Natural Law, Catholicism, and the Protestant Critique: Why We Are Really Not That Far Apart

Abstract

Catholics and Evangelical Protestants often find themselves on the same side on a variety of issues in bioethics. However, some Evangelicals have expressed reluctance to embrace the natural law reasoning used by Catholics in academic and policy debates. In this article, I argue that the primary concerns raised by Evangelicals about natural law reasoning are, ironically, concerns expressed by and intrinsic to the natural law tradition itself. To show this, I address two types of Protestant critics: (1) the Frustrated Fellow Traveler and (2) the Solo Scripturist.