ABSTRACT
Some truths about God and his nature belong within the set of Christian doctrines known as the preambles of faith. While the preambles are included in what has been revealed, it is possible to come to know them independently of special revelation. There is no of cial list of preambles, though the existence and unity of God would surely appear on any such list. Writing to the church in Rome, the apostle Paul insists that God’s existence and power are evident in his creation (Rom. 1: 19-20; all scriptural quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version). The pre-eminent Catholic philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas nds Aristotle’s Cosmological Argument for a First Cause (Unmoved Mover) cogent and convincing. Since Aristotle had no access to sacred Scripture, Thomas concludes that God’s existence is knowable by the natural light of reason. What has been done is, of course, possible. Christian moral principles that are accessible to reason also belong among the preambles of faith. Faced with the impressive virtue theory elaborated in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Aquinas concludes that moral principles can be discovered by human minds. The only exceptions here might be speci c supererogatory precepts in the teaching of Jesus, such as the injunction to bless those who curse you. Aquinas’s
natural law theory of ethics draws heavily from Aristotle, but is also in uenced by Augustine, Stoicism, and Roman legal theory. An abridged form of natural law ethics animates modern British political philosophy by way of John Locke and others, in uencing the United States Constitution and the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Moral philosophers continuing the tradition of Thomistic ethics include Russell Hittinger (2003) and Ralph McInerny (1997). Germaine Grisez (1983; 1993; and 1997) proposes a ‘new natural law theory’ which bypasses the empirical foundations of Aristotle’s moral theory, appealing to an intuitive grasp of basic goods such as life, learning, and friendship. John Finnis (1991, 1998), Robert George (2001), and Joseph Boyle (in Lawler et al. 1998) further explicate and defend the new natural law theory, applying it to issues in moral and political philosophy.
