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[00:00.000 --> 00:04.720]  Hi, I'm Dave Champion. A few days ago I posted a video and a gentleman attempted to rebut
[00:04.720 --> 00:11.720]  some of the facts by resorting to the natural law. Now, I'm sure you've heard of natural
[00:11.720 --> 00:27.340]  law, we all have, but do you know what it actually really is?
[00:27.340 --> 00:30.900]  If you live in the United States of America, you have almost certainly heard of this thing
[00:30.900 --> 00:38.540]  called natural law, and it's probably just as certain that you have no idea what it is.
[00:38.540 --> 00:44.680]  Let me describe what it is today, and then we'll take a quick historical retrospective
[00:44.680 --> 00:51.880]  and see how this all plays out. What natural law is here in America in 2019, is it something
[00:52.480 --> 01:00.820]  primarily Christian Americans resort to when logic and reason and the real law, the kind
[01:00.820 --> 01:05.560]  you can actually go look up in the law library, don't comport itself with what those Christian
[01:05.560 --> 01:17.160]  Americans want. So when they can't get past that, they say, but the natural law. So the
[01:17.160 --> 01:25.080]  question is, where is this natural law? Any other law, you can go somewhere and pull it
[01:25.080 --> 01:31.640]  out in section one, section two, section three, section four, and you can read it. No such
[01:31.640 --> 01:37.640]  thing with the natural law. So let's take a quick stroll down history lane about natural
[01:37.640 --> 01:42.120]  law. One of the first people we have records of discussing this thing called natural law
[01:42.200 --> 01:49.000]  was Aristotle. And when Aristotle talked about the natural law, it was based on reason,
[01:50.920 --> 01:57.320]  reasoning. So you would look at a number of factors, and you would put them together in
[01:57.320 --> 02:02.920]  some sort of order, and this would be a reasonable line of thought. That was how Aristotle referred
[02:02.920 --> 02:05.880]  to the natural law. And of course, there'd be conclusions to that reasonable thought, right?
[02:06.520 --> 02:11.800]  And a lot of that was taken from, they didn't live in the time of science, right? So a lot of
[02:11.800 --> 02:18.280]  that was taken from what they observed in nature, hence the word natural law. But it was based on
[02:19.240 --> 02:24.680]  Aristotle's concepts of reasoning. That's a very important concept to keep in mind as we move
[02:24.680 --> 02:29.720]  forward, right? Based on reasoning. Now, we could go step by step through history, but this would
[02:29.720 --> 02:33.240]  be a very long video. So I'm just going to jump ahead to the 13th century, and we're going to
[02:33.240 --> 02:40.040]  talk about Thomas Aquinas. He was one of the first big name people who was Christian to start talking
[02:40.040 --> 02:45.800]  about the natural law. Here's where the concept started to get into trouble, because you've got
[02:45.800 --> 02:51.400]  Aristotle talking about reason, and then you've got Thomas Aquinas, who was talking about it in
[02:51.400 --> 02:57.960]  the religious sense. Now, religion is, of course, faith, right? It's, you know, belief in things
[02:57.960 --> 03:03.480]  unseen, or as I like to phrase it, belief without any evidence, because if there was evidence, you'd
[03:03.480 --> 03:10.360]  see it. Okay, so we've got this Aristotlean reasoning, and then you've got this evidence-less
[03:11.160 --> 03:17.160]  faith. And Thomas Aquinas tried to put them together, and that's a problem, because they're
[03:17.160 --> 03:23.000]  totally incompatible. Let's go ahead to the Enlightenment era, where the Enlightenment
[03:23.000 --> 03:29.880]  thinkers used the concept of natural law to disempower the notion of the right of kings,
[03:29.960 --> 03:35.640]  right? Which is kind of weird, because kings claimed their right of kings was from God.
