to what extent is Aquinas’s natural law meaningless w/o a belief in a creator God?

meaningless: aim/ purpose

- non believers will find it hard to use NL bcs the aim of moral acts is diff for christians and non chrisitans.

- purpose of human existence is diff if there is not a good and no life after death.

- Aquinas argued beatific vision is the only possible universal aim for the whole of humanity.

so if there is not creator God, then the purpose is completely distorted and the theory collapses as there is no motivation for morality.

- due to the differing purposes with/without a creator God, it cannot work.

- it is just a subjective moral theory.

meaningless: no obligation

- Hugo Grotius constructed a more secular interpretation of Natural Law as a body of rights.

- his interpretation showed that, w/o a God there is no sense of obligation in NL.

- is moral duties depend upon ppl freely adopting them, then ppl are equally free to reject them.

- w/o a God theres no reason why someone shld not reject them.

- if ppl rejected them then society wld collapse and so wld the theory

meaningless: reason

- for aquinas w/o God we do not have reason

- Aquinas did believe reason cld be used w/o the need to look at God's revelation or wait for some kind of divine miracle.

- but for aquinas reason was a gift from God that we wld not have access to unless God created it within us.

- NL revolves around the existence of God as our source and purpose.

meaningful: reason

- Coplestone said even Aquinas himself didnt think it was impossible to hv knowledge of the good w/o revelation from God.

- even if a philosopher didnt know abt the beatific vision, they are perfectly capable of seeing that some actions are more likely to lead to human perfection

- and other actions are incompatible with it.

- Aristotle didnt belive in a personal God and Aquinas didnt dismiss him as a pagan or wrong.

- he just argued Aristotles concerns were with imperfect, incomplete, temporal happiness.

meaningful: science

- Murray Rothbard pointed out enlightenment produced Newton's laws, which enhanced our understanding of the world as a set of interacting natural laws.

- just as science has explained the natural workd can be explained w/o refernece to God, there is no reason why human reason can be understood in the same way.

- morality can be explained with refernce to reason that follows from the nature of humanity w/o need to refer to God at all.

- Aquinas suggested God was unecessary to udnerstand primary precepts, we can take this one step further.

becomes meaningless when u add a creator God?

NL is the exercise of reason based upon an understanding of the nature of the world.

Alan Suggate points out to add a God to NL is to add a metaphysical concept.

- its v difficult to understand how rational ethical principles or the empirical world have any relationshio with a metaphysical being.