For the purposes of illustration, the Thomistic Natural Law disciple sees himself as a farmer harvesting facts. He harvests his facts much like a farmer might harvest his corn. On his way to town with his wagons full of his corn (facts) another Natural Law farmer stops him and says… “Nice crop of sorghum you have there.” The first Natural Law farmer, now befuddled by this comment, insists, “my fact harvest is one of corn and not sorghum.” When he finally gets to town to sell his harvest the Natural Law middle man purchaser says to our Natural Law corn harvester, “Nice harvest of perch you have there. What lake did you pull all them out of?”
You see the Thomistic Natural Law disciple sees facts as a farmer sees a crop. The problem here is that there is no fact apart from a interpretation of fact, and as such corn as a fact to one Natural Law advocate may well indeed be seen. understood, and counted as counter-factual to another Natural Law advocate. One Natural Law advocate’s corn is another Natural Law advocate’s fish.
You see facts, unlike crops, while indisputably objectively real, are refashioned according to the subjective mind to fallen men harvesting the facts. The classic analogy of this truth is in found in the fossil. The fossil is an indisputable objective fact but if that fossil is presented to a evolutionary Darwinian scientist he will look at the fossil and might say something like, “We see here proof that evolution is true as this fossil so wonderfully demonstrates.” Standing next to our evolutionary Darwinian scientist we have a Biblical Christian scientist who next looks at the fossil fact and says, “Ah, here we see the proof that the world was created in six days — all good.” A third scientist present, being a nihilist, looks at the fossil and say’s something like, “This is nothing but a rock and it means nothing.”
The point here is that the Thomistic Natural Law advocate cannot collect facts like a farmer harvests his crop. Facts, while objectively true, are reinterpreted by the unbeliever so that they might not testify to the reality of the God upon whom all facts depend upon for meaning. As God gives meaning to facts, the one who hates God and His Christ has an agenda to not let facts say what they inescapably say. The problem is not with the facts — they remain objectively objective. The problem is with fallen man who is determined to not read the facts for what they are since a reading of the facts for what they are will inevitable lead them to the one who gives all facts their meaning, and that they cannot have.
Now, this tendency and determination to reinterpret God’s interpretation of facts becomes more and more radical and extreme the further a individual and/or culture rebels against God. In such cases Natural Law will be appealed to as teaching, for example, that there are a multitude number of genders and not merely two. When a rabid antithesis develops between God and man or between God and a society any Natural Law appealed too will be invoked in order to overthrow the kinds of conclusions coming from the Natural Law to which Aquinas appealed as existing independently of presupposing the reality of the God of the Bible.
Thomistic Natural Law once worked in the West as a epistemological foundation because the denizens in the West largely were operating already with Christian presupposition and having Christians presuppositions a consensus could be arrived at in terms of what Natural Law taught. However, this consensus of what Natural Law taught — absent of a Biblical presuppositional foundation — ended up having the lifespan of cut flowers in a vase. The consensus remained beautiful for a season but however the consensus, like cut flowers, eventually died because the cut flowers were not rooted in the soil of Biblical presuppositionalism.
When handled by someone who is not submitted to the God of the Bible and His Christ, facts are not like crops and men are not like farmers harvesting a crop of unquestioned and indisputable facts. Honestly, nothing should be more obvious in the climate we are living in currently.
Still, at the same time that postmodernism is going wild we now have a strong movement to return to the modernism that was built upon the foundation of Natural Law. A modernism that eventually was found empty and brought us to postmodernism. This new impulse of modernism with its Natural Law advocacy has found strange bedmates with the coupling of the R2K fanboys together with the Classical 2K followers of Stephen Wolfe. These two schools of thoughts fight like two cats knotted at the tail and cast over a clothesline when it comes to their varied conclusions on just exactly what Natural Law teaches and yet together they man the ramparts against any onslaught by Theonomists who, contrary to Thomistic Natural Law theories, appeal to the law and the testimony. Both Van Drunen’s R2K and Stephen Wolfe’s Classical 2K believe that fallen man can use right reason and natural law, independent of presupposing the God of the Bible, to come to true truth.
