Order or Chaos?
Does human nature carry with it a moral structure and a specific end or purpose that remain constant over time and to which we must conform ourselves in order to flourish?
Yes.
Or are we simply the stuff of which we are made and beyond that be free to be or do whatever we so choose?
No.
Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution, by Carl R. Trueman
I have been thinking lately about the book of Genesis, specifically the first three or four chapters. Not as science or as history, but as anthropology and as foundational for natural law.
Genesis 1: 1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Did God create a universe of order, or disorder? We see the answer in all of creation, from the movement of the stars and planets to the sufficiency of all things necessary to sustain life on earth to the most minute processes in the human body.
We see the answer in the last verse of chapter 1:
And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.
Good: morally excellent; virtuous; righteous; pious: satisfactory in quality, quantity, or degree: of high quality; excellent. As opposed to bad: not good in any manner or degree. having a wicked or evil character; morally reprehensible: of poor or inferior quality; defective; deficient.
We see that creation is ordered, and God calls this order “good.” Had creation been chaotic, well, first of all there would be no creation to speak of, but I suspect God would have called it “bad.” This being not possible, of course….
Order was created. In this, we find the roots of natural law. If order is created, that order can be discovered – it must be discovered, it cannot be invented. Just as we can discover the order of the universe, we can discover the order of and between men. To the extent we conform to that order, we will be right with creation.
Earlier in chapter 1 we have the following:
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
Here we see another key component of natural law: all men and all women are made
Article from LewRockwell
