[00:00:01] Speaker A: Now again, those rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Not a so called right that the government provides you with medical care, that the government provides you with food, or the government provide you with a guaranteed annual income. No, the government protects your rights to have the career you want to pursue, to make your own way in the world, to worship God as you see fit. And so that's the limited but very important role of government.
Idaho the Future A Podcast about evolution and Intelligent Design.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: For generations, the hallowed words of the Declaration of Independence that we're endowed by a creator with certain unalienable rights has inspired not only Americans, but millions around the globe.
Yet today, many Americans are skeptical or confused about the Declaration's key claims.
Welcome to Idea the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I welcome Dr. John west to the podcast to discuss his latest book, Endowed by Our Creator, the Bible, Science and the Battle for America's soul. Dr. West, in case you don't know him, is Vice President and a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, where he serves as Managing Director of the Institute's center for Science and Culture. His current research examines the impact of science and scientism on public policy and culture. He has written or edited 12 other books, including Darwin Day in How Our Politics and Culture have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science, the magician's twin, C.S. lewis on science, Scientism and Society and Walt Disney and live action.
Dr. West has also directed and written several documentaries and exploring Intelligent Design, as well as the debate over evolution. Dr. West. Welcome back, Andrew.
[00:01:52] Speaker A: Thanks for having me.
[00:01:54] Speaker B: Well, today I'd like to kick off a two episode conversation with you about your book, Endowed by Our Creator. And in this book, you're taking readers on a deep dive into the meaning and purpose of our foundational creed, the Declaration of Independence. You examine how the Declaration and the founders who wrote it were inspired by not just by philosophy, not just by theology, but also the natural philosophy that is the science of the day. And then you show us how science has been misused in the last two centuries to undermine the Declaration's principles. And then you tell us, thankfully, that there is some hope and what we can do about it. So today in part one, we're going to explore what the founders really meant by phrases like the laws of nature and of nature's God and and all men are created equal, and how those ideas connect to natural theology and even the modern intelligent design debate. Now, in chapter one, you quote G.K. chesterton saying that America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. What does that mean exactly? And why is it important for understanding the Declaration today?
[00:02:58] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks. I think that many Americans, or many of us who are Americans, don't realize how unique we are here in most places, even today in the world. Say if you're a citizen of Japan, likely you're a Japanese ethnicity, you've been there forever.
That's true in African countries, that's true in many European countries, although they have had more immigration more recently.
But really your citizenship, your identity is tied up with your ethnicity, your race, your particular religion. And I don't want to completely discount that. America historically was settled in the 16th and 1700s by people from England and Europe and overwhelmingly identified as at least culturally Christian, whether they were individually or not.
And that that's important.
Having said that, of all the nations of the world, and GK Chesterton was really perceptive in this.
America, from the very beginning, almost really has identified as that you could be an American if you adopt the American creed. And what is that?
Chesterton identified it with the Declaration of Independence. And I think that's a pretty good summary. The idea that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I'm sure we'll unpack that later in our conversation. But the idea is that if you believe those things, you can be an American. And so most Americans, I just urge people listening to think about their story of how they or their families came to America because we are a nation of immigrants. I mean, I think in my own case, on one half of me, if you will, goes back to Puritan New England. I actually have ancestors who helped settled New Haven or Hartford, Connecticut that were Puritan dissenters. But the other half of me, on my mom's side, they came through Ellis island from what today is Ukraine. Before World War I, both sides ended up embracing the principles of America and transmitted to me a love for America. And so I think that this really is unique. And I think today we do have some voices that aren't all that helpful who talk about being a heritage American, meaning that if you're not, say, a white descendant from the United Kingdom or Europe, you're not American. Bosh.
That's actually not what America has stood for. And so I think if anyone thinks these are just dry, warmed over concepts that aren't relevant to today, they're not reading social media or the headlines. This idea that American identity is bound up with a certain set of truths, yes, I would Say that the Judeo Christian tradition helps inform those truths and that if you try to establish a society apart from that, you're going to have problems. Nonetheless, those truths are universal truths. Whether you're a Christian or a Jew or Buddhist, these are universal truths. And if you adopt them, then you can be an American.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's a message for hope of hope for any, anybody who wants it.
