If we are not endowed with certain inalienable rights by our Creator, then all of our rights are the results of agreements between men, and can be removed just as easily by agreements to the contrary.
No Creator, no inalienable rights. I don't give a rat's patoote about evolutionary biology, but I care a great deal about the rights of man.
I reject your premise. In fact, I think that ascribing our rights to a creator weakens them, as not everyone will agree on the nature and preferences of the creator. Moreover, people are more fickle with their beliefs than with their contracts.
But rights are not a matter of contract. They follow ineluctably from taking human life as the standard of value. That's all there is to it! Now, you may say that not everyone has to take human life as their standard of value, and you'd be right. But such people are often easy to spot: criminals (value money above human life), totalitarians (value the state above human life), terrorists (value their creator above human life), animal-rights activists (value animal life above human life), greens (value "nature" above human life), etc. But the overwhelming majority of people take human life as their standard of value, whether they acknowledge it or not, so this is a much firmer foudation for the Rights of Man than any book or sect.
A creator does not need to be a supernatural being in order to determine rights. It just needs to include a set of natural laws and forces that result in predictable results from specific behaviors.
For instance, the relative failure of every society that restricts human freedom can’t be avoided for long by “agreements among men”. Their society stagnates or collapses due to unmet social and economic needs. The relative failure of every society that places the rights of animals, nature, God, money, etc… (as Physicist brings up) above the rights of man is assured. Our creator gave both man and everything affecting us a nature that makes consequences unavoidable. So in essence, rights without God are simply a common denominator of principles that promote life.
1. A scientific theory about the origin of species has nothing whatever to do with political rights, and connecting them is a logical fallacy.
2. The theory of evolution does not address origins of life (our Creator). So it specifically has nothing to do with human rights under the Constitution or how or why they are "endowed."
What does that have to do with this debate? Just because you might not like the consequences you see for "inalienable rights" if there is no creator does not mean that there then must be a creator.
"If we are not endowed with certain inalienable rights by our Creator, then all of our rights are the results of agreements between men, and can be removed just as easily by agreements to the contrary."
That's one helluva good line!
I agree. If we are not designed, then we, by definition, have no purpose. A thing that has no purpose has no intrinsic value. One could slaughter the entire human race, causing as much pain and prolonged suffering as possible and the words "moral" and "immoral" would have no contextual basis in the event, any more than it is immoral to "destroy" a ridge of mud in a puddle on a dirt road that was "accidentally" produced by cars.
Without a creator, mankind has no purpose and no value whatsoever. It is really just that simple.
Short of God Himself coming down and enforcing these rights, I'd submit that it is, rather, the widespread belief in the sanctity of human rights which is their guarantor.
Where was this divine endowment of rights to be found prior to 1776?