Must moral law be divinely inspired?

[CrisBrown]

Hi maurile,

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So whatever the independent justification is for saying that God's preferences matter more than mine do, it's that justifying principle -- not God's whim -- that ultmately determines the truth or falsity of moral claims. In an objective moral theory, a moral dictator is at best a middleman and at worst a fraud.

The overall conclusion is that objective moral theory is equally reasonable for theists and atheists.

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This is very true, and it's ironic that it took a trained theologian, Immanuel Kant, to divorce moral imperatives from religious teaching.

Kant's Categorical Imperative (in every situation, let each man act as he would if his action were the rule for all other men in that situation) expresses a fundamental principle that appears in nearly all of the world's major religions. But Kant did not ground the C.I. in the Bible. Rather, he chose to ground it in pure reason.

The C.I. is also one of the core principles of all advanced legal systems. John Rawls and other jurispdudential theorists express it in the phrase "like cases should be treated alike," an idea that goes all the way back to the Code of Hammurabi.

So yes, it is possible to assert an objective moral code which is not rooted in religion. But such a code is not likely to conform to the desires of Dominionists, precisely because it does derive from religious belief. It asserts a primary of reason which is antithetical to Dominionism.

Cris