A Leap of Faith

A thought occurred to me on my way in to work this morning that I think will explain what I have come to understand about Natural Law.

Natural Law is a property of a volitionally conscious being and, just like the other laws of nature, these laws do not change over time (I'm ignoring the fact that there is some indication that those laws did change in the first few millionths of a second after the big bang. As far as we have been able to determine, those laws have remained constant for the 15 billion or so years since). The law of gravity is, I think, a very good analogy.

Gravity had been around for a LONG time before Galileo (and others) realized it was some sort of predictable, natural phenomenon and began working to understand it. Decades passed and others took up his work. Then Newton came along and provided a quantum leap in human understanding of gravity. Hundreds of years came and went with no marked improvement upon Newton’s laws, and then Einstein came along and provided another giant leap forward. None of these men created gravity they have each simply come to provide a better understanding of it and how it works. Gravity does not evolve, we just find better and more complete mathematical “laws” to explain how it works.

The natural law of a volitionally conscious species does not change over time any more than gravity. We may gain a greater understanding of it, but we can't create it or destroy it. Just as with gravity, we can choose to ignore it and we can use other laws to attempt to circumvent it. For example, using the principles of lift, we can build an airplane to temporarily defy gravity - but the law is still there and it constantly ‘acts’ to prevent being ignored or circumvented. Eventually, that plane will come down.

We can conceive of a situation where one person (or a group of people) convinces another that he, in fact, can defy gravity. All he must do is believe it and jump from the cliff. Of course, we know the result - no matter how much you may believe you can defy gravity, you will plummet to the ground.

The same situation occurs with Natural Rights. We can be convinced they aren't there, we can be convinced to not exercise those rights, we can be forced with penalty of death or imprisonment or eternal damnation to ignore them, but the law never goes away. Eventually, the steps taken to defy natural law will lose the energy required to sustain the defiance.

To continue an analogy from my previous post, government – all forms of government – is effectively a giant black hole that sucks in everything around it. It consumes everything within its reach and the more it consumes the more powerful it becomes. The analogy continues here for, just as the laws of the universe break down in a black hole, the Natural Law of Man breaks down in government. Our government was originally so structurally sound that it built a country so strong it has taken well over two hundred years for the black hole destruction of government to destroy it, but even as brilliant as the Founders were, they could not design a government that does not exert this influence.

(I believe this ‘black hole’ theory of government is a corollary of Natural Law. This effect of government is what happens when a person or group of people become artificially isolated from the effects of Natural Law by the shield of a government. In short, that person or group of people are left free to act as they wish without fear of consequence. This cannot be avoided, even in a republic or a democracy for, even if the people change, the offices remain the same and are never subject to the consequences of the actions of the office holder.)

Just as the “punishment” of pain increases as the leap of faith in an attempt to defy gravity gets higher, the more convinced a society becomes that it can ignore Natural Law, the more painful the consequences. The Communists, through coercion, intimidation, and propaganda, convinced large numbers of people that they could fly and about 100 million died as a result. The Nazis – the democratically elected Nazis, I might add – convinced large numbers of people that they could fly (those they couldn’t convince received treatment similar to that used by the Communists) with the result being that about 20 million people died.

As I sit here this morning writing these words, forty miles to my southwest a small group of people are working very hard to defy that law, to convince us that we can fly. We have, almost from the beginning been marching up an enourmous cliff. We have climbed higher than any civilization in history. No one has ever taken a leap of faith from this height. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending upon your perspective) we are all in this together. If we jump, we jump as one – the government will make sure of it. The people and the government may offer me no choice but to jump off the cliff, but I will never, ever, believe I can fly. And, I packed a parachute.