[03:36.600 --> 03:42.360]  Yet the natural law, if you go back to Aquinas, has a lot to do with God, right? Most of the
[03:42.360 --> 03:47.240]  people who employ in modern times, they were from, I don't know, say the eighth century forward,
[03:47.240 --> 03:57.560]  who apply the phrase natural law, they claim it comes from the Abrahamic God, or some transcendent
[03:57.560 --> 04:04.120]  mythical sky daddy. Okay, so you've got the king saying, God gave me the right to be king,
[04:04.120 --> 04:07.800]  and then you've got the Enlightenment thinkers, some who are atheists, some who are agnostics,
[04:07.800 --> 04:15.880]  some who are Christian, saying the natural law says you can't be king. Okay, then even within
[04:15.880 --> 04:20.280]  the Enlightenment thinkers, it was not held to be the same thing, because John Locke is an example,
[04:20.280 --> 04:25.480]  used the natural law to hold up the rights of the individual above the state, and then Thomas Hobbes
[04:26.200 --> 04:30.200]  used it to try and support the power of the state over the individual, what he called the Leviathan.
[04:30.760 --> 04:37.800]  So this is why I say it means whatever you say it means, right? Unalienable rights. Most Americans
[04:37.800 --> 04:45.560]  believe in them, yes? And if you're a Christian, you believe they come from God, this deity somewhere.
[04:46.680 --> 04:53.400]  However, if you're not Christian, then you say they come from the fact that it's the way to live,
[04:53.400 --> 05:01.240]  and it's the fact that it's the way I'm gonna live, okay? The founding fathers told King George,
[05:01.880 --> 05:10.200]  look, we have these things called unalienable rights. That was their opinion. King George had
[05:10.200 --> 05:16.360]  a different opinion. He said, no, you don't. So the founding fathers decided to kill enough Englishmen
[05:17.240 --> 05:28.360]  within the colonies that their opinion prevailed. Now, culturally, in America,
[05:29.560 --> 05:37.320]  we are committed, at least by speech, to the idea of unalienable rights, right? So,
[05:37.320 --> 05:45.400]  but that doesn't make it real. Unalienable rights is an idea, right? And the founding fathers made
[05:45.400 --> 05:52.120]  their idea into reality by killing the British. They didn't make it into reality because lightning
[05:52.120 --> 05:57.880]  strikes came down from an invisible sky daddy. They made it into reality by killing enough
[05:57.960 --> 06:11.400]  Englishmen that their perceptions, their opinion, their viewpoint was the winner, okay? So now we
[06:11.400 --> 06:18.520]  jump forward to how natural law is used today. And it's pretty much used the same way the founding
[06:18.520 --> 06:24.920]  fathers used it, except I noticed that Americans, predominantly Christians, are the ones that
[06:25.560 --> 06:36.520]  go to this natural law. It goes to that whole God's law is above man's law thing, okay? So to them,
[06:37.240 --> 06:40.440]  whenever you hear them say natural law, essentially they mean the Bible.
[06:41.320 --> 06:48.120]  Whatever principles it is they take away from Christianity, and there's a wide separation of
[06:48.120 --> 06:52.360]  the principles that people take away from Christianity, right? Whatever principles they
[06:52.360 --> 07:02.120]  take away from Christianity is natural law, such religion. So when somebody says the natural law
[07:02.120 --> 07:09.160]  dictates this, what they're saying is my religious construct dictates this. Guess what that isn't?
[07:09.880 --> 07:17.400]  That isn't law, okay? Now, if you're a Christian, I'm not bashing you. If you believe that
[07:17.400 --> 07:26.440]  unalienable rights come from a deity, I'm not bashing you. I'm just pointing out that we need
[07:26.440 --> 07:36.120]  to recognize that this thing called natural law started out as a reasoning concept, what, 500 years?
[07:36.120 --> 07:44.280]  Was it 450, 500 years before the Bible? Clearly, it's not Christian based. But today in America,
[07:44.840 --> 07:49.560]  the overall, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say 97, 98 percent of the people who reference
[07:49.560 --> 07:54.280]  natural law are Christians. So what they're really saying is natural law is a euphemism for
[07:54.280 --> 08:11.800]  my religious beliefs. And that's cool, as long as we all understand what's taking place. Take care.