No. 17. >> I'm really appreciating all of these discussions. And I have to admit that it has not been my habit to think in terms of serving the right hand and serving the left hand. Like the sheriff you just mentioned. If the natural law is the foundation for all functioning in the left hand realm, it seems that any valid ethical system needs to have its roots in the natural law. Is this true? And are some ethical systems better than others? >>DR. JOEL D. BIERMANN: Good, good question, Nick. And I appreciate you bringing up ethics. Ethics is a big interest of mine. I teach a course at the sem called Theological Ethics. And I wrote my dissertation on virtue ethics. So I'm very interested in the topic. But I'll try not to get carried away in giving you an answer that gets a little bit just kind of -- massages my interests instead of answering your question. I think, yeah, a good ethical system is going to take into account God's true and God's law. And will be responsive to natural law. So are there some ethical systems that are better than others? Well, certainly. While I would agree that a good ethical system is going to uphold God's law, we have to recognize there are sometimes different answers in different situations. There are times when a little pragmatism is appropriate. And there are times when you need to take into account a situation or a circumstance. Sometimes the best justice is not just simply arbitrarily applying the rule. We know that. The greatest injustice is sometimes justice arbitrarily applied. Or blindly applied. We have to take into account real people, real situations. Parents know this. You know, parents know that as you're enforcing in part law and enforcing rules, you sometimes take into account situations and people and apply things in the right ways. So there is a place for doing ethical systems different ways. But ultimately there is truth. And truth needs to be upheld. And truth needs to be promoted. And any ethical system that compromises truth or based on a premise of we decide what is true is going to be problematic. In our culture today in the 21st Century, the name of the game is autonomy. Take apart the word autonomy and you see it's self law. In other words, I make my own rules. I make my own truth. I decide what's right and wrong. I decide what's morally right. I decide what I'm going to do. And that certainly describes the world that we're living in today. People want to make their own rules, their own laws. And we even have the idea that somehow the majority decides. So if 51% of Americans think abortion is okay, suddenly it becomes morally acceptable. That's nonsense. There is truth. There is a natural law that's there. And any ethical system that's going to be valuable and useful needs to be normative and standardized. And that will be based on God's will and God's law. And it will then shape and norm our behavior. And anything that's simply arbitrarily chosen is no kind of standard. No kind of principle. It's just what I arbitrarily want. Autonomy does not make for good ethical systems.