So this creed provides justification for human rights, limited government and equal treatment under the law. And, you know, one of the things you remind us about is that the Declaration, it was always forward focused. It's a declaration, after all, and some of the things it declares would follow in time. It's not like everything was set in stone and done and enforced the moment it was declared. It was forward focused. It was looking to a future that would, as Lincoln put it, have these things constantly looked to, constantly labored for, constantly approximated.
So was it by design that the Declaration was always going to be, have that future focus?
[00:06:57] Speaker A: You know, that's a good question. I actually think it may not have been because, you know, they were in the midst of a war. And so the practical purpose of the Declaration was to state the principles as to why we should be independent. And so they were trying to not necessarily even trailblaze new ground, but they had to have a justification. And so they were trying to express what Thomas Jefferson talked about, not something necessarily new, but the common sentiment of Americans at the time of what they actually believed was fundamental. And so I don't think that at the time that they wrote the Declaration, they were necessarily all thinking about the future. They were just trying to survive against King George and Great Britain. Now, having said that, some people use that to say, oh, see, this was just part of political propaganda. Well, no, this was a statement of principles, because they believed in principles as to why it was right, what they were doing. And so, and again, as Jefferson said, he was trying to express the common sentiments of America at the time, their common fundamental beliefs. And so just because it was done for political purposes does not mean at all that these weren't expressing real fundamental beliefs. These were not window dressing. And I do think that the people who actually wrote the Declaration came to see within a few years of sort of like, I don't know, sometimes when someone has worked on a classic Hollywood film and they didn't know that it was going to be such a tremendous thing at the time they were doing it, but then afterwards it becomes this classic.
I think the same thing was true of some of the people who wrote the Declaration. So let me talk about just one guy. His name was John Carroll, and he was the only Catholic to sign the Declaration.
And he was one of the longest lived signers of the Declaration. In fact, he may have been the longest lived. I forget.
But in 1826. So about the 50th anniversary of the Declaration, because he was one of the few people still around, he was asked to reflect on it. And he wrote a letter that I cite at the beginning of the book that he talks about that he recommends the Declaration to the present and future generations as these principles, and that these principles are the best earthly inheritance their ancestors could bequeath to them, and pray that the civil and religious liberties that they have secured these Declaration principles have secured to my country may be perpetuated to the remotest posterity and extended to the whole family of man which he's talking about, that he hopes these principles will go all around the world. So I do think that even if at the time, in June and July 1776, when they were struggling to survive when they wrote this, that they may not have had huge thoughts about the future and what this meant for the future. I think that the Declaration writers and signers, certainly after the Revolution, came to see just how important what they wrote was.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: Okay, Yeah, I think you're right. They were wholly dedicated to the cause of the moment. And they knew, I think it was Ben Franklin that said, we must hang together or we'll hang separately. They knew what was at stake. Their very lives were at stake. But as you say, these words have been carried forward and have that future significance as well. Well, in chapter two of the book, you unpack several key phrases from the Declaration and explore both the signs of the day that informed them as well as the biblical tradition. And I really like this chapter because you unpack all the famous words, you know, and you give us some much needed context as to why the Founders chose these words and what they actually mean. Let's start with the phrase the laws of nature and of nature's God. What did the Founders mean by that?
[00:10:51] Speaker A: Yeah, thank you for highlighting how I unpack these phrases because, you know, I taught college students for, you know, 12 years, hundreds of students, I taught them the Declaration of Independence, and most of them, they liked the glittering claims of the Declaration. And we just did a survey, as I think you know, of 2,500Americans that shows that they say that they agree with things like, all men are created equal, but when you scratch beneath the surface, they don't really necessarily understand what those phrases mean. And so I wanted to show, you know, help people understand why they don't need to be embarrassed about these things. They don't need to think that these were just sort of abstract concepts that weren't really real.
Help them understand, well, what did the founders really mean? Because the founders were really thoughtful people, not just courageous, they were also very thoughtful. And so there was a lot of thought behind it. So laws of nature and of nature's God. I start with that because that's one of the most important phrases early on. And I think many people just gloss over it. They just think, oh, what is that?
