Morals have evolved along side the human race. This is called “social evolution.” The morals of societies are well documented, and it can be easily shown how morals change over time. Social evolution explains why morals are different amongst the many cultures on this planet, and why morals change over time.
It seems that we are all blessed with a conscience. This conscience allows us to determine between “morally acceptable” and “immoral” actions. You attribute this to your God, whose morals are firm and unchanging. This would be a good answer, but there are a few problems. One problem being, if these “natural law” morals are in fact divinely inspired in all humans, you would expect to see them from the onslaught of the human race. The fact is that you do not. You see a different set of morals for each group of people that do share some morals in common (which is to be expected) yet there are differences. The Aztecs held the notion that it is wrong to murder each other, but it was perfectly ok to sacrifice enemy prisoners to appease their gods. The Egyptians had a set of morals where it was morally acceptable to have slaves. There have been slaves since the dawn of human civilization in one form or another. Slavery has existed in cultures from the Aztecs to the Greeks, to the noble land owners of England, and slavery is even mentioned as acceptable (debated) in your Bible. It wasn’t until the 1800s when people started to decide that slavery was immoral. The question I pose is if slavery is “truly wrong” based on some sort of divinely inspired natural law, why would your God choose to tell us now? Why wouldn’t the people way back when realize that “something isn’t right with slavery?” This is an example of social evolution.
I’m not going to argue that abortion is a moral act, as I personally am against it. However, I will argue against your stance that abortion is immoral because of “natural law.” Abortion induced by herbs or manipulation was commonly used as a method of birth control in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and probably earlier. It wasn’t until later, in the 18th or 19th century that abortions became a taboo thus being outlawed. The motivating factor in this was that in a male dominated society, it was against their best interests to let women have the sole choice of whether or not to have a child. By the 1970s abortion had been legalized in most European countries, and in 1973 (and reaffirmed in 1992) a Supreme Court decision legalized it in America. This is in congruent to the rise in social power of the woman where she instead of being the “home maker” whose sole responsibility was to make babies, was granted equal rights that men had. This again is more evidence that morals come not from a deity, but have evolved along side the human race.
Genocide has not always been wrong. Wars have been a part of humanity since we settled down in areas. Fighting for hunting territory between rivaling tribes, and with fighting such actions as genocide entered into the picture. From the early times of one tribe wiping out another tribe, to more recent occurrences such as the Spanish Inquisition, and what befouled the Jews and Gypsies by the Nazis. In each culture it was morally acceptable, but since other parts of the world it was not, we determined that our morals were better and we had to stop the mass murdering of the Jews. Global morality is something new that is, as our communication becomes better we are able to act as a single global society. Through reasoning, we are able to determine what actions are moral.
As to the concept of natural law from God being firmly embedded in American law by the founding fathers, they knew that there are Morals that everyone should have; Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. However, it does not take a god to tell you that. Luckily we’ve all developed a brain that’s capable of coming to that conclusion ourselves.
