As for the legal consequences of Enlightenment-based starting assumptions, sociological law is best illustrated by the Roe vs. Wade decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 which legalized abortion on demand.  In it the unborn child was effectively declared a non-person by a ruling that was entirely arbitrary both legally and medically.  All scientific evidence to date points to life beginning at conception, where an entire human chromosome pair exists that contains and controls the growth and make up of an individual for the rest of their life.  Early term embryos feel pain and react to stimuli.¹⁷  Left alone, they get born as babies, being fully human from the get-go.  They are merely at an earlier, less visible stage of development.
     The only question about whether or not life begins at conception is generated in the minds of those who have chosen to ignore genuine science based on observation, as well as the sanctity of human life, because they want the license to kill unborn children for reasons of personal and sociological convenience.  This is sociologic law at its essence, and we can expect more frightening examples in the decades ahead -- law based not on moral principles, but upon whatever is deemed socially convenient by whoever happens to have the political power.  So often we are lulled to sleep by that mindless bromide mantra that says, "You can't legislate morality!"  We need to wake up!  Law, by definition, IS LEGISLATED MORALITY!  A moral absolute that says "You shall not murder" is the basis for all our legal codes against murder.  Moral absolutes about sex and the family form the basis for our marriage laws, and all our legal concepts about child support, abuse and family ethics.  The question is not about whether or not we can "legislate morality," but about who's morality we want to legislate.  Shall we legislate the morality of amoral relativists, which will slip and slide depending upon who is in power and consistently allow for the grossest abuses of that power because such abuse is intrinsic to that governing philosophy?  Or shall we re-establish a sense of absolute morals from a God who is really there, where abuses of power will be recognized as inconsistent with the established principles, which will then provide a rational basis for raising an outcry?  There will always be abuses of power, but which way of thinking provides a better chance of minimizing them?  Once moral absolutes from a divine source above the human domain are rejected, all we have left is sociological law -- capricious tyrannical absolutes created for the fleeting whims of whoever is in power.¹⁸  History has proven repeatedly how easy it is to enact such tyrannies in the name of a distorted view of civil liberty.  Right now there are enough people in political and judicial power who still operate at least partially from a sense of Judeo-Christian morality, and interpret the law according to the general sense of fair play and compassion their world view tends to encourage, however imperfectly.  But they are growing old and their influence has long been fading.  Any justice and kindness to be found in our legal system today is running on pure historical inertia.  Sociological law, guided by fallen Man's innately corrupt sense of social convenience, can end in only one kind of place:  The guillotines of Robespierre, the death camps of Hitler, and the killing fields of Pol Pot.