Posted on 05/17/2019 6:45:30 AM PDT by Heartlander
Stephen Meyer has written here about how the ideas framed by the Declaration of Independence, the “sources of our rights as citizens,” are rooted in design thinking.
There is one source that is more basic than any other, yet that receives less than the attention it deserves. I refer to the idea that there is an intelligent creator who can be known by reason from nature, a key tenet underlying the Declaration of Independence — as well as, curiously, the modern theory of intelligent design.
As Meyer notes, that’s no coincidence given the design thinking of the document’s main author: “Jefferson himself thought that there was scientific evidence for design in nature,” as he indicated himself in writing to John Adams in 1823. So American civilization is rooted in intelligent design, and would likely be very different if informed by the premises of what would emerge, in the 19th century, as the theory of Darwinian evolution.
Don’t believe it? Just ask a candid and clear-sighted Darwinist. A friend has been reading the best-seller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, and points out a passage that is refreshing in its candor. Dr. Harari imagines rewriting the Declaration’s revered words in the light of Darwinian biology. He highlights the problematic ideas:
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.
Harari quickly gets down to business, unsentimentally shredding Jefferson’s noble phrases:
According to the science of biology, people were not ‘created’. They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal’. The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation. The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are ‘equal’? Evolution is based on difference, not on equality. Every person carries a somewhat different genetic code, and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences. This leads to the development of different qualities that carry with them different chances of survival. ‘Created equal’ should therefore be translated into ‘evolved differently’.
Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a ‘Creator’ who ‘endows’ them with anything. There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading to the birth of individuals . ‘Endowed by their creator’ should be translated simply into ‘born’.
Equally, there are no such things as rights in biology. There are only organs, abilities and characteristics. Birds fly not because they have a right to fly, bur because they have wings. And it’s not true that these organs, abilities and characteristics are ‘unalienable’. Many of them undergo constant mutations, and may well be completely lost over time. The ostrich is a bird that lost its ability to fly. So ‘unalienable rights’ should be translated into ‘mutable characteristics’.
And what are the characteristics that evolved in humans? ‘Life’, certainly. But ‘liberty’? There is no such thing in biology. Just like equality, rights and limited liability companies, liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their imagination. From a biological viewpoint, it is meaningless to say that humans in democratic societies are free, whereas humans in dictatorships are unfree.
After going on like this, he arrives at a final bold rewriting:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.
With this introduction, what follows the Declaration’s Preamble would be nonsensical.
Harari concedes that it’s possible to imagine a system of thought including equal rights. A society could be founded on an “imagined order,” that is, where “We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.”
This is just like the question debated by Jerry Coyne and Eric Metaxas about life’s “meaning.” On the Tucker Carlson show, as I wrote earlier, Metaxas had stated plainly that under the Darwinian view, “our lives literally have no meaning.” Coyne responded furiously over at Why Evolution Is True that this was a “crock,” only to be undermined by a quick scan of comments left by his own readers and the observation of Evolution News contributor Kirk Durston that “Making up a meaning and purpose is quite a bit different from there actually being objective meaning and purpose.”
Or to put it differently, as I did, “You could imagine a meaning to life. But inevitably it would be a fictional rather than objective meaning.” Similarly, you could imagine ideals like those in the Declaration. But inevitably they would be fictional rather than based in objective reality. That’s the difference between trying to ground our civilization in evolutionary versus design premises. It should be obvious that a society whose roots are widely acknowledged as fictions is bound to be less successful and enduring than one where they are recognized as real.
John Adams
“The articles published at Evolution News are copyright by Discovery Institute”
Somewhat related:
I believe that when Conservativism was being formulated as a political philosophy by Burke and others, some of the early Conservatives were not Christians (or Jews). BUT they nevertheless recognized that the type of society they wanted needed to be predicated on the morality and values that could only be found within the Judeo-Christian tradition. Therefore, as good Conservatives, they embraced the moral foundations of the Faith, even though they had no faith themselves.
The people who embrace the view of the world as a random place are just inviting chaos and anarchy.
For the sake of your soul, you should have faith.
For the sake of a just society, you should at least act like you have faith.
My unalienable rights were given to me by God and not by a group of statesmen who constructed those documents, however noble they might be.
Trample on my rights and see where it gets you, whether man or government.
Darwinists need to stfu until they can explain how a single cell can develope by chance. The odds are virtually incalculable.
The Declaration of Independence was based on "Natural Law", in other words, a belief in God.
The nation was founded on a belief in God. It's laws and institutions were designed around that belief.
The right to independence was one of those "Natural Laws".
So what?
A cell does not develop by chance.
Grand Evolution is not about chance.
Get over it. Once you mention chance and randomness, you lost the argument.
No, I got that part. That is all I ever heard for my entire life. "The South started the war and lost it."
Never doubted this was true, although when I was in Junior High, I never understood why the Blockade was necessary. I asked the history teacher, "Wasn't this mostly a Land war?" I just assumed they enacted the blockade because they needed to give the Navy something to do to make it believe it was supporting the war effort.
In the last few years I have come to realize the Blockade was absolutely the most significant and crucial part of the war, because the Blockade is what kept the South from trading directly with Europe. The war was started specifically to stop the South from trading directly with Europe.
But no, I had the "South started the war and lost it" drummed into me. I quit believing that when the facts didn't match up with what I had been taught.
I don't think he is trying to understand it. He's trying to undermine it. He's one of those foolish people who believe men can be obligated to control themselves without a belief in a higher power.
I think men's belief in a higher power is the only thing that keeps them under civilized control. I think that if you destroy their belief in a higher power, you will unleash destruction.
Hence Sanger, Hitler and the Democrat party.
Bookmarked.
Actually the whole equality of man idea was more from the enlightenment thinkers than Christianity. The enlightenment thinker were mostly deists. So were some of our most prominent founding fathers(Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, etc.).
That’s not to say that the enlightenment thinkers weren’t influence by Christianity but I’ve always thought that saying America is a judao/Christian society doesn’t tell the whole truth. We are truly a Roman/Greco, Judeo/Christian, Enlightenment Society. Of course that doesn’t roll of the tongue as good.
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