Craig Carter: The immutable truth of natural law

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, February 11th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. On January 20th the White House announced that President Trump had signed an executive order titled “Protecting Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” WORLD Opinions contributor Craig Carter says you cannot ignore the Creator’s design, and public backlash for ignoring that is a good sign.

CRAIG CARTER: We’ve been told that there are anywhere from 11 to more than 263 genders. We have been assured by so-called “experts” that gender is so fluid it cannot be pinned down. A person’s gender tomorrow may be different than it was yesterday.

But President Donald J. Trump begs to differ and he signed an executive order to prove it. The vast majority of Americans apparently agree with him.

We live in postmodern times when everything once thought solid is now liquid. Individual choice and personal autonomy are of supreme value. Consent is the only limit. Be who you really are. In these heady days of self-invention even our gender is up for grabs. The beckoning frontier is transhumanism and cyborgs. In the pursuit of immortality, we seek to merge with the machine and evolve.

If naturalistic evolution can turn chemicals into living cells why can’t mortal life become immortal? Compared to that idea, man becoming woman seems like a rather minor step…until you bump into natural law.

For most of the history of Western civilization philosophers and lawyers have believed and debated natural law as integral to a just legal system. Positive law must be based on natural law to have legitimacy. Natural law provides a basis for challenging positive laws deemed unjust. If you can prove a law contradicts the natural law, you have a case for challenging it.

For centuries our ancestors took natural law seriously because they saw nature as created with a purpose by a personal God. When you start from that premise, natural law seems to be an obvious implication. But what happens when you start from nature as the product of accidental evolution? What if the way things are is just random, rather than designed? What if we currently occupy a waystation on a long and winding road to immortal cyborgs?

Natural law has something to say at this moment. Perhaps it may surprise you to learn that I believe that we can know with absolute certainty that society inevitably will embrace natural law in general, and the fact of two sexes in particular. What makes me so sure?

Because it’s based on reality. Reality just is. It does not change because you will it to do so or because you took a vote on it. It just is. A society that twists it too far finds that it breaks and things collapse. Humans are flexible and adaptable, but not infinitely malleable. If we go too far with our fantasies, we crash into the rock of reality, and it hurts. A society that refuses to do business with reality will crash and burn. Many cultures throughout human history have already done so and more will do so in the future.

Human nature remains constant. Sinful human nature can be meliorated up to certain limits. But delusions of Utopia or the perfectibility of human nature inevitably turn out to be dystopian, destructive, or both.

For human beings, existing in two sexes is part of the permanent, unchanging truth about human nature. A society that pretends otherwise will eventually become so dysfunctional that it will fall apart and be replaced by one that recognizes biological and psychological reality. Just look around! That is why I can be so certain.

The only issue to be decided is whether our society will be wise enough to recognize its need to bow to reality before it is too late. Will we dash ourselves on the rocks and sink the ship of state or will we drop anchor in the sea of ancient wisdom in time? We shall see.

I’m Craig Carter.

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