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An Ambitious Fiction: We Hold These Truths …
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
More beautiful words were never written. But if the gentlemen who penned our Declaration of Independence intended that “We” to refer to the nascent America as a whole, rather than to themselves only, then it’s largely fiction.
I am agnostic and lacking in faith but, paradoxically, the only portion of that glorious sentence above that rings true to me is the “Creator” part. Because I do believe that, throughout human history, men have believed the reality of a creator to be self-evident. I think evolution has wired us that way, to seek an explanation for our existence and our purpose and, if necessary, to invent one.
But is man’s equality self-evident? Does anything about human history teach us that something in nature or nature’s God suggests to men that every other man is in any essential sense his equal? I don’t think so. I believe we are created equal, but I don’t believe that is self-evident.
I’m not talking here about the superficial inequalities of physiology and circumstance but rather of the equality the founders meant: equality of value and worth and, yes, of rights as a fellow human being. These are the aspects of equality that make our rights intrinsic and fundamental to, and inseverable from, each of us: that makes them, in a word, unalienable. That is the equality that has, for most of our history, been far from self-evident — that in fact is still not embraced by much of the world’s population.
This post was inspired by Stina’s post “Where Rights Originate,” which asks a deep, important, and ultimately unresolvable question. She inspired an interesting discussion, and you should go read it.
My purpose here is much more modest and practical. I want to make the simple point that, wherever rights come from, and regardless of what we believe about where rights come from, nothing that we cherish about our rights or our equality is really self-evident. Rather, it must be taught, and it must be taught early: The torch of freedom has to be passed on to each child long before he or she becomes an adult.
If we are going to restore our nation, we will have to reclaim our children. Home school, private schools, and church schools offer an alternative to public schools and their increasingly sinister and tyrannical administrations. But confronting the public schools is essential, which brings us back to the need to assert our right to free speech and free assembly.
The current efforts of the Brandon administration to silence parents, to caricature them as terrorists for challenging the authority of school boards, suggests that the public education establishment understands how unpopular its policies are and how vulnerable those policies are to pushback from outraged parents.
Push back. Keep pushing back. And make sure that your children are learning those truths that, unfortunately, aren’t really self-evident: that we’re all created equal, and that our rights are integral and essential — despite whatever they may be learning in school.
Published in Culture
Yes. Christians who don’t know that are few and far between.
Thank you.
Yes.
Hence # 57. Hence my first published article on the subject, and also the other one.
FIFY.
If you mean light as in God (the light of the world) then yes. But I’m referring to the conceptualizations of light and dark, warmth and cold etc…. Your definition illustrates the point. Try defining one without the other.
100% incorrect. Light exists, period. Dark doesn’t exist. Dark is merely the absence of light.
Cold is also not a thing. It is merely the absence of heat.
Does God only exist because there is evil? No. Absolutely not. God exists. Evil is the absence of God.
“Electromagnetic radiation of any wavelength that travels in a vacuum with a speed of 299,792,458 meters (about 186,000 miles) per second specifically : such radiation that is visible to the human eye.”
Didn’t mention darkness at all…
I can describe the greatness of God without ever mentioning evil.
It’s understanding and appreciating light that is hard to do if you’ve never been in darkness.
I can’t define dark without mentioning light.
One can define light without mentioning dark. They do it in physics textbooks.
Now it’s hard for me to understand light without thinking about dark. But that’s because I have a puny human mind, and it doesn’t mean the definitions of light aren’t right.
I agree, see my clarification in comment #124.
Do people burning up with a fever ever express being “So cold?”
And if you remove the vision what do you have? They’re inexorably linked, and that’s God’s design in action. The whole concept of evil is predicated on it.
I don’t think that makes your point very well. You clarified what you mean, so good. We aren’t talking about whether a thing exists or not, but rather how we perceive a thing. And I agree we do not appreciate the grace of God if we have never been outside of it. Which is what we are really talking about here.
I do but yes it’s foolish for us to argue about it. The point is that if one can intellectually acknowledge pure evil then so too must one recognize its opposite: Pure goodness.
Examining the source of that concept of pure goodness is a great place for the atheists and agnostics to begin their journey. And the Bible has a lot of claims about pure goodness that they’d be wise to examine and test against history and reality to see if it holds up.
I was thinking about this conversation and it occurs to me that perhaps Hank is partially right.
First, I was trying to decide what self evident means. As I thought through it, without going to look for some accepted, official definition, I thought “Self evident means a thing proves itself. I don’t need further logic beyond the thing itself.” Example: I have a partial gallon of milk in my fridge. Now, you cannot know that is true, as you read this, because you are not in my house. Does that mean the statement is not self evident? No. Because self evident doesn’t mean that we all understand the thing to be true instinctively. It means that when we learn of a thing, the thing itself proves itself to be true. So, if you come to my house, I will open my fridge and you’ll see the partial gallon of milk. And the partial gallon of milk will prove itself. It is self evident. So that’s a thing. What about a concept, or moral truth (which is the real conversation we are having here)?
