God and Natural Law Theory

natural lawyers low-key have to be theists

Classical Natural Law Theory — the bane of Coca Cola’s existence — is committed to a robust realism about teleology.

spooky spooky teleology, woo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo!

Naturally, it’s tempting to think that this feature of the view makes it somehow dependent on theism. To quote Frank Turek’s Catholic brother, “You can’t have natural law, without a natural law-giver! Stop sleeping with your girlfriend!”

Of course, if natural law’s teleology is cashed out in terms of extrinsic, divinely imposed teleology — where God imposes functions on organisms the way humans impose functions on artifacts — then natural law, so construed, will logically depend on theism.

But there’s another path to take. Typically, natural lawyers say that organisms have their teleological properties intrinsically, meaning they couldn’t have been imposed extrinsically by God or by anything else. The natural lawyer might still think, when all is said and done, that God is responsible for creating those organisms. But natural law theory per se will be logically independent of theism, if teleology is intrinsically fixed.

Still, I think there’s something to the suspicion that natural law’s notion of teleology doesn’t make much sense on naturalism (where by naturalism I mean ‘atheism + nothing spooky, like laws of nature that bend the moral arc of the universe towards Justice’). But I think the connection isn’t logical so much as probabilistic.

Here is the basic worry.

Natural lawyers claim not only that there are intrinsic teloi, but that we — dwellers in the actual world — can know about them. Without this claim, natural lawyers would lose the most natural reason for believing in intrinsic teloi: namely, that we know some of them.¹