First gene-edited babies claimed in China

Not necessarily, if natural law somehow emanates out of God’s natural goodness. God is the ultimate standard of all goodness, the most perfect Being. Natural law is merely a reflection of that necessary nature.

(Your objection is a variant of the first horn of the Euthyphro Dilemma.)

If this is what you meant by

Then I agree. Note that most Catholics I know reject the first horn of Euthyphro.

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OK, if you agree that moral commands in Scripture are based on natural law as a reflection of God’s moral goodness, then I assume that you are withdrawing your earlier statement:

?

First of, my point is that there are many views in Catholicism. Whether I believe in Natural Laws underlying all of morality or not does not change that statement.

Now,

What I agree with is: that Natural Law is a reflection of God’s moral goodness. If this moral goodness of God is the one that underlies the moral tenets in scripture then I would withdraw that statement.

However, this is not how Natural Law is usually understood. Typically Natural Law is understood as the axiomatic statement that it is possible to discern moral truths from observations of nature, i.e. not revelations such as scriptures.

Edit:
Actually, I am not even sure about this: “If this moral goodness of God is the one that underlies the moral tenets in scripture then I would withdraw that statement.” There might be moral statements that stems from the goodness of God that is not Natural Law.

@dga471, actually this is what I got from Wikipedia’s page on Natural Law. My understanding of Natural Law is poor, so I have to resort to people who know better:

St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica I-II qq. 90–106, restored Natural Law to its independent state, asserting natural law as the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law.[42] Yet, since human reason could not fully comprehend the Eternal law, it needed to be supplemented by revealed Divine law.

So I suppose I was mistaken. Those Thomist-heads in the Dominican Order probably do not think that all morality (including those revealed in scripture) stem from Natural Laws.

I understand, but I am merely using your own views as a test case, since you seem to have very different views compared to the Dominicans I talked to. If even you believe in some sort of natural law, that seems to indicate widespread acceptance of that concept in Catholicism.

(It is also not just Dominicans. The statement about preserving the integrity of the natural body came from a devout Catholic layperson who had no connection to Dominicans, as far as I knew.)

Yeah, thanks to this discussion I was also motivated to read a little bit more about NL and found that there is a differentiation between NL as discovered in nature and moral commands in Scripture.

That being said, it would be interesting to learn about what exactly is the Catholic and/or Thomistic view on how NL as discovered in nature relates to moral commands in Scripture. Of course, I assume they cannot contradict each other. But is one ultimately reducible to the other? The Wiki quote here seems to imply that Scripture is a heuristic supplement to NL - a sort of remedial to the limitations of human reasoning, or sort of “cheat code” to natural law.

Haha I was just poking fun at Dominicans. Of course this view is not confined to them.

I don’t think so, this is from Wikipedia’s entry for Thomas Aquinas:

Natural law is an instance or instantiation of eternal law. Because natural law is what human beings determine according to their own nature (as rational beings), disobeying reason is disobeying natural law and eternal law. Thus eternal law is logically prior to reception of either “natural law” (that determined by reason) or “divine law” (that found in the Old and New Testaments). In other words, God’s will extends to both reason and revelation.

It seems that Thomas believes that there is a parent law called the Eternal Law, which is essentially “What God Wants”. This is then split into Natural Law (part of the Eternal Law that can be discerned through physical processes, e.g. human reasoning on the natural world), and Divine Law (part of the Eternal Law that God just tells you).

There could be overlaps, in which they cannot contradict each other. However, prima facie I don’t think it is necessary that these two subsets of Eternal Law are the same. (Edit: or that perhaps one is wholly contained in the other)

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I mean professional ethicists play active roles in supervising research. Not just research scientists wearing another hat, but academic ethicists. If anything, Christians may be over-represented. :wink:

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An official statement by the Director of NIH:

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