The knowledge that the genesis of our basic human rights rests on unchanging, eternal sources once formed an integral part of the Western legal tradition. The greatest jurists in English legal history all believed that law is not ultimately the product of human will, but of objective principles which are discoverable by reason and operate whether they are enforced or not by the State.^[1]

The English legal system originated from the view that God created eternal moral laws derived from our human nature. This view is associated to the biblical doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which accounts for the orderliness and predictability of nature and the fitness between our rational capacities and the natural world.[2]

On what grounds can the above assumptions be objected and undermined?

A full-throated materialistic account of the origins of life leaves little room for the notion of Divine purpose in nature. Accordingly, everything, including human reason, is no more than the ‘epiphenomenon which accompanies chemical or electrical events in a cortex which is itself the by-product of evolutionary process’.[3] This philosophical assumption denies the existence of minds in a metaphysical sense. It gives plausible justification to doubt the reliability of human reasoning.[4]

Charles Darwin himself raised his own doubts on the reliability of human reason based on the premises of this materialistic worldview. ‘With me the horrid doubt always arises’, confessed Darwin, ‘whether the convictions of man’s mind which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy’. [5]

Suffice to say that if one believes that humanity evolves through a blind process of genetic mutation (and natural selection), genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the human species.[6] The consequences are twofold: the denial of nature as a Divine creation (and revelation), and the undermining of confidence in moral-legal standards thought to be objectively applied. There is also no recognition of a transcendental moral order and, as such, no metaphysical basis for the legal protection of basic human rights. The “law” is automatically reduced to managerial skills used in the service of social engineering – the predominant view in the legal profession today.Generally speaking, morality is now often observed as entirely subjective – as a social construct that exists only to serve the interests of particularly groups.[7] Accordingly, argued the late Phillip E. Johnson, who was professor of law at the University of California-Berkeley, the main reason “evolution” has become the predominant presuppositional narrative of the ruling classes is because it bolsters a materialistic worldview which depicts human beings as morally autonomous individuals. According to Johnson,

The concept that the universe is the product of a rational mind provides a far better metaphysical basis for scientific rationality than the competing concept that everything in the universe (including our minds) is ultimately based in the mindless movements of matter. Perhaps materialism was a liberating philosophy when the need was to escape from dogmas of religion, but today materialism itself is the dogma from which the mind needs to escape. A rule that materialism should be professed regardless of the evidence … is the equivalent of a rule that science may not contradict the teachings of a church.[8]

For over a thousand years, Christianity shaped England and the law of the land honoured this nation’s rich religious heritage. However, as the ruling classes began to disbelieve in Christianity, and to believe that humans evolve solely by means of a random process of adaptation and biological change, they also assumed that the codes of moral-legal behaviour should undergo a similar process of “evolution”. One also might say that if no appeal to objective truth can be made, then law becomes entirely subjective. As a result, traditional Christian legal principles are now missing the tacit social approval once required to keep them alive.

Christianity in England is facing an existential threat and a deadly attack not just from secularists and militant Islam, but even from the established church. After the 1960s, bishops of the Church of England, especially the ‘South Bank’ group headed by Dr John Robinson of Woolwich,[9] began to publicly admit that ‘they were not sure about the existence of God or the truth of their religion’s central beliefs’.[10] Bishop Robinson was particularly notorious for comparing sexual intercourse to the act of taking Holy Communion. And it would take a few more years for another bishop, Dr David Jenkins of Durham, to speak derisively of Christ’s Resurrection as ‘conjuring tricks with bones’.[11] According to English political commentator Peter Hitchens,

The idea that one had to believe to be a parson or even a bishop was by then all but dead, and there was a group of Anglican clergy, known perhaps humorously as Sea of Faith, who appeared to all intents and purposes to be atheists.[12]The situation reached its tipping point in August 2002, when the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams (below), decided to use the robes of a Chief Druid, taking the Druidic name of ap Aneurin in homage to Leftist politician Aneurin Bevan (who described Conservative voters as “lower than vermin”). There you had the primary religious authority of the established Church in England openly celebrating an ancient religion whose traditional rituals are centred on human sacrifice, and especially child sacrifice.

A survey of 2,000 Church of England clergy conducted more than 20 years ago found that at least a quarter of them do not believe in the virgin birth of Christ. The survey also discovered that amongst the most unbiblical Anglican clergy are the female priests, from which the present Archbishop of Canterbury is a representative. Apparently, only a tiny minority of these female priests believe in the Resurrection of Christ and Redemption through Christ’s suffering and death.[13]

In this awful environment, where the established church has ceased to have a meaningful correlation to biblical Christianity, the demise of traditional morality becomes almost inevitable.[14] 

Read it all in Quadrant