Query:

An author I’m reading asks “Can reason get us to divine truth?”  He answers “No,” saying the god of natural law is not the true God.  Quoting from the Lutheran theologian Karl Barth, he says the god of natural law is an idol, which cuts us off from the true God because the Redeemer is discoverable only through revelation.  He argues that “whatever is found by human reason is merely a human invention.”  What do you say to this?

 

Reply:

For all I know, your author might be a clever fellow, but concerning natural law, I’m afraid that he doesn’t know what he is talking about.  His argument rests on a fallacy of equivocation, for the question “Can reason get us to divine truth?” can be taken in either of two ways, and they don’t have the same answer.  Unfortunately, he mixes them up.

If the question is taken to mean “Can reason, by itself, tell us anything about God?” then the answer is “Obviously, yes,” and despite his claim to be relying on revelation instead of human reason, this is the biblical answer too.  St. Paul knew well that arrogance about the products of our intellects leads to pride and error, but he never told us not to use our intellects.  When he criticized the pagans, his criticism wasn’t that they couldn’t know anything about God, but that they suppressed what they knew: “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.   Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.”  He also believed that one of the things even a pagan can know through reason is the basics of moral law, for he says a little later, “They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them.”

But if the question is taken to mean “Can reason, by itself, tell us what we need to know about God in order to be redeemed, in order to be forgiven of our sins and reconciled to Him?” then the answer is “Obviously, no.”  Reason is a great gift, but it doesn’t tell us everything we need to know, and natural law thinkers don’t claim that it does.  We need God’s revelation – and He has given it to us.  We need Him to come among us – and in Jesus Christ, He was made man.  We need Him to do something about our debt of sin and guilt – and He has paid the price by dying in our place on the Cross.

I must also protest that the expression “the god of natural law” is profoundly misleading.  Natural law gives us an incomplete picture of the same God that revelation portrays more adequately.  They are not different gods.

But wait!  If revelation portrays Him more adequately than natural law does, then why not just study revelation and do without natural law?  We can’t, for two reasons.

The first reason is that revelation itself speaks of natural law as real, for example in the quotation from St. Paul which I gave above.  If natural law were useless, then why would God give it to us, and why would He point out that He had done so?

The second reason is that revelation presupposes the knowledge of natural law.  For if we didn’t already have its precepts written on our hearts, then the additional instruction God gives us in words wouldn’t make sense to us.  For example, in the prologue to the Ten Commandments, God gets the attention of the Hebrew people by reminding them of what He did for them: “"I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”  But had He ever commanded in words, “Thou shalt have gratitude for good things done for you”?  No.  Then how did they know that they had incurred the debt of gratitude?  Because He had written the law of gratitude on their hearts.  It is a precept of natural law.

Barth’s idea that if we know what reason tells us about God, then we will be hostile to the revealed truth about God, is also profoundly unbiblical.  If it were true, then why would our missionary model, St. Paul, have preached as he did in Athens?  The book of Acts depicts him as commending the Athenians for being religious, quoting their own pagan writers, and even calling attention to one of their altars, which was intriguingly inscribed “To an Unknown God.”  Then he said, in effect, “Let me tell you who He is.”

If Paul had followed Barth’s advice, he wouldn’t have done any such thing.  Obviously the pagans didn’t know enough – but they did know that there was something beyond the supposed gods of their mythology, and he offered to show it to them.  We see then that Paul alluded to what the Athenians already knew by reason just because it might open their minds to revelation.  In fact, Holy Scripture says that he did win some converts that day, including the woman Damaris and the man Dionysius, who later became bishop of Athens.

To finish off my reply, let me comment on your author’s remark that whatever is found by human reason is merely a human invention.  This prompts at least three questions.

The first:  If reason is so useless, then why does your author suppose God gave it to us?

The second:  If everything found by reason is merely a human invention, something not discovered but made up, then would he say that two plus two might just as well be called five?

And the third:  If reasoning is futile, then why is he trying so hard to reason us out of using it?