The Limits of Common Sense

[troubledgoodangel]

The truism says that common sense is the least common of the senses. It may be so as long as we operate within limits of reason, as Kant would tell us to do. We just resign ourselves to the constraints of this life, mind, and earth, and we refuse to hope and to look beyond. We say that, "there may be a God, but he is not a hands-on involved God." Darwin and Dewey thought like this, and so did the father of American Pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce. The idea was: since we cannot prove the existence of God empirically, we must take our destiny in our own hands and do the best we can. The best we can hope for, is to rely on our common sense. But the judgments of common sense are both good and bad. Using common sense, the Founding Fathers judged rightly that the American continent was indefensible against the guerrillas, and therefore that it could be snatched from the jaws of the British King. This was a mixture of common sense, cold mathematical calculation, and strategic insight. The Founding Fathers were better mathematicians and strategists than for instance Alfredo Gualtieri, the Argentinian President who exhibited a dismal lack of such common sense, when he made a similar "strategic" judgment about the Faulkland Islandas. But George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and even the Catholic Bishop, John Carroll, guided by the common sense idea that "fields needed to be tilled by someone for survival," thought that slavery "was a Divinely ordained necessity." I am not making a case against the use of common sense. But we must be careful not to make common sense into a god or an idol! There are times that pragmatic common sense will tell us, go for it, for it feels good. But not all that feels good is good, and not all that shines is gold. All pleasures feel good, and our senses would have them all. Whose common sense would counsel against love? Yet even love can easily degenerate into violence and death lest we use God as reference! Many are deceived by their common sense! This is why I firmly believe that the Holy Spirit is alone trustworthy Guide, able to counsel where human senses fail!