Self-Evident Truths

Joe Biden:

And we are a spiritual nation. We are a nation that was founded upon — the only nation I can think that was founded upon the notion that there is a — a — that there is a God. We hold these truths self-evident, that all men are created equal, et cetera.

Andrew retorts:

Isn't the point of self-evident truths that we do not need God to perceive them?

Maybe so, but in the specific document that Biden was attempting, with characteristic grace, to cite as support for his point - the Declaration of Independence, that is - the existence of God is itself taken to be self-evident, and the principle of human equality is grounded on what the authors describe as the self-evident truth that human beings are "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." No doubt many of them thought of this Creator as a watchmaker God or some similarly impersonal Designer, rather than the Judeo-Christian Deity, and of course one can attempt to ground the principle of human equality on something other than endowments from a Creator. But the fact remains that insofar as the Declaration should be considered the founding document of the United States of America (which is a whole separate debate), Biden's comments about America being founded on the notion that there is a God seem inarguably - one might even say self-evidently - correct.

Comments

No more so than "all men are created equal" should be taken as evidence that the nation was founded upon the notion that women are inferior. Theism and sexism were ambient attributes of the times. It might be raining when I build my house, but it makes no sense to claim my house is founded upon the rain.

Posted by Consumatopia | August 22, 2007 9:15 AM

I think Ross has the better of the argument vs. Andrew, based on the wording of the Declaration.

I am less sure that Biden's point about the US being the world's first God-based country. Didn't every king ever claim the mandate of heaven? The difference is that our version of Nature's God endowed all people with rights, not just the king (of course, it was all white, wealthy, landowning white men, at the time, but it was better than pretty much any other contemporaneous philosophy, and its promise was, with great effort, extended).

BTW, speaking of the Declaration of Independence, if I were Native American, I would definitely start a group blog called "Merciless Indian Savages." Alas, no Indian blood in the Elvisberg family tree.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | August 22, 2007 9:17 AM

I dunno - knowing Andrew, he'll somehow manage to work his way around all that "endowed by their Creator" stuff ...

Posted by John | August 22, 2007 9:33 AM

Obvious pandering is obvious.

Also, the only country? One would forgive him for being unaware of the existence of Saudi Arabia and Vatican City, or the messy religious split that brought about India and Pakistan. However, you'd wish he at least knew that the shiny new Iraqi constitution has the line "Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation".

Posted by Bo | August 22, 2007 9:35 AM

There goes Andrew, snipping at the "Christianism" in the Declaration of Independence.

Next up: he bitches out Lincoln for mentioning God in the last sentence of the Gettysburg Address.

Posted by Matthew | August 22, 2007 9:56 AM

Alas, no Indian blood in the Elvisberg family tree.

if you have old line settler blood (e.g., pre-1776) the chances of no native american ancestry is pretty low because of genealogical mathematics.

also, the USA was founded with a theistic/deistic premise, but, as others have noted that was pretty ubiquitous. very few avowed atheists were around during that period (hume can close, perhaps d'holbach?). that being said, what was somewhat peculiar about the USA at that time was that didn't have an established church (at least for a culturally european nation).

Posted by razib | August 22, 2007 10:23 AM

That we aren't all in fact "created equal" is one of the more patently obvious realities I can think of.

Also worth pointing out that as much as we might SAY we're a nation of faith, we don't in fact act that way at all. It's called lip service. People by and large proceed in their daily lives as if there is no God, that life is what you make of it etc., whatever they may profess to believe.

Posted by Bill | August 22, 2007 10:24 AM

i think the "created equal" is more intelligible with the fuller fragment:
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.

so more that people are created with equal rights, than that they are literally equal (which is kind of incoherent and absurd).

Posted by razib | August 22, 2007 10:37 AM

>>that being said, what was somewhat peculiar about the USA at that time was that didn't have an established church (at least for a culturally european nation.

Posted by Thomas Nelson | August 22, 2007 10:48 AM

I thought 9/11 changed everything.

Posted by SavageView | August 22, 2007 12:51 PM

The equality was of the metaphysical sort that does, in fact, only really make sense given a Creator. "Rights" are dubious in any case, the way the Declaration viewed them, but the only cases that come even close to being plausible are theistic.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | August 22, 2007 1:16 PM

The following excerpt is from the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli with the Barbary Pirates. If you are curious about the role that the founders thought religion should play, why not read what the founders, in this case John Adams and President, Thomas Jefferson as President and Timothy Pickering, as Secretary of State, actually put on paper about the issue:

"As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

Posted by Scot Wilson | August 22, 2007 2:28 PM

Wasn't all that religious hooey inserted by the committee anyway? I vaguely remember Meier saying something like that. And didn't Jefferson think they turned his draft into ... less than he thought it was before?

Point being, it may be embedded in the founding document, but not the author of the founding document.

Posted by Chris | August 22, 2007 2:29 PM

Doesn't it make just as much sense to claim, based on the First Amendment and the No Religious Test clause of the Constitution, that the country was founded upon the notion that religion was a private matter and that the government had no business picking and choosing as to which religious beliefs were true?

The Declaration of Independence may have gotten the religious types on board, but when it actually came to putting together a government, the framers deliberately chose a secularism.

