MacIntyre’s Rationalities of Traditions and the Question of Divine Foreknowledge

This paper uses Alasdair MacIntyre’s theory of the rationalities of traditions to examine the controversy over his 2022 lecture, “The Apparent Oddity of the Universe”. The paper has five parts. First, I consider what “rationalities” are and how they may conflict. Second, I compare modern rationality and its account of physical causality to the theory of causality produced by the classical rationality that informed Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Third, I examine differences in the question of divine foreknowledge and the attendant questions of theodicy in the light of the contending rationalities of classical and modern thought. Fourth, I return to MacIntyre’s comments in the 2022 lecture. Finally, I entertain MacIntyre’s invitation to question the necessity of the rationality that produced Thomas Aquinas’s teachings on this matter. The paper suggests that universities succeed when they can help students recognize and question how they study the world and realize that their pursuit of objective truth is sometimes hampered by unacknowledged habits born of inadequate traditions.