The Role of Natural Law in Pointing to a Lawgiver
Look at the world around you; the way the stars hang in perfect balance or how a seed knows to become a towering oak. It’s not chaos; it’s order, governed by natural law, the consistent rules that keep the universe humming. These laws, from gravity’s pull to the intricate code in DNA, don’t just happen, they point to a purposeful intelligent design, a Lawgiver who crafted it all with intention. As a believer in the Bible’s account of a six-day creation, I see this order as evidence of God’s deliberate handiwork, not a cosmic accident.
Natural law is the framework of predictable principles that make life possible. The sun rises on schedule (Jeremiah 31:35-36), seasons shift like clockwork, and the laws of physics keep planets spinning. Romans 1:20 says God’s “eternal power and Godhead” are clear in what He made. The universe’s fine-tuning (like the precise gravitational constant that allows stars to form) is no fluke. Scientists estimate the odds of a life-sustaining universe by chance are 1 in 10^229 (Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos). That’s not luck; it’s design, echoing Genesis 1, where God spoke order into existence over six days.
Then there’s the moral side of natural law. Humans share a sense of justice, love, and truth across cultures. We see this in the oft asked questions about why is there evil in the world. Without God’s moral law, there is no such thing as good nor evil. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says God “set eternity in their heart,” (ASV) hinting at a universal compass. Psalm 19:1-4 adds that the heavens “declare the glory of God,” revealing Him through their silent order. This moral awareness sets us apart from animals. A lion’s instinct drives it to hunt, not to ponder fairness. Animal instincts are about survival (eat, mate, flee) void of elevated human traits like justice, compassion, or self-sacrifice. A dog might show loyalty, but it doesn’t wrestle with ethical dilemmas or seek meaning. This gap points to a Lawgiver who gave humans a unique moral capacity, reflecting His character.
Skeptics might say natural laws are just “there,” needing no explanation. But why do they exist, and why are they so perfectly balanced? Randomness can’t account for a universe where laws align to support life and human consciousness. It’s like expecting a hurricane to build a skyscraper. The Bible’s account of creation (God forming light, land, and life in Genesis 1) shows a purposeful design, not a cosmic roll of the dice.
Natural law, from the orbits of galaxies to the moral stirrings in our souls, is a testament to a Creator’s wisdom. It’s a quiet invitation to see His fingerprints everywhere. Natural law’s order and humanity’s unique moral spark reveal a Lawgiver who designed the universe and us with purpose and love.
agape
Sources:
Ross, Hugh. The Creator and the Cosmos. Reasons to Believe, 2018.
Borger church of Christ @ Franklin & Juniper 
I’ll grant you that god exists. Now justify why you leap from “god exists” over to “he has something to say to 21st century people”.
Because we have noticed that life will be less miserable for us if we learn to work together as opposed to constantly being at war.
Correction: without God’s moral law, there is no such thing as ULTIMATE good or evil. Your reasoning is fallacious because, like Dr. Frank Turek, you automatically equate subjective with defective. If I tell you that Hitler was evil because he acted in ways that offend my personal moral standards, you will scream “fallacious” merely because of the subjectivity. But it is fallacious to pretend that “subjective” is synonymous with “defective”. I can be reasonable to judge Hitler solely on the basis of my personal subjective morals. There is no “requirement” that criticism of another’s morals must originate within objective transcendent morality. The fact that conservative Trinitarians disagree with each other so much on moral issues like abortion, euthanasia, etc, makes it less likely god wants them to disagree for the sake of a higher mysterious good, and more likely those people are no better than lions on the Serengeti…they disagree with each other because there is no god guiding their moral decision-making in the first place.
I’m one of those skeptics. Since I claim the universe is infinitely old (I agree with YEC that the big bang is biblically and scientifically untenable) I classify your question of why natural laws exist, as fallacious. Those natural laws are as old as the universe, and since that means they have existed into eternity past, they are axiomatic. At that point, your question is asking where those axioms come from…but axioms by definition are properly exempt from the question of origins.
Any intelligent being that can experience the same joy in torturing children that he gets out of giving prosperity to obedience people (Deut. 28:63, see vv. 15-62) either isn’t loving, or defines love so uselessly broadly that it becomes indistinguishable from hate, and thus, cannot coherently function in any attempted “defense” of such “love”.