So let's first be clear what it doesn't mean today. When people hear about the laws of nature, they think like the laws of physics, laws of gravity, fine tuning, all that's great stuff. But that's not what the founders are talking about. Or sometimes in a Darwinian sense, they think the law of survival of the fittest. That's not what the founders were talking about. So what were they talking about? They were meaning the laws of human nature, basically the laws of morality. And the reason why it said the laws of nature and nature's God is that the founders believed.
And I'd say this is completely consistent with the Christian tradition, the biblical tradition, that morality can be known two ways. It can be known directly through the Bible that God has revealed to us, but it could also be revealed to us through what the bible even talks about, what St. Paul talks about in Romans, the law that God wrote on our hearts. So the idea that God, in creating human beings, gave us a conscience and that the Bible also says the same things, and they're mutually reinforcing. So it's not that they go off in different directions that our conscience sort of. And if they do, if your conscience goes to the opposite of what the Bible says, the founders would have said something's out of kilter because they thought they. They spoke together. And even many Christians today, I think, are misguided in thinking that, well, the only basis for morality is the Bible. Well, that's not true. The Bible itself says that's not true because it says that God has revealed his law on our hearts. Now, yes, we're sinful, and that impacts the law written on our hearts. It also impacts how we often misinterpret the Bible or trust the Bible.
So we are sinful. But that doesn't get around the fact that God reveals himself.
We'll talk later in nature, but also reveals by writing the laws on our heart and this is important for a huge reason.
If you're together in society with people who may not share all your beliefs. I mean, right now in America, regardless of the past, many Americans are not biblical Christians today. In fact, I would say most are not biblical Christians.
Most Americans still culturally identify as a Christian, I would say as an evangelical Christian, that most Americans really don't fully understand. They sort of think their works get them to heaven. So my point is, and we also have many people who are non Christians and people who are what they want to say, nothing in particular.
If there's no common ground in the area of morality between Christians, Jews, non Christians, Buddhists, nothing, Aryans, people who don't believe in anything about God, if there's no common ground in morality, how can you have a civil society where you just don't kill each other? Because there's no common ground? You can't. And so this point, which might seem minor and abstract, is absolutely critical.
And, and I want to say that the founders were not inventing something new. They were expressing the common sense of American and of mankind. And that this idea that God revealed himself, morally speaking through both the Bible things like the Ten Commandments and the law written on our hearts was something. It wasn't just Paul. It wasn't just for. If you're a Protestant evangelical like I am, I meet many Protestant evangelicals who think, well, that's just Catholic natural law teaching.
Okay, yes, Augustine argued it, so did the early church fathers, so did Aquinas. But you know who else said it? And I cite this in my book, Martin Luther. Martin Luther said that the natural law written on our hearts is really pretty much nothing more than the Ten Commandments. He equated the two. John Calvin, the star of Calvinism, said that of course, in our own, not exactly our own lifetime, but in the last hundred years, you had C.S. lewis, who wrote a whole book called the Abolition of Man that was articulating this. This idea that reason and revelation and that our conscience and the Bible speak with one voice and reinforce each other and provide a moral common ground that we can get together with citizens who may not share all of our beliefs. That is Americanism 101, but that's also Christianity 101. Basically, Christian theologians, whether Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, from the Old Testament to the New Testament, all the way up to Certainly people like C.S. lewis, that was the standard teaching.
And Christians who don't know that, I want to make sure that they know that this is not something that's anti Christianity or anti faith. To say that there's a law written on our hearts by God and there's a law written in the Bible. And just one more thing, I'm getting too long winded on this. But why it's so practical when someone says today, oh, you're just trying to impose your biblical morality on me. And how dare you?
Now the answer to that is, well, actually the moral law is one and it applies to you whether you believe in the Bible or not, because it's the moral law written on our heart. And you don't have to be a Christian to be subject to the idea that you shouldn't steal or that you shouldn't commit adultery. And if you claim that you are, I love how Augustine put it, which is, so even if you find someone who says that theft isn't wrong or adultery isn't wrong, see what they say, if you steal their goods, see what you say, if you steal their spouse, they know that these things are wrong. Now the real problem, as CS Lewis would point out, is not that we don't know what is fundamentally right in most cases, it's that we ignore it and we don't follow it. But that's a different question. We, which we may get to in another context anyway. So the laws of nature, nature's God is the moral common ground that we share just by being human beings created in the image of God.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: Okay, so we've got reason and revelation that are converging sources of truth. It's what the Reverend John Witherspoon called the light of nature and the law of nature being consonant.
