{"id":314,"date":"2006-01-31T17:16:47","date_gmt":"2006-02-01T01:16:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=298"},"modified":"2006-01-31T17:16:47","modified_gmt":"2006-02-01T01:16:47","slug":"genes-and-natural-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2006\/01\/31\/genes-and-natural-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Genes and Natural Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a good little discussion brewing at Dawn Treader<\/a> about applied ethics and Natural Law. One of the commenters feels that the Judeo-Christian approach to ethics — which he describes as “‘Because God Says So'” — is unsatisfying. This reflects, I think, a common misconception about how Christians derive ethical beliefs. Here’s how I continued the conversation.
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\nWell, I would agree that “because God says so” would be unsatisfying. However, that’s not the Judeo-Christian answer. It’s a poor charicature of the Judeo-Christian answer that someone like Richard Dawkins might draw.<\/p>\n

The Judeo-Christian answer ultimately is ontological: “because that’s who God is.” God doesn’t “say so” arbitrarily. He is, and what He says regarding the moral law — as well as what we intuitively know about it — ultimately flows from His nature and character. Goodness, justice, love, beauty, and truth are present perfectly in God’s nature and character. They are present also in His creation, and are known at least dimly in every person’s deepest being, because all of creation must reflect God’s nature and character.<\/p>\n

When God speaks the moral law into propositions, particularly in scripture, He does so consistent with His eternally preexisting character and nature, and therefore also consistent with the Natural Law that was present from the beginning of creation. Scripture doesn’t create the moral rules; it simply makes some of the moral rules more clear to us.<\/p>\n

As to the naturalistic narrative of ethical development, I don’t think it’s satisfying because it doesn’t answer any of the hard questions we’re asking. In particular, though it might tell us “How” we’ve come to feel certain things are right or wrong, it doesn’t tell us “Why” we should or shouldn’t act on those feelings. It isn’t in any way normative, and therefore can’t support any system of law, norms, or culture. (For a more detailed and erudite discussion of this, I’d direct you to Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life<\/a>, by Oxford theologian and molecular biologist Alister McGrath. Incidentally, McGrath believes, as I do at least to a certain extent, that God used an evolutionary process that can be described in naturalistic terms to imprint on our brains and emotions certain aspects of the moral law.)<\/p>\n

In my view, then, when properly understood, the Judeo-Christian concept of Natural Law provides rich ground for a deep and robust ethic based in the ontological reality of God. I don’t see that the secular alternatives, which principally are variants of utilitarianism, offer anything comparable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a good little discussion brewing at Dawn Treader about applied ethics and Natural Law. One of the commenters feels that the Judeo-Christian approach to ethics — which he describes as “‘Because God Says So’” — is unsatisfying. This reflects, I think, a common misconception about how Christians derive ethical beliefs. Here’s how I continued […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-54","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}