“To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.” – Isaac Newton

We discover what the civil law should be via reason. Look for what makes for a peaceful society. Things like “don’t steal”. This is not different from what scientists do. Physicists have discovered the laws F=ma and e=mc2. These are also God’s laws written into the fabric of the universe. Many have found God by looking at Nature. How the planets dance to the music of the spheres. How light is split into a rainbow or glory.

It starts with logic and mathematics.  Some things are merely abstract symbols, but they grow and resolve and form patterns like a Bach fugue or an Escher drawing.  They ask “is there any conceivable universe where 2+2 can equal 5?”.  Or is the shortest distance always a line, or do all triangles internally add up to 180 degrees?  Sometimes it depends on an assumption we cannot prove, only define or assume. Some worlds are complex and wondrous, others are simple and elegant, all are from reason.  But all are imperfect. Kurt Gödel showed that any such system we can construct will be incomplete or have contradictions – and he did it using the very mathematical proof technique as everything else in mathematics is discovered.  So we may never know if there are an infinite number of prime pairs (11,13; 17,19) or an odd perfect number.  But we can keep looking to find them or find a way to prove their nonexistence.  They are searching the mind of God in the purest sense for the foundational laws – laws which even precede the real world.  And rules for reason itself and where reason can take them.  You can hear it in Bach more directly, but there is something astonishingly beautiful in an elegant mathematical proof though it is pure abstract thought.

(Note: if your browser can’t handle the Bach media link, James Kibbie has recorded all of Bach’s organ works, for free but copy righted so I won’t deeplink the audio but here here is the page for the work, but you can and probably should browse the entire collection).

The hard sciences like physics and chemistry often come up with surprises like the uncertainty principle, but even the surprises can be reduced to equations and those can be verified by experiment and demonstrated.  All this is still reason, but discovering what God has in mind when electrons follow some path, become waves to tunnel through barriers, or go around the nucleus in an atom.  There is wonder at the universe and everything in it from the veil beyond the uncertainty principle at Planck’s constant up to the large, powerful, and remote quasars.

Our green earth provides even more discoveries – the simplest archebacterium is a feat of nanotechnology that the semiconductor makers can envy.  Chloroplasts still are the most efficient solar energy conversion devices – and they are still finding out how it works, channeling an excited magnesium atom, through chlorophyll, to antenna proteins, to splitting apart a water molecule.  And as you move up the scale it gets more surprising.  What appear to be simple worms are complex machines where the parts are functioning in harmony and many things have to work to keep it alive.  By the time you get to mammals it is clear that for what we do understand we still don’t understand orders of magnitude more.

It is a cosmos – as it has laws governing it and you can see the order.  The opposite of cosmos is chaos.  There isn’t any.  For all the destructiveness of the flood, each molecule of water is following its ordained path, the surface tension is kept, the turbulent or laminar flows are acting according to their laws as we have reduced to equations.

When we come to human beings, we have all the things preceding, yet we have something more or less than a cosmos.  Man has will.  His body will act like an animal’s, and even parts of his brain will work automatically.  But there is a will and intellect.  There are shadows of reason in animals, but only man has the full power. Animals have some “will”, but without reason, it can only be or serve instinct. The will decides on the ends, and reason will give the means, corresponding to justice and law.

Men find their own law – they govern themselves as individuals first.  They cannot break biology, chemistry, or physics, only try to understand and apply those laws. Natural law is the same.

When men create a community, then there is the possibility that such governance will start to contradict.  I’m not even talking of the fall here – where there is something pulling us to violate our own laws and enthrone chaos for some pleasure.  That is where we have to seek and find out which laws are truly right and which only seem right.  I won’t go into detail as C. S. Lewis in the short Abolition of Man details what he calls the Tao – what every society, from aborigines to Confucians, to Christians all accept.  Don’t lie, steal, or murder to begin with.  These weren’t sent down by angels or a heavenly finger onto a sacred stone, these are written in man’s soul and in the universe and discovered, first as mathematics, a set of abstract rules, then as physics – what seems to work, then as an ecosystem to create a small economy.  At some point God did clarify things by writing them in stone because of the fall, since they are easy to forget or close our eyes to.  But they are laws in the same sense as those science discover.  Culling predators might not show something immediately, but the prey overpopulates with disease and starvation later.  Similarly violating the natural law, or even getting it wrong will not result in a bolt from the blue.  That would be too easy.  It results in disorder, unhappiness, quick pleasure but long and deep despair.  And society falls apart.