Natural law was once perceived as a body of objective moral truth infused into the world by the Creator. It held sway over all men and their rulers, requiring obedience of believer and unbeliever alike, and finding its Scriptural rationale in such passages as Romans 1:19-20 and 2:14-16. It is the law written on the heart of every human being that enables all of us to agree that such things as murder, rape, theft, and perjury are wrong. In principle, it was the goal of positive or written law to reflect accurately the spirit of the natural law. This view has changed in modern times. The emphasis has shifted from the idea of natural law to that of natural rights founded on the notion of our status as autonomous human beings. It is now up to the government to create obligatory laws, but only at the consent of the governed whose interest it is to have their autonomy preserved.

Therefore, it is no longer the government’s prerogative to create laws in concert with a preexisting natural law which all men must obey, but to create laws that protect autonomous individual freedom. As a result, the United States Constitution as positive law now stands above natural law. Natural law no longer dictates positive law, but instead is subordinate to it. Natural law serves only as a source of principles that guide us in interpreting positive law in terms of individual rights. Among these rights is the individual’s civil liberty to make his own moral choices free of governmental intrusion or coercion, save the restriction that one’s exercise of this right must not infringe upon another’s equal right to so choose.

Such a view of natural law leaves it quite malleable to changing times and circumstances. Since the notion of natural law no longer suggests the existence of a changeless body of objective moral truth, we are able to adjust natural law such that it remains in tune with man’s alleged “progress” in knowledge and understanding. Therefore, notions of “morality” become hopelessly relativistic, and the positive law becomes little more than an instrument by means of which litigants gain public affirmation for their personal lifestyles as autonomous individuals rather than an application of eternal and transcendent moral truths.

A practical outworking of this state of affairs occurs in education. In his book Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law, and Education, Phillip Johnson points out that it is currently the aim of the liberal state “to maximize personal freedom within a framework of economic equality, while maintaining a strict neutrality on differing conceptions of the good life and a firm agnosticism toward religious claims.” In keeping with this viewpoint, the goal of education is not to pass on a body of objective truths by which to live, but “to produce self-defining adults who choose their own values.”

Furthermore, it is imperative that this education be taken out of the hands of parents at no later than the child’s fifth birthday so that any “negative” influences (such as religious or cultural bias) may be effectively challenged before becoming ingrained. Therefore, when it comes to the claims of religion, morality, or culture, there is no central truth that stands above any other by which such claims can be measured. Each claim has an equal weight, and the objective of education is to enable students to make choices as autonomous individuals, not beings under authority.

Of course, the fly in the ointment is the unexamined belief that immature minds are capable of making mature and wise decisions. This project also implies that children must be rescued from those allegedly authoritarian “traditional” values of their parents that might include ideas of religious truth and objective morality. Interestingly, the project does not extend to the science classroom, where metaphysical naturalism, the unjustified belief that matter is all there is, reigns supremely, and no other thought options are either offered or tolerated.

According to Johnson, this suggests that, when it comes to matters that are of real importance to educators, they “understand very well that immature minds cannot be trusted to come to correct answers.” This, of course, is blatant hypocrisy, and the damage such hypocrisy has done to our educational system is largely self-evident, as the institutions critical to the survival of our culture, such as religion and family, continue to collapse.