RELIGION AND SOCIETY

Religion and Society ~ 399 ~ of any foundation, it is a concept, which may controvert all basic human values. The result of all this is that we are back where John Austin left us, with no clear idea of what justice is, or how it can be defined. Centuries of investigation and research have failed to provide mankind with a set of clear principles on which to base his laws. As G.W. Paton says: “What are the interests that a perfect legal system has to protect? This is a question that has to do with values and comes within the scope of legal philosophy, but we require more help from legal philosophy in this matter than philosophy seems prepared to give us. Consequently we have been unable to come up with an acceptable scale of values. In fact, only in religion we find such values, but religious dogmas are accepted on faith or intuition, not on the basis of rational argument.”4 In the same work he later remarks (p. 109), “The Orthodox Natural Law Theory based its absolutes on the revealed truths of religion. If we attempt to secularize jurisprudence, where can we find an agreed basis of values?”