Third, does Aquinas adequately describe the nature of human beings as rational? This exposes two problems: anthropology has radically altered our understanding of the nature of human beings; and the notion of reason itself has undergone massive debate in the seven centuries since Aquinas. Thielicke writes:
...Natural Law in any given instance depends on the view of man which underlies it. But this view of man is something which is quite inconstant...hence there can never be such a thing as Natural Law which is of unchanging and universal validity.
Could human nature ever be known in the detail required to construct a Natural Law? Natural lawyers tend merely to insist that human nature is rational nature. The notion of reason itself, which is so crucial to Natural Law, has also been subject to much debate. Post-enlightenment rationality (and in particular practical reasoning) is of a different genus to that of Aquinas. While making this point, Crysdale almost ludicrously tries to adapt modern statistical reasoning to a Natural Law outlook.
4 comments:
I asked earlier – if observed data serves to confirm theories of plurality and post-modern variety, then just what data would possibly “adequately describe” or serve as relevant to “the nature of human beings as rational”?
Lest the faux saving grace of Reformed assertions enter to save the day, consider the empirical data. See e.g., Miner, M. H. and McKnight, J. (1999). “Religious Attributions: Situational Factors and Effects on Coping.,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 38(2), 274-287), showing that actively confessing Calvinists (the group you’d expect could do exactly this) and who say that God controls natural events (empirical data) cannot as a population consistently identify specific instances of God at work in the data-events of the natural world all around them, i.e. attribution fails despite theological and creedal insistence otherwise.
It would be a throw-away cheap shot against non-natural law theorists (say Barthians, or natural law agnostics, legal positivists, contract theorists, or ethologists) to take such evidence as justifying the wild assertion that – no one (forget Aquinas) has “adequately describe[d] the nature of human beings as rational” – because the better possibility is that revealed doctrinal and dogmatic theological assertions get dumbed down (more likely dumbed up to rational standards) by the same Calvinists in the study above – so that these Calvinists live their real and everyday lives in some form of natural reasoning and in some natural law reasoning frame of mind – and despite their theology – and by discounting their theology.
A sensibility that Thomas seems to incorporate.
I’m no natural law apologist. But I’d say to Thielicke’s ignorance and hubris (“there can never be such a thing as Natural Law which is of unchanging and universal validity”) that Thielicke can enter any one of the countries where infanticide is universally criminalized and is universally biologically/statistically (say per Crysdale?) at homogeneously scientifically low rates – that Thielicke can enter one of these countries and falsify the universality of such a human rationality by trying to kill a baby, and see what happens to his theory about non-universalizable theory.
But then again, if Thielicke says it, it must be true ipse dixit.
And if Crysdale is ludicrous for thinking to use statistical observations about human rationality, then it must be ludicrous. Ipse dixit. That settles it. No data admissible. And statistical maths as a universalizable language of human rationality? Impossible to admit such a ludicrous praxis. Not even as a fact/datum of a universal human rationality and praxis.
Though I suspect Thomas was rather Bayesian in deriving rather than mirabile dictu theorizing human rationality.
Fragile reason doesn’t mean non-existent.
Cheers,
Jim
Jim -
1) I have to say those studies of Calvinists misunderstood Calvinism, or at least Calvin...
and
2) don't forget, Thielicke is .writing... when? ... in the aftermath of Nazism, when outrage was piled upon outrage in the name of a kind of natural reasoning. So you might cut him a little slack, or at least, reckon with his first hand experience of horror
Michael, thanks for your good natured reply. And tolerance despite my hard hits.
I’m partially using your blog – perhaps not altogether fairly – to work out some unresolved issues on the relative (not absolute) values to plug into the variables of natural vis revealed.
I’m more conservative theologically than it may appear. I’d easily go beyond both Barth and Calvin in positing revelation as the active word of God – charismatically. And that, daily.
Though none of this should bias scholarship.
The problem – as here – is that Nazis are marshaled as prime exhibit “A” as a limit to plurality and multi-valence. I think more highly of Helmut than my sarcasm shows (having read a few of his books under Rendtorff). So, yes, I’ll cut him the reasonable slack of owing one reasonable German showing hyperbole against another unreasonable German (“Between God and Satan,” qua Thielicke’s “resistance to ideological tyranny”). Though Hannah Arendt reasonably did a much better job reasoning against tyranny from a natural reasoning perspective.
The problem with Thielicke’s hyperbole against universalizing any form of human rationality is that it’s really just another form of tyranny, that is, it’s ipse dixit if his statement is taken as authority so as not even to look at facts. Nor to look for empirical evidence of human rationality. And such evidence includes looking at the fact that resistance to Nazi Germany was – reasonable. Unless are we to take Nazis as evidence of irrationality. And take the facts of resistance to Nazi’s as equally irrational. But really, the approach of taking Thielicke’s word against human rationality under the rationale of cutting him slack really begs the question of just what counts as evidence of a universal human rationality, and what standards of evidence owe for any empirical or theoretical theology of a universal human rationality. Far more than just politics have changed since Helmut’s time.
Though some things haven’t changed. Curious that Aussies (I think) remain under the same common law heritage as Yanks in applying the British common law inheritance of the “reasonable person” standard to determine practical matters of personal injury and reasonable duties of care owed socially. When it gets down to everyday reasonability, we trust ordinary reasonable jurors to know what duties of reasonable care such a “reasonable person” owes.
To wit – reasonable judges in English-speaking lands don’t issue jury instructions to reasonable jurors about the “reasonable person” duty of care by quoting Helmut Thielicke to the contrary against human rationality. And for good – reason.
Though science itself is far better evidence (evidence: not proof) than common law is (which isn’t bad) of trans-national and universal rationality.
And I haven’t read any new biological science showing how Australian aboriginals (someone here asked how aboriginals might express or might exhibit natural theology), that is, I know of no aboriginal studies showing that aboriginals pose any exceptions to the universal biological laws of assortative mating, nor exceptions to the established metrics showing the universally observable behaviors of kin-selected reciprocal altruism – inherent or innate expressions of universal human care. Reasonable, within limits.
As to whether the researchers misunderstood Calvin, I don’t think so; but, that’s another matter for another time.
Again, thanks for your good natured reply. And fair challenges.
Peace,
Jim
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