The title of my talk is Law Without a Lawgiver, Why Natural Rights Require a Divine Source.

So what we're going to be doing this afternoon, I think I'll talk for maybe about 40 minutes or so,

then open up the floor for questions, and I'm sure many of you are going to have questions.

What I want to do is raise the question if, in fact, we believe, or it seems as though we seem to believe that there's such a thing as natural rights or natural law, does that reality, if in fact we do believe it, imply that God is the source of those rights.

Some of you may be familiar with the book

by C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.

It's one of the most biggest best-selling books

of the last 50, 60 years.

The first five chapters of mere Christianity offers, I think, one of the most

clear and succinct defenses of this particular position. I'm not going to try to repeat or

try to emulate in any way what Lewis had done. Lewis is very good at defending the argument in the way in which he has defended it.

What I want to do is focus more on sort of the nature of morality or the natural law.

So to begin, let's begin with the question, what is a natural right?

So when somebody talks about natural

rights what exactly do they mean well a right is is when somebody says that

there's a natural right they're saying that they're have it by nature so for

example when individuals or groups want to, let's say, change a particular law because they think that the current law or the current regime is unjust in some way,

they don't appeal to some positive law or some other statute to justify it.

They appeal to something deeper and more profound, the principles of justice.

You see this in the way in which we think about our fundamental rights that are written in documents

like the Constitution. So when I teach it at Baylor, I was on the issue of religion

and law, I will often ask my students at the beginning of the semester, if you were writing

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