Posted by Dilan Esper | August 22, 2007 2:36 PM

Well, Jefferson had his points, but it was more of a committee thing, this whole founding the country. I don't think the Declaration said this to "get the religious types on board" or the Constitution avoided it to be pro-secular in any modern sense. The debates then weren't really the debates now. Biden has no real point, and Sullivan is just being his usual snarky self.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | August 22, 2007 2:47 PM

Chris: Actually, Jefferson's original language was even more quasi-religious in tone, proclaiming that the truths were "SACRED [my capitals for emphasis] and undeniable." Franklin suggested the change to "self-evident," which evoked the language of the Scottish common sense philosophers. The mentions of God or the Creator were largely the same in both versions, although Jefferson disliked capitalization and referred to Him as "nature's god."
Scot Wilson: The Treaty of Tripoli is an important document, but the realities of church-state relations in the founding period and early republic were very complicated and this cannot be regarded as a definitive proof.

Posted by James Kabala | August 22, 2007 4:30 PM

Which is to say that the United States was not founded as a Christian nation, isn't it? The United States was founded pre-Darwin, a time in which few were plainly atheistic. Evolution does a lot to eviscerate the argument from design--it makes deism unnecessary. It's profoundly silly to argue that the founders, inspired as they were by Hume, Hobbes, Locke and co., are an example that in any way should teach us the importance of belief. These were skeptical people who did not yet have an idea of how to explain the wonderful diversity of life without some supernatural designer. We do have such an idea, and it blasphemes the memory of the founders to in any way assert them as an archaic authority to prevent inquiry into subjects we are far better equiped to answer today, thanks to the advances of science.

Posted by Robert | August 22, 2007 7:27 PM

This is silly. Some founders were skeptics, who would almost certainly be atheists outright today. A number might be agnostic. Others, it being a more religious climate in certain ways now than it was in the late 1700s, might well be more religious than they were. They were a diverse group, with differing opinions, and it's hard to guess what any of them, raised in our world, would believe or support.

Biden does have a pseudo-point in that the US was very much, in a sense, founded on "ideas" including some fuzzy notions of rights emanating from the Creator. Most countries are founded on more substantial and useful things, like dirt and blood.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | August 22, 2007 8:50 PM

Re: Evolution does a lot to eviscerate the argument from design--it makes deism unnecessary.

The Deists were mainly concerned with the origin of the universe as a whole not just the origin of species. The really strict Deists did not believe that God did not interfere in the world in any way at all, so a God who showed up periodically to design new living creatures was quite alien to their belief. Rather they believed in a "watchmaker God" who put the initial pieces together then wound it up and let it go on it own so that life (among other things) simply came about naturally, although they did not know the mechanism. They would have had no problem with Darwin though, indeed they would have been glad to hear his theories. Meanwhile the problem of the universe's origins remains an issue today, but we know so much more about physics that it has been pushed into the far abstract corners of quantum and relativity cosmology, understood only by a few, so that for the average atheist "The Big Bang happened" is sufficient to explain the origins of the universe.

Posted by Jonf | August 22, 2007 8:57 PM

The Colonists invoked God to obfuscate the treasonousness of their revolt.

Posted by Carter | August 22, 2007 11:33 PM

I think these discussions get sidetracked when they start examining the minds of the founding fathers, as if they invented the country all by themselves. The American Revolution was the product of a lot of people coming together to fight for sometimes very different reasons, and the founders were politicians who were bound to try to please them all as best they could manage. Even though Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, why should he alone get to determine what it means? It was purposely a public document meant to speak on behalf of the country, not just himself.

Posted by Camassia | August 23, 2007 1:17 PM

Carter's right that they were a bunch of traitors, though, however much Russell Kirk tries to persuade us they were _conservative_ traitors.

Posted by The Marquis of Carabas | August 23, 2007 4:31 PM

I rise to oppose those comments that equate a dynastic, ethnic based country having an established church and national religion from a country founded specifically on the fact that God exists and that he made man a certain way. There was a Rus before Orthodoxy; Germans before Christianity and Franks before France was the eldest daughter of the Church. Similiarly, Great Britain was united to the Wall by the Romans before Christianity reached it. China and India have been China and India without recognizing any particular Creator, but our institutions assume one.

I remain risen to laugh off the Tripoli Pirates Treaty. Diplomats lie. The art of diplomacy is saying "nice doggy" while reaching for a stick. The language in that treaty so congenial to atheists and history deniers of various stripes was inserted to differentiate America from the confessional states of Europe. The Northwest Ordinance seems more apposite than that Treaty. Americans actually had to live in the North West. We repudiated that Treaty and put paid to the Moslem raiders of the Barbary Coast. We settled the Northwest territories under a law that recognized God and religion as a good cause to do so.

There is a famous, talented and influential politician who spent his days attacking the premise, associated thought and words of the Declaration of Independence now derided by Sullivan and the atheist/secularists who cover the blogosphere like the buffalo of old but have about as much relation to our founding as the Ivory Billed Woodpecker has to tree damage in the present American South. His name was John C. Calhoun.

The present denigration of our rights as being a unarguable logical step from our nature and the nature of creation promises to lead to similiar wonders on the body politic as Mr. Calhoun's philosophy performed.

Joe Biden is right. God Help Me, I never thought I'd say it!

Posted by jjv | August 27, 2007 5:30 PM