.

As Van Til often quipped: “Calvinism is Christianity come to it’s own.” So a foreign worldview must be imposed philosophically. What is necessary says the committed Calvinist is regeneration by the Holy Spirit so that one may see clearly what original sin destroyed. This is sovereignly an monergistically accomplished by the Holy Spirit to those whom God loved and Christ died for. This paradigm does not work with a prima facie reading of Romans 1, which has to be tortuously wrangled through the Calvinist worldview to work for Van Tillians.

When I realized my Calvinist underpinnings slipping, it was glaringly obvious where natural law ethics were historically incorporated - Catholicism. It was Catholic moral philosophy that insisted on the illegitimacy of abortion, homosexual acts, contraception, euthanasia, the unlawful use of the death penalty, etc. When I left the reformed world, there were 48 groups descended from Calvin. We were always trying to justify the protest against Rome, but the epistemic force of natural law compelled me and I broke myself over it.