So let's move to the next group of words that are famous but not often fully understood. We hold these truths to be self evident. What did the founders mean by that?
[00:18:00] Speaker A: Oh yeah, there's a big debate on this. So technically, and the founders would say this, that a self evident truth is an inductive truth that you can just sort of immediately apprehend like the rules of logic. So for example, 1 +2 equals 3 rather than 4, 1 +2 equals 3 or 4. A equals B, B equals C, then A equals C.
So there are things that you intuit and you just once you see cannot be otherwise. So that's a technical meaning of self evidence. But and that's where people get tripped up because the truths mentioned in the Declaration of Independence the founders believed were absolute truths, but they're not really, I would argue, self evident truths in the way of that definition. Self evident though also meant basically rules that any reasonable person who had a decent upbringing should be able to apprehend and understand that they're true. And so self evident also meant just more plainly. These are obvious truths that decent people ought to be able to understand. And I think that really is the meaning of self evident truths in the Declaration. And a lot, I will say I do a little bit on this for people who want to go deeper. There is a lot of back and forth by scholars of, you know, how is this self evident or not? But I think the bottom line is self evident in terms of the Declaration was simply meaning that these are plain spoken truths that all reasonable people ought to be able to understand are true if you really understand reality.
[00:19:33] Speaker B: Yeah, we're lucky we even included them in the Declaration. If they were so self evident, they might have just left them out, but for posterity, we're glad they included them.
All men are created equal. Now, this is one of several ideas that has withstood sustained attack in the last few centuries, particularly from scientific claims. And we're going to look at some of those claims later. But first you lay out seven fundamental ways that all humans are equal according to the writings of John Adams and other founders. Can we touch on just a few of those?
[00:20:06] Speaker A: Yeah. So I decided to do it at this level. And I have to say that although my background, when I did my PhD, did deal a lot with the American founding, to write this book, I delved in things even more deeply and discovered, I think, some new things. And so a lot of people, even scholars, are confused about what it means by all men are created equal.
And I remember again when I taught college students, they would say, yeah, we are equal. But when I press them, well, what does that mean? In what ways are we equal? It really floundered. So I. But, but there are really, if you look the writings of the founders, they gave the ways. And so let's just first of all put to rest the founders were not meaning that we were all have the exact same talents, that we're all brilliant mathematicians, or that we're all this or that, or that we all have the same income or wealth. They were not talking about that. And they were very clear that. I mean they wrote extensively about this is what we don't mean.
But what did they mean? Well, I think you can piece together and I did, as you point out, through the writings of the founders themselves. So just boom, boom, boom. Number one, we are all created by the same God and we're going to probably delve into that a little bit ahead. But they thought that was an objective fact, not just wish Fulfillment. We were all created by the same God, so that levels us. It's not that one is created by God to reflect his image and someone else isn't. We're all created by the same God.
All humans have the capacity to reason. We're not like fleas or rocks.
That's a distinguishing characteristic. All humans have some capability of the law written on their heart. So we're moral beings. And again, fleas don't debate morality.
But the next one is that we all have.
Humans have.
Augustine would talk about that. We're restless until we rest in the O God. Talking about that. Humans have this passion drawn towards God and the worship of God.
Birds don't build cathedrals to worship God, they build nests. I mean, humans are the only creature that we know have religion. So that's another thing. We have immortal souls. And when we get to our discussion later about modern science, maybe in our next conversation we can get into that. But the founders, like James Wilson, said, human beings have souls that survive death. Well, that's a way we're all equal. And then there's a negative way that is absolutely critical that people often don't think about. But that made us so different from like the French Revolution that turned into a bloodbath. That negative way is the founders thought we're all sinful and corrupt.
And that's key because a key aspect of equality, because that's why you don't want to give absolute power to any human being, because we're all equally corrupt. There's no human who's so great and so superior that they shouldn't be subject to some sort of checks and balances because everyone except Jesus is corruptible. And then finally, I think because of some of the things we just talked about and because our rights ultimately come from God, not human beings, which we'll maybe talk about some more too, that we all have the same fundamental rights because we're created by the same God as the same creatures that. With the same fundamental rights.
