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Today marks the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence which includes the famous words: “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.”
But are these “truths” really “self-evident”? Well, it depends.
When the Declaration was penned (mainly) by Thomas Jefferson in 1776, the Enlightenment, as it has come to be known, was in full swing. A new ‘age of reason’ had arrived. Old superstitions were being cast aside, old customs and traditions discarded, organised religion was being looked at in a new, much more sceptical way.
Thomas Jefferson himself was very much a child of his age. He was a Deist, that is, he believed a Creator had made the universe, but this same Creator was distant and remote from our affairs, taking no interest in them. There was no divine revelation. The Bible is not the word of God. Jesus was simply a man, although a very remarkable one.
In fact, Jefferson at one point produced a new, more ‘rational’ version of the story of Jesus, that is, one stripped of all its supernatural content. He called it ‘The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth’.
When he was president of the United States, Jefferson invented the phrase “a wall of separation between Church and State”, meaning there should be no officially recognised State Church as in England, and that were should be freedom of worship.
Nevertheless, when Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, the vast majority of people still believed in a Creator God and still believed in the basic moral assumptions of Christianity. Even though Jefferson was, like many other intellectuals of his day, a Deist, he nonetheless accepted the basic moral outlook of Jesus. No matter how much Jefferson might have disliked Church/State alliances or criticised the Churches because of historical crimes and misdeeds, his morality still owed a huge amount to Christianity.
This is why he was able to say that certain truths are “self-evident”, including “that all men are created equal”, and “that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights”. (Of course, we need to note the irony that Jefferson owned slaves).
But are the truths Jefferson speaks of still self-evident in a world much further removed from its Christian roots than the world of the Declaration of Independence? The short answer is no.
You must notice that the Declaration says, “all men are created equal” and “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”.
The key concept is that we have a Creator, and this Creator has made us all equal with one another. But what kind of equality are we talking about? It can’t be physical equality, because clearly some people have superior physical qualities to others. It can’t be intellectual equality either, for the same reason. Nor is it social equality, because as much we want there to be total social equality, it doesn’t exist, it certainly didn’t exist in 1776, meaning it wasn’t self-evident, and it will likely never exist. In addition, attempts to reach total social equality (see communism) have usually ended in disaster.
So, when the Declaration says we are “created equal”, it means we are all morally equal, from the highest to the lowest in society and no matter what our physical and intellectual abilities or disabilities might be.
Take away the idea of a Creator God, and where does that leave us? Nature doesn’t confer moral equality on us. Nature doesn’t care about us. It doesn’t know we exist. If nature is all there is, our various physical, intellectual and other inequalities seem perfectly natural, for that is exactly what they are. The ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t even think to question these inequalities even though they were not short of great thinkers.
It is chiefly Judeo-Christianity which gives us the belief that we are all created morally equal. It is true that many people today who passionately believe in human rights also believe in the moral equality of all human beings, but if you take God out of the equation, then the idea of moral equality seems very fanciful and not a bit self-evident. We might like to believe in it. It might seem like a nice idea, but that doesn’t mean it is true.
If there is no God, then our moral equality does not come from Him. It doesn’t come from nature either. If it comes from us, then it is merely an invention, one that most humans didn’t believe in for most of history.
As Yuval Noah Harari (an atheist) say in his book, Sapiens: “The liberal belief in the free and sacred nature of each individual is a direct legacy of the traditional Christian belief in free and eternal individual souls. Without recourse to a Creator God, it becomes embarrassingly difficult for liberals to explain what is so special about individual Sapiens”.
Precisely. And this is why the “truths” outlined in the Declaration of Independence are not self-evident once you cease to believe in a Creator God. As the West moves further away from its Christian roots, these “truths” will seem ever less self-evident. If America is still around to mark its 500th anniversary, will the Declaration of Independence even be quoted?
Perhaps it will, but the ‘self-evident truths’ might well be viewed the same way Jefferson viewed biblical miracles—as fictions.
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