Natural vs. Divine Law: Social Evolution Essay Example

always win. Jumping to a more civilized group of people, lets look at Moses and his followers.These are a people that had permanent cities, farm lands, and infrastructure set in place.

Strangers came in and out of town on a daily basis and although wars were still fought over land, there was no need to assume that any stranger coming into town was there for that reason. In this level of social evolution we see the first emergence of a moral code contributed to divine law, such as the ten commandments. In the case of the ten commandments this moral code is relayed to man through god. Out of the ten commandments, five of them apply to how mankind should act in ociety. These help people to live in a society, so that people can comfortably and happily coexist.

Don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t cheat on your spouse, don’t covet, and respect your parents. These five simple rules while in a primitive culture are unattainable, are needed in a modern culture to help citizens live comfortably. At this stage the of society have mandated that these rules should be followed, not necessarily coming directly from the ten commandments, but more that the ten commandments were a good medium for these laws to become naturalized.

Over the next few stages of social evolution more laws have gone from impractical to natural and have been adopted first by society and then reinforced by religion. A good example of this is Kosher laws for the Jewish people. Kosher started because scavengers and other animals caused serious health issues before proper storage, preparation, and refrigeration was developed. The Jewish Rabbi's saw the

problems coming from this and adapted a set of rules to protect their people from sickness.A few hundred years later the Catholic church implemented a law that for a month and a half period, the only meat allowed to be consumed was fish. This was in response to fisherman having low sales and threatening to shut down the fishing industry.

Although most of these laws are justified by faith, there is no specific instance where God commanded these exact tasks. They were laws created to fix an issue that was threatening society. One could argue that today natural law would not cause either of these to be relevant, but in the time when they were created they were very important to fixing a problem in their respective societies.Divine law, steaming from natural law is also the reason many people today find some divine laws pointless.

After the need for certain laws set in place by faith is lost there is no way to remove it from practice. If after good refrigeration techniques were invented, or the fish industry stabilized, the church would have removed those laws people would not have understood. After justifying that something is in place because of the will of God, there is no easy way to say he changed his mind. As a result of this ou can see how the major religions of the world are starting to fall out of favor. As natural laws evolve with society, the current structure of right and wrong will change.

Divine laws will seem more and more obscure, and religion will be faced with the challenge of adapting their laws to match those that came about

naturally. Since natural laws are fluid and divine laws are limited by scripture certain problems are arising. This could be how religions of the past became extinct. This also could change the path of natural law over the next few hundred years.