[00:23:35] Speaker B: So it's what you start out with, not what you end up with, you know, as far as wealth or station or just what you amass in life. But it's what you start with that is all the same, you know, in terms of what makes us equal. Well, maybe we can get a bit more explicit about how the science of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries reaffirmed what the founders believed, as you say, by reason, conscience and revelation. You mentioned Sir Isaac Newton as well as English botanist John Ray. How did their thinking about God typify The relationship between science and faith at the time.
[00:24:11] Speaker A: Yeah, this is really interesting. So, you know, for people who read the Bible, think about Psalm 19 when it talks about the heavens declare the glory of God or Paul in Romans again, but this time Romans one where it talks about that human beings are left without excuse because basically nature proclaims, you know, the existence of God, what we see in nature. And so the earliest Christians and actually the Jews and actually many people in Greco Roman culture also all thought that nature, the orderliness of nature, the purposefulness of nature, could not have reasonably been created by an unguided process that's based on chance and necessity.
And the thing is, because people are so used to Darwin and we'll get to him later, that they don't realize that the foundings of modern science, all those founders of modern science, had the exact same belief. And in fact, in the 1516, 1700s, the people who were making the major scientific discoveries for them, it was reaffirming that the more we studied nature, sometimes people today say God of the gaps. The more we study nature, the more the gaps shrink and show that God doesn't exist. No people. Let me cite some of Samuel Clark, who was a philosopher, a theologian, a friend with Isaac Newton, and he wrote a book about being attributes of God, the evidence is for God. And he said, no, actually the more we find out through science, the less compelling atheism is. And he talked about the things that they knew at the time about the regularity of the planets, our circulation of the blood system, the various ways that our body parts work. And he actually said in the ancient times there were people like Galen and Cicero and that a thousand years before, centuries before, who even they could see that this couldn't be the product of chance. And necessity says now how much more. So if they knew what we knew now, they'd be even blown away. More. This was the standard refrain of all these scientists. And I know many people know Newton's famous comment that basically our solar system couldn't have been created except by the superior being. But what's really interesting about Newton and I bring this out. Newton actually thought the strongest evidence for design wasn't the planets. It was what he would call the contrivances of the human body and basically of biological creatures because we have so many things from our eyes to our ears to our circulation systems that require systems upon systems that screams intelligent design.
They thought that was a truth that could be understood through natural science.
Now bring this to the founding. What I found fascinating, and this was not Something I learned in graduate school. When you go through the writings of founders like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Wilson, John Witherspoon, John Adams, you name it, this was their view. So when they say that we're endowed by our Creator, they weren't just giving this fairy tale statement of, you know, yes, we're just paying lip service to there's a God. And so we're doing this exalted phrase. No. They lived in a time and culture where they thought science actually demonstrated provide convincing, overwhelming, irrefutable evidence that a creator God existed. So when they said we owe our creator, they really believed there was a creator. And this went for people who were not Christians, sadly speaking. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ben Franklin, they were Unitarians, they were not Christians. They didn't believe Jesus was God, but they absolutely did believe there was God who was a creator. And they thought science showed it.
And they actually read many of the people that you just talked about. In fact, I found in a document that has been largely overlooked, I think, by many people, by Benjamin Franklin, where when he gave, in his own personal words, worship of God, he talked about various things and then he said, and then after I've praised God in prayers, then I should read a selection from. And then he listed many of these natural philosophers who I actually quote in the book, that those are the people he's recommending he read them. So I'm not just. The key thing here is I'm not just making this supposition, I prove it. I mean, the founders were influenced by these natural philosophers. So when they said there is a creator, they were actually talking that way because they believed there was evidence of intelligent design, of an intelligent creator that came from natural philosophy or today what we called science.
[00:29:06] Speaker B: Right. And these were very learned men who would not just take something on authority, but rather saw it confirmed in the multiple ways we can know. Know things.
[00:29:16] Speaker A: Yeah, if you read their private writings, you know, they didn't take the. I mean, they disagreed with each other all the time and they disagreed on theology. They disagree. And so when they, when they did proclaim something they agreed on, you can be sure they agreed on it and they actually had reasons for it.
