"Law doesn't come from governments or votes. It comes from God."
If that is what you believe, natural law is not your opponent. In many ways, it is your oldest ally.
Natural law doesn't ask anyone to give up their faith. It makes no claim about whether God exists or what God is like. It makes a narrower claim: that there is a moral order built into reality, which human reason can discover. People of every faith, and of none, can stand on that ground together. This page is about where they meet.
The great traditions already said this
The idea that the moral law is written into creation, and can be known by reason, is not a modern invention set against religion. It runs through the heart of the religious tradition of law.
The apostle Paul wrote of people who had never received the law of Moses, yet lived by it anyway, because it was already within them (Romans 2:14–15, KJV):
"For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness."
Written in their hearts. Not handed down by a king, not passed by a council. Present in every person, available to every conscience.
Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the most influential thinker in the history of Christian law, built his whole account of law on this idea. He described an eternal law, the rational order by which God governs all things, and he wrote (Summa Theologiae, I–II, Q. 91, Art. 2):
"This participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is called the natural law."
In other words: for the believer, natural law is how the divine order shows itself to human reason. Whatever its ultimate source, it is discovered by reason, the same way for everyone. That is exactly what this site claims.
Is it good because God commands it?
There's an ancient question, first posed by Plato more than two thousand years ago, that every believer eventually has to face. Put in modern terms:
Is something good because God commands it? Or does God command it because it is good?
Suppose the first. Then goodness is nothing but command. If God commanded cruelty, cruelty would become good. Morality becomes arbitrary will, the very same problem we found with kings and legislatures, only on a cosmic scale. Few believers accept this. They don't worship God for being powerful. They worship God for being good.
Suppose the second. Then goodness has a nature of its own, which God, being good, perfectly expresses. And if goodness has a real nature, it can be understood. It can be reasoned about. It is objective.
That second answer is natural law. If God commands what is good because it is good, then the goodness is there to be discovered, by anyone, and the law that follows from it is the same for everyone.
Who speaks for God?
The real trouble with "law comes from God" is almost never God. It's the people who claim to speak for God.
When a government says its authority comes from God, it is making a claim about itself: that it, out of all human institutions, has been appointed to announce God's will and enforce it. Kings ruled for centuries on exactly this claim, the "divine right of kings." Theocracies make it today.
So we return to the same question we ask of every lawmaker: where does that authority come from? Who appointed this king, this council, or this cleric to be God's legislator? Their own scripture? Many traditions have scriptures, and they disagree. Their own word? Then their authority rests on nothing but their own word. History shows what happens next: wars between kingdoms each certain that God was on its side, persecution of anyone who prayed differently, cruelty carried out in God's name.
And notice that a believer is in the best position of anyone to reject this. If the law truly comes from God, then no human government has the authority to change it, edit it, add to it, or pass a statute contradicting it. Natural law holds every ruler to the same standard. So, in your own terms, does God.
A law for everyone must be open to everyone
A law that binds all people has to be knowable by all people. If the only route to it ran through one book, one church, or one priesthood, then billions of people would be bound by a law they could never reach, and they would depend completely on whoever claimed to interpret it for them. That is a recipe for exactly the kind of human domination this whole site argues against.
Natural law runs through no gatekeeper. It is written, as Paul put it, in the heart: open to the conscience and reason of every human being, believer and unbeliever alike. That isn't a rival to faith. For many people of faith, it's the most direct evidence of it.
So if you believe law comes from God, we have no quarrel with you. We would only ask that you hold every human government to that same standard: none of them made the law, and none of them can unmake it.
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Other objections: This is crazy, silly, woo-woo! · What gives you the authority? · Laws come from nations and governments · Laws come from the consensus of the People