Arthur Allen Leff (1935-1981), lays out the impossible situation faced by those who try to make sense of law apart from God.
I want to believe — and so do you — in a complete, transcendent, and immanent set of propositions about right and wrong, findable rules that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us how to live righteously. I also want to believe — and so do you — in no such thing, but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought to do, but to decide for ourselves, individually and as a species, what we ought to be. What we want, Heaven help us, is simultaneously to be perfectly ruled and perfectly free, that is, at the same time to discover the right and the good and to create it.
~ “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law” in Duke Law Journal (Vol. 1979, December, No. 6)