[00:29:30] Speaker B: So it's safe to say that the scientific milieu at the time of the Founders was not contradictory in the least to the philosophy or the theology that they also, you know, recognized.
[00:29:42] Speaker A: Not at all. In fact, it was very consistent. And I would argue that it actually provided the foundation, even in some of their, their writings for what they believe. Because again, if you look At John Witherspoon, James Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, they all actually explicitly cite some of these arguments from nature for God's existence.
[00:30:04] Speaker B: Yeah, well, imagine what the founders would think of the evidence of intelligent design in the last hundred years, you know, and we get to enjoy that, of course, and just think about what their reactions would be. Well, let's move to more keywords in the Declaration. All men are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. How has this idea that our rights come from God, not the government, been challenged in the modern era?
[00:30:33] Speaker A: Well, well, we can look no farther than the sitting United States Senator from Virginia, Tim Kaine, who last year lashed out at Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Why? Because Rubio had issued some statement where he, as part of it, talked about that our rights come from God. And Tim Kaine said, saying that our rights come from a creator come from God. That's what Iran believes.
And so that, you know, no, Americans shouldn't believe that. Well, this is, I mean, height of irony because of course, the most famous Virginian other than George Washington was Thomas Jefferson. And so here you have the sitting United States Senator from Virginia now basically saying that Thomas Jefferson, by saying that our rights come from God was basically like a moolah from theocratic Iran. I mean, it's hard to lampoon how historically grossly inaccurate and stupid it is. But here's where it gets serious, is the reason, and in this survey we did of Americans that was published just a few weeks ago, unfortunately only 4 in 10Americans now, or actually less than 4 in 10Americans, think that our rights come from God. And this includes self identified Christians. A majority of them don't believe our rights come from God. Why is this so serious?
Well, the founders knew that if our rights come from God, then they can't rightfully be trampled on by government or other people because our rights didn't come from them. Now they can do it, they can try to do it, but they can't rightfully do it. They don't have the moral right to do it. Whereas if you think our rights come from government, they evolve according to whoever is in government anytime, then you can't really say that what they're doing is wrong because that's just a new view that government has come up with. And what government gives, government takes away. Blessed be the name of government.
And so this idea that our rights come from God, not government, is really foundational to the American way of life. And I'll just, without getting too controversial here, think about the reaction to some of the most onerous and I think in retrospect, stupid and even wicked Covid restrictions that went, that infringed on personal liberties that went around the world, even in Canada next door to America.
Compare the reaction of what happened in the United States. In the reaction all heck broke loose because people were upset. They're still upset and I think rightfully so about some of the stuff that happened. Well, that's because they thought ultimately their rights came from God, not government.
And similarly in the arguments over slavery and arguments over a lot of things, if you think that our rights ultimately come from God, it gives you a moral stature to actually be courageous enough to argue against the stuff that you disagree with and to provide a basis. So this idea is not a trite little saying. I think a lot of people think, oh, our rights come from God, our rights come from God. That's a trite little saying. No. Or it's a scary saying like Iran, as Senator Kaine apparently believes. But no, this is a foundational belief in American culture that the. And the founders, I think were right.
[00:33:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, three rights in particular are mentioned and let's just touch on them really briefly as we wrap up this session. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Why did they include those and what did they mean for the Founders?
[00:34:02] Speaker A: Yeah, very interesting. So life, of course, you can't have any rights if you're not alive. I mean there's nothing.
And also we clearly do not create ourselves in the Founders view. And so this is something that you could also see directly. Yeah, this has to come from God. And so what did they mean by that? Well, basically government or other people cannot arbitrarily take innocent human lives. They weren't against the death penalty. They didn't mean that you couldn't do something that then you would merit losing your life or that you can't sacrifice your life to save other people. That's not what they're talking about. But that the government can't arbitrarily, like through a KGB or a Gestapo or something, take your life of an innocent human being just because you oppose the government. And they also, it's interesting and I talk about some of this in my book and then I actually found something after my book that I'll just give people here, James Wilson actually applied this to the issues of abortion and suicide. So today when people who are in the right to life movement talk about, you know, life as its absolute right, they're not misusing this idea from the American Family, because James Wilson actually applied it to the same things. He basically said that you can't. Because our lives are not ultimately our own. We don't have the right to commit suicide. So we don't have the right to take our own life. And then he talked about life in the womb being alive, and that we don't have the right that, you know, that's going against the right to life, to take life in the womb.
