Away With This Move Back To Natural Law

What does this mean? It means that when man exercises his reason as he approaches anything, and especially in the processes of education, man’s reason plays the role of God. For us, as Christians, reason is extremely important, but we believe in reason, not as God, but as reason…. Enlightenment faith believed that man’s reasoning, philosophy, education had to be omnipotent, autonomous, or it was nothing.”

R. J. Rushdoony
Education and the Autonomy of Thought

Thanks much to the efforts of Dr. Stephen Wolfe there has, in the recent past, been a push to restore that great whore of Natural Law so as to be sitting, once again, on the throne of epistemology. This despite the fact that it was the Enlightenment that was famous for its appeal to “right reason and natural law” as the means to answering the question of “how do I know what I know.”

Indeed it was the Enlightenment and Natural Law that gave us muck and mire we are currently stuck in by championing as a main principle, “Egalitarianism.” Henry James Sumner Maine, a 19th century legal scholar wrote, on this score;

“There cannot, I conceive, be any question that to the assumption of the Law Natural we owe the doctrine of the fundamental equality of human beings.”

It is this Natural Law … the Natural Law that was championed by the French Philosophes and Revolutionaries, which included egalitarianism that is making a comeback among a new generation of pseudo-intellectuals.

Natural Law suffers from the condition of only being as good as the presuppositions with which one begins. The man whose reason begins by valuing sodomy and pedophilia will easily conclude that, lo and behold, Natural Law teaches sodomy and pedophilia. Similarly, the man whose reason begins by valuing Scripture will find Scripture validated everywhere by Natural Law. His problem however, will be that he is positing the strength of God’s revelation on the foundation of his autonomous reasoning as opposed to founding his reason (which is never autonomous) on God’s revelation.

The Natural Law chaps seem to believe that folks can look out upon reality and quite apart from any fallen biases can begin to read the proper nature of things just by the use of this presumed unbiased reasoning. However, this stands in contradiction to God’s special revelation. If these Natural Law types would refers to God’s special revelation first as opposed to referring to Natural Law first there they would read that “the heart is deceitfully wicked above all things.” As such man never looks out upon creation and reasons in an unbiased manner. As the saying goes, “Man has a ox to gore” and that ox is to read all things in terms of himself as the highest and best interpreter.

Natural law aficionados have failed to take seriously the noetic effects of the fall on the mind of fallen man, and as such they are denying the doctrine of “total depravity” with their precious (gollum gollum) doctrine of Natural Law. Indeed, it is not to much to say that the Church’s embracing over the centuries of Natural Law has been one of the greatest boondoggles of the Church in her entire history.

John Dewey in his book Experience in Education, says that man must learn to set his own standards, his own ideals, in terms of himself, as the ultimate criterion.  This is exactly what the Natural Law attaboys are promulgating when they advocate for homo mensura (man the measure). The idea that fallen man will create a just and Christ honoring social order by relying on his autonomous ability to read Natural Law is right up there with the idea that Ph.D. clergy from Reformed denominations are trustworthy men from which to garner advice.

Fan boys of Natural Law think that they are avoiding presuppositions but they have instead merely embraced the presupposition that fallen man has no bias and can indeed act in a neutral fashion as a autonomous free agent. They have returned us to De Cartes by positing that the thinking self is the highest point of reference. This gives us, just as it gave De Cartes, subjectivism. What Natural Law does is it takes the subjective (fallen man) fills him and his thinking with helium so that his thinking becomes a transcendent something and then labels that helium filled subjective as his “objective” naming it with the name of “Natural Law.” The “objective” that the Natural Law man has is a subjective that has been given the status of objectivity. It is a subjective objective.

We would be better served by remembering Van Til  on this score;

“If God exists, there are no brute facts. If God exists our study of facts must be the effort to know them as God wants them to be known by us. We must then seek to think God’s thoughts after him. To assume that there are brute facts is therefore to assume that God does not exist.”

There are no facts that can be known truly as independent of God. Fallen man is by definition someone who seeks to be a knower independent of God. He uses Natural Law to proclaim that all facts are brute facts until he, as fallen man, gives them meaning and coherence. He can know apart from and without God just by the use of right reason and natural law. But, without God, pray tell what is the standard for this thing called “right reason,” and apart from God how does Natural Law have any objective meaning whatsoever?

Natural law, when it “works” is a classic example of robbing capital from a Christian worldview and importing into a pagan concept in order to get it off the ground. Natural Law can only work as a reasoning mechanism if one presupposes the God of Christianity to begin with but if one is going to presuppose the God of Christianity then why not go all the way and presuppose that God’s law as found in special revelation? Why presuppose instead man’s epistemological ability to start from his fallen self and by the use of his right (right by what standard?) reason properly cogitate about the nature of reality?

Save yourself of presupposing yourself as your own God and flee Natural Law theory.