The Declaration of Independence speaks of self-evident truths, among them, that all humans are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Do unalienable rights depend in an important way upon the Creator? The answer might differ depending on which Founder we consider. Thomas Jefferson is a good test case not just because he was the author of the first draft of the Declaration, but because he was not an orthodox Christian believer. Jefferson took scissors to the Gospels to remove all the miraculous elements, leaving a pared down version that he called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. The Jesus of Thomas Jefferson is merely a man who taught moral truth. So, for Jefferson, how is the Creator involved in the Declaration’s claim of unalienable rights?
An 1814 letter from Jefferson to Thomas Law sheds some light on this question. Jefferson wrote of “my own creed on the foundation of morality in man” namely, a divinely implanted moral sense. The author of the Declaration continued, “how necessary was the care of the Creator in making the moral principle so much a part of our constitution as that no errors of reasoning or of speculation might lead us astray from it’s [sic] observance in practice.” Jefferson recognizes that some people lack this sense. They are similar to someone born without eyes or someone born without hands, the exception that does not disprove the rule. For this reason, Jefferson thought both the ploughman and the professor are on an equal footing in terms of basic ethical responsibilities. Those who violate the moral law are without excuse, for knowledge of this law arises from our nature. In a 1787 letter to Peter Carr, Jefferson wrote this about the Creator:
He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler, if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science. For one man of science, there are thousands who are not. What would have become of them? Man was destined for society. His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object.
For Jefferson, God made man for a social state, so God gave to human beings a moral sense so that they would be able to pursue happiness together.
But if God is taken out of the picture, then Jefferson’s justification for trusting the moral sense—and therefore the self-evident truths of the Declaration—vanishes. If our moral sense arises not from the design of a Creator, but from chance survival and random mutations in the primordial genesis of humankind, why should we trust our moral sense as reliable? This insight has been formulated in more recent times by C. S. Lewis in book one of Mere Christianity. In a more technical, philosophical way, Alvin Plantinga makes a similar argument in his evolutionary argument against naturalism.
For Jefferson, God made man for a social state, so God gave to human beings a moral sense so that they would be able to pursue happiness together.
Unlike Lewis and Plantinga, Jefferson was skeptical about the miracles of Jesus. But Jefferson was not skeptical that we are created equal. Jefferson retained this conviction because it did not depend on miracles—it depended on creation itself. Jefferson, like all the Founders and first readers of the Declaration, knew the story of creation from Genesis, “in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:26-27). The Declaration echoes this passage. We are created equal, and therefore merit treatment that reflects who we are. Like God, human beings have the root capacity for understanding and for choosing, for knowing the good and for willing the good. If all human beings are created in God’s image, then all human beings have innate value and dignity in virtue of being created equal. This belief drove the Founders—and should drive us—to seek social and legal remedies to secure the innate dignity of each human being.
In the words of civil rights activist and public intellectual Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, “We contend, and we contend relentlessly, for the dignity of the human person, of every human person, created in the image and likeness of God, destined from eternity for eternity—every human person, no matter how weak or how strong, no matter how young or how old, no matter how productive or how burdensome, no matter how welcome or how inconvenient. Nobody is a nobody.” The story of Genesis, like the Declaration itself, calls us to live this ideal: Nobody is a nobody.
This article is the final installment of Dr. Kaczor’s series of insights leading up to the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.