Well, let’s turn then to some generally accepted definition of self evident. Merriam-Webster defines it this way: “evident without proof or reasoning”. The Oxford English Dictionary gives a bit of a better answer: “Evident by itself; requiring no proof or explanation; obvious, axiomatic.” This seems to square with my own definition of the thing.
So self-evident doesn’t mean we always know about a thing. That it sort of instinctively occurs to us. It means that once we are aware of a thing, that thing is true on its own, without further evidence, proof, or reasoning.
So what is it that Hank says it not self evident? That:
all men are created equal
they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights
among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
So I think that it is clearly self evident that we have a natural right to life and liberty, and to pursue happiness.
What I think is completely true, but is not self evident, is that we are created, and that a creator-God endowed us with natural rights.
Hence I come to the conclusion that Hank is partly correct.
I said originally he’s 100% correct if he doesn’t know God. One must recognize a moral law giver to accept a moral law. The opposite is might (or 51% of the vote) makes right.
I don’t think that is true. His perception may be understandable, but he isn’t correct, just because he doesn’t know God. If I hold to erroneous notion about the world around me, I’ll likely come to erroneous conclusions. That doesn’t mean I’m correct.
That’s because the air around them does not have the same heat as their body. Our sense of hot and cold is relative to our core body temp.
Candyman candyman candyman.
Spin, come on, let’s just be on the same side for a change. We can’t expect these truths to be self-evident to any unbeliever, hence he qualifier “if he doesn’t know God.” Unless one has a Biblical worldview he has no universal basis for rejecting sin, or even acknowledging them, only proximate ones.
As John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.” What we’re seeing play out with capitulation to the sate is the natural drift of a society away from the courage to stand on the supremacy of God. If we want to reclaim our children, we need to start by addressing their worldview, and ensure it’s one grounded in Biblical truth.
Spin, I guess one of the reasons I think these things are not self-evident, even to people of Christian faith, is that for most of the past 2,000 years we have had Christian faith, yet people didn’t see these supposedly self-evident things.
I think they’re obvious only to people who have already embraced them, which is a kind of circular definition of self-evident. Our conception of equality under the law is not obvious in the Bible. Rather, it’s the product of thousands of years of theology and philosophy and evolving civic order. People worked hard and long to discover this “self-evident” truth.
You can’t argue that because people’s thoughts were changing. I hate to break it to you but the lightbulb moment is kind of rare. It isn’t that suddenly at baptism, everything becomes obvious.
But for people (and civilizations) that make Christ the center, they under go changes in thinking.
Christianity altered the trajectory. No, Christianity did not cause a sudden Lockean view of rights to pop out of people’s foreheads as soon as they uttered “Jesus is Lord”, but you CAN see the evolution in thought on the value of human life. Look at the debates over the slave trade in the New World among HE Charles and Spanish and Italian ethicists of the 16th century. You can see the evolving thinking as they attempt to apply Christian thought to the problems of that time. You also see some fallen nature break out, too (like the prohibition on feudal systems in the Americas).
Those arguments were built on as foundational to later debates that ultimately led to the abolition movements. Each revelation formed a foundation stone that lockean political theory is built on.
Just because it took 1700 years to reach the point of the US constitution doesn’t mean it wasn’t progressing to that point.
The problem you have currently is that the rejection of Christianity that has become widespread throughout the west is leading us back to the old ways of devaluing life. And it’s happening much faster than the valuing life to equal status took.
No, I get that. But the point of “self-evident” is that the lightbulb moment should come easily. It shouldn’t be the culmination of centuries of philosophizing and grappling with conflicting thoughts about human nature and relationships. It should be, well, evident. Obvious. Something that leaps out at people.
And even if one wants to claim that it’s self-evident to Christians, it seems it really isn’t, as it took 1,500 years of people being Christians before a small group of people brought up in the Christian tradition actually articulated the idea and made it stick.
Then again, the meaning of words change. The founders may well have meant, by self-evident, that it was obvious to them, based on their beliefs about man and man’s Creator. That wouldn’t imply that it was self-evident to normal people who hadn’t invested much of a lifetime in pondering those issues.
The problem for us — and the point of the post — is that almost no one, today, spends a great deal of time pondering those issues. Rather, they have to be taught these self-evident truths. And we’ve stop teaching these things to our children. And this is very different from being Christian. Lots of Christians don’t find the founders’ conception of liberty self-evident.
Should it? I think I’m leaning to whoever said that it requires no proof once known.