This agreement between Wolfe and Van Drunen, both of whom insist they are Reformed, strikes the garden variety Theonomist as a denial of the noetic effects of the fall playing havoc with the whole idea of the stout Reformed doctrine of “total depravity.”
Don’t get me wrong. I am glad for many of Wolfe’s conclusions via his usage of Thomistic Natural Law. I have even defended Wolfe on my Iron Rhetoric podcasts from many of the “Reformed” who oppose Christian Nationalism. My point here is, in part, that the Natural Law that was the epistemological foundation of the Enlightenment project, in the end, is not going to win the day. Thomistic Natural Law is not going to rescue the West because at its heart it is a humanistic doctrine that finds man being the interpretive center of his own world.
Gary North argued that “natural law,” as the humanistic philosophical construct it is mainly known today, was originally invented by Stoic philosophers to justify the existence of new cosmopolitan empires in the post-Alexandrian Hellenistic era. (The Book of Daniel confirms that Alexander the Great was a very important historical person – with his conquests, the European culture came into contact with Babylon and its notions of universalistic empire.) In other words, “natural law” was a proto-multicultural concept from the very beginning:
https://www.garynorth.com/public/2280.cfm
“Natural law theory was born in a time of breakdown: the breakdown of faith in the Greek city-state. Alexander and then Rome had conquered them all. Stoic philosophers sought a substitute theory of the local religious rites-based theory of the city-state.
The substitute was a theory of universal mankind, an idea foreign to classical Greek politics. This universal humanity possesses a common reason, they argued. Common reason allows men to come to agreement about ethics and law. Natural law theory was an attempt by philosophers to provide legitimacy for a world empire.”
And what happened in the Enlightenment era was basically this: unbelieving “philosophes” took up the Stoic natural law theory, and, while adding some Epicurean materialist utilitarianism to it, consciously cut away those Christian appendixes, or extras, that Christian thinkers had added to this theory in the medieval and Renaissance times. They “re-paganized” it.
Peter Gay, the famous historian of the Enlightenment, openly admitted this:
https://archive.org/details/enlightenmentint0000unse_i6k5/page/322/mode/2up?view=theater
“Hence the philosophes – rogues that they were – could claim that they were doing to the Christians what the Church Fathers had claimed they had done to the Greeks and Romans: they were merely taking back what had originally belonged to them.
This philosophic estimate is uncharitable, positively unchristian; still, here as so often before, we encounter the curious duality of the Enlightenment’s historical verdicts: the philosophes were ungenerous and prejudiced and still right in substance. What the philosophes took over from Christian theologians and Christian philosophers were the least distinctively Christian, the least religious, parts of their teachings – they were usually ideas that had come to the Church Fathers from the Stoics.”
Excellent
The Stoical “natural law” theory might well fall under this condemnation of Apostle Paul – it was something that Christian thinkers took over from pagan philosophers, because it seemed at least superficially to be compatible with the Bible (and perhaps it PARTLY was, the same way that half-truth is partly true):
“Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ.” (Colossians 2:8)
Any simpleton could see that Epicurean philosophy, with its hedonistic, atheistic materialism, is incompatible with Christianity; it is EXPLICITLY anti-Christian. But the nefarious nature of Stoicism is harder to detect – it is IMPLICITLY anti-Christian. As is stated here:
https://www.academia.edu/28895217/Stoicism_unbound_Ciceros_Academica_in_Tolands_Pantheisticon_
“Christian Stoicism might be as legitimate, and as influential, as Christian Platonism or Christian Aristotelianism; nonetheless, it was only made possible by denying what was intrinsic to Stoicism itself – namely, the complete immanence of the divine.”
Or like Gary North put it:
https://www.garynorth.com/freebooks/docs/html/gnbd/appendix_e.htm
“The foundation of Stoic philosophy was a denial of the Creator-creature distinction. Its outlook was summed up by Epictetus:
“When a man has learnt to understand the government of the universe and has realized that there is nothing so great or sovereign or all-inclusive as this frame of things wherein man and God are united … why should he not call himself a citizen of the universe and a son of God?”(58)”