[Vision2020] Daniel C. Dennett On Separation of Church And State

[Nick Gier]

Greetings:

Simply saying that God grants us rights without giving any other 
reason than "God just does it" commits the fallacy of circular 
reasoning.  Much more needs to be said.

God-given unalieanable rights are in the Declaration of Independence 
not the Constitution, the only document that serves as the framework 
for the laws of our secular society.  Does it really need repeating 
that God is not mentioned in the Constitution?

Even in the Declaration Jefferson identifies the source of our rights 
as "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God," a phrase that cannot be 
found in any text of Christian theology of which I'm familiar.

In his book "Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: Origins, 
Philosophy, and Theology" (U of Kentucky Press, 1998), Allen Jayne 
concludes that Jefferson is referring to the God of deism, an 
impersonal being that is essentially nature itself. (The exact source 
appears to be the deist Lord Bolingbroke.) More generally Jefferson 
is referring to what is called "natural law theory," in which any 
human being could derive moral laws using reason alone.  Lucky for 
us, divine revelation is not required.

So the answer to the question how atheists fit in is easy: the ones I 
know are rational beings and they seem to know the difference between 
right and wrong, sometimes better that their Christian neighbors.

Even the Apostle Paul acknowledged that the heathen can know the 
moral law (Roman 2:14), but that does not mean that he can be saved 
by it.  (Paul would have been very amused by Jerry Falwell's "Moral 
Majority.") Thomas Aquinas also believed that atheists, using their 
own reason, could know the moral law and thereby derive a theory of 
rights from that knowledge.

Therefore, the Founding Fathers and Mothers gave us a Constitution 
whereby rational beings can acknowledge and uphold basic human rights 
and make good laws.  No appeal God is necessary.

Nick Gier

>I owe no particular allegiance to the past, so the reconstructed
>intentions of our founders aren't keenly relevant to me.  The nation
>they conceived and which was born of their disparate intentions has
>fortunately evolved, so that being a white male property owner is no
>longer a requirement to enjoy the full benefits of citizenship.
>
>As a complete secularist, I don't include God or the supernatural in
>any equation that governs my life.  Further, as I have indicated
>above, that some of our founders did -- arguably the majority -- is of
>only historical interest.  "Rights" are something that humans invented
>that they sometimes wax poetic about.  For rights to exist in any form
>other than the uselessly ephemeral, they must be enforced and
>maintained.  Deities don't do the enforcing, people do.  In this
>modern era, governments are the primary instruments of enforcement.
>Theoretically, this isn't a bad thing, as governments are supposed to
>derive their power from the will of the people.
>
>I don't want to live in a white Christian hegemony, even if that's
>what this nation was in times of yore (yesterday, relatively
>speaking), even if that was the intention of our founders.  Humanity
>has  evolved beyond that.  "Rights" are now extended to blacks and
>women and to nearly everyone who was previously dispossessed due to
>the superstitions and prejudices that were acceptable -- or the norm
>-- in bygone eras.  Too many religious institutions dogmatically
>preserve all that was bad about our past.
>
>More people understand this than not, even if only intuitively.  That
>enshrines it, for me, as a worthy democratic principle.
>
>Democracy before faith?  That gets my vote, especially when the
>alternative is a return to a medieval brand of Christianity on the
>shores of a country that I love, however critical I may be of it.
>
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"Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to 
human affairs."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who 
represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."
  --Mohandas Gandhi

"Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be 
discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each 
part by itself. . . .We must keep our attention fixed on the whole 
and on the interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our 
intellectual life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between 
science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the 
sum of its various parts." --Max Planck

Nicholas F. Gier
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843
http://www.home.roadrunner.com/~nickgier/home.htm
208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO
http://www.roadrunner.com/~nickgier/ift.htm

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