QED doesn’t mean I suddenly get it just because someone showed me a proof.
We ARE on the same side. But I still disagree with you on some things…
I contend that it took time for people to recognize “these truths” and once they did, they were self evident. Again, my point is that self-evident doesn’t me we instinctively know it. It means when we learn of it, we need no further evidence beyond the truth itself.
Do all people have a natural right to life? Yes. Do you and I hold that to be true? If so, do we require anything beyond the truth itself as evidence of the truth? I don’t.
I think this is exactly right.
When I was in my 20s I began to wonder “What makes me think Conservatism is right? How do I know that the progressives don’t have it right?” Then it dawned on me: on the core matters, the progressives just don’t line up with God. Long before Prager said it (he perhaps thought it, but he wasn’t a household name among conservatives), I came to the conclusion that you could tell if someone was conservatives or progressive by the honest answer they give to one question: Do human beings have intrinsic value, or utilitarian value? Back then the left were arguing for killing any baby that had any perceived genetic faults, and killing off the old. It became very, very clear to me that the progressives were at cross purposes with the God of the Bible.
Agreed. I think before this conversation I took “self-evident” to be synonymous with “readily apparent”. It’s clear to me that these things are not the same.
It is not readily apparent to any of you that there is a partial jug of milk in my fridge. But the proof of that jug is the jug itself, and nothing more.
Practical reasoning has to start somewhere. The Declaration of Independence is not an extended philosophical treatise, but what it says in the first paragraph: ” …a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.”
It’s only after that we get the “self-evident” propositions. The document states that “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” In other words, what immediately follows are the propositions from which their practical reasoning will start. I don’t think “self-evident” here means self-evident to everyone at all times and in all places. It says we hold these truths to be self-evident rather than just “These truths are self-evident…” Certainly the Founders didn’t think the truths were self-evident to the “merciless Indian Savages” referred to later in the text.
The point is the we hold these truths to be self-evident, and as such, they form the basis for our justification for our actions. A “decent respect for the opinions of mankind” requires them to set forth these reasons, but that doesn’t mean everyone on Earth must agree with or should agree with that justification. The “respect” is fulfilled by setting forth reasons rather than leaving them a mystery.
Of course, the Founders thought or were hoping a lot of people would agree with those reasons, in particular Englishmen and Frenchmen, and so would inspire support for the Revolution.
Yes, that seems to me to be the most compelling justification for the phrase. That’s why I wrote, in the original post, “if the gentlemen who penned our Declaration of Independence intended that ‘We’ to refer to the nascent America as a whole, rather than to themselves only….” I think they were framing an argument and making what many would consider to be a bold claim, this idea of inherent equality.
As for what is going wrong…. It’s a cliché that the children of rich people fritter away their wealth in empty and often self-destructive pursuits. One can think of several examples, some of which are not Hunter Biden. I think much of what is rotten in our culture is simply that, going on on a national scale: we became rich, and that allowed us to become unserious.
This is not in response to any recent or particular comment. Just observation and reflection.
This has been and still is a good discussion. Might have wandered afield a little here and there, but a good amount of thinking appears to have taken place. We’ve learned things we haven’t realized yet.
I think most of us would agree that we can and should do this and I would add not only with the young. It’s easier perhaps with the young, but we should do this with every person we know. We don’t need to get into the details as we have in this discussion. If we can just talk about the ideals and how important they were for getting us to where we are today, I think we’ll be moving in the right direction.
Another thought occurs to me. I think some people may read the Declaration and get hung up on the idea it is meant to found a Christian nation. The founders were wise enough to write it in such a way that it can be embraced by anyone who believes in the ideals it puts forth. I think HR’s post pretty much proves that and is something to bear in mind when having a conversation with your friend who’s been lost to the left. Save them to the right first and maybe they’ll get saved otherwise later.
In exactly the formulation as put forward in the Declaration, yes. But that doesn’t mean that similar ideas hadn’t already been percolating for a long time in Christian civilization, or ideas that weren’t “on the way” to that particular formulation. The “rights of Englishmen”, for example, already had a long history, and in fact the Revolution came about because the Colonists thought they were being denied their rights as Englishmen.
And those rights were themselves based on a yet older and broader understanding of the rule of law, under which all men are subject to the law, even the King. That is, the King could not do any old thing he liked, like an Oriental despot, but his power was restricted to that which was “owed to Caesar” vs “owed to God” (Mark 12:17).
Ideas can be latent or implied in a new understanding of the world that take years, even centuries to develop. Old habits die hard, and the pagan habits of the Barbarian tribes that dominated Europe in the wake of the Roman Empire died hard. But once the new understanding has developed and spread through the culture, the new way of thinking can be said to have become “self-evident.”