So right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. I joined together because pretty much it's getting at the same thing.
And this is not libertinism. So this is the big controversy of today. When people hear liberty, oh, you have the right to do absolutely anything you want, except maybe absolutely hurt someone else. No, that wasn't the founder's view. Remember the laws of nature and nature's God, they were not moral relativists. They thought there was a.
A moral framework that applied to everyone.
But within that there are lots of things. Like it does not break a law of morality if you want to be a baker rather than an artist, or vice versa, or that you want to be a farmer rather than a manufacturer. So the right to have the career that you want the right to, I mean, pursue the career that you want the right to, that you have to earn your living and earn the fruits of your labor. And actually, Thomas Jefferson was really big on this. And in his first inaugural address, he talked about having a government that was small enough, that basically wasn't stealing from you the fruits of your labor. He wanted a frugal government. Imagine that, a frugal government so that it wouldn't take away your right to earn the fruits of your labor. And so when they're talking about liberty, they're talking about the right to speak your own opinions freely, to worship God as your conscience dictated, to earn your money, to live where you want within your country.
Those basic things. And interesting. I like the phrase pursuit of happiness because they weren't saying, the government guarantees you happiness. The government guarantees you an income. The government guarantees you. No, the government guarantees. Or what you hope the government does is create a situation where, where you are free to pursue happiness and exercise your liberty in a responsible way.
[00:37:27] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's key there. Well, Ben Franklin said that only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. Why were the founders so observant of the relationship between virtue and liberty?
[00:37:40] Speaker A: Yeah, and again today we have, I think a lot of people have a Hollywood view of freedom, which is freedom is, oh, do whatever you want, you know, go get stuff if you want, go, go. Use hallucinogenic drugs, do whatever you want, other than maybe short of killing someone else. And that, that's freedom. And anything else is a restriction on freedom. No. As Ben Franklin pointed out, if you're gonna have a free society, you need to have people who are self controlled.
And liberty is not license. And this was at the time of the family. I go through lots of citations of both pastors and public officials and even like the Massachusetts Constitution and others that liberty was not licensed. And so, and that's because liberty is actually the opposite of both slavery and of anarchy. Because in anarchy you're enslaved to your passions. And so again, if you want, here's a thought experiment that I would often give students, which is more free if you're in an urban inner city that's wracked with crime scene. So that in your apartment you need 24, seven surveillance, you need triple locked deadbolt doors. You can't let your kid out without knowing where they are every second of the afternoon. Is that really freedom in that hip urban environment? Or a small town where neighbors know each other, most of them go to church and they're so self controlled that you can leave your doors unlocked, that if your kids, they can go out to other parts of the town exploring or out playing and you don't actually get freaked out if you haven't seen them for five minutes. Which is more free? Well, the founders would say that small town is more free because the more self controlled you are then the less the government has to do. But the other part of that quote from Franklin is the real kicker because it basically says only virtuous people are capable of freedom. But then as nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.
And so the reason why, one of the reasons why people push for more and more laws, the government to regulate everything from cradle to grave, 24 hours a day, is because if you're not self controlled, then you need another form of control. And so really the most straight laced, biblically based place where 90% of the people attend church, that's the society the founders thought could actually be a free society, that the government could leave you alone.
The more you get away from that, then the more you have need of masters, as Ben Franklin put it.
[00:40:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So you must have both virtue and liberty. Now you end this part of your book on the purpose of government. And before we go, I just wanted to ask you quickly, how did the Declaration propose that we secure these unalienable rights?
[00:40:35] Speaker A: Yeah, well, they thought that the purpose of government was to secure those rights. And so your rights aren't self enforcing.
And so the purpose of government is to secure those rights now again, those rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Not a so called right that the government provides you with medical care, that the government provides you with food, or the government provide you with a guaranteed annual income.
No, the government protects your rights to have the career you want to pursue, to make your own way in the world, to worship God as you see fit. And so that's the limited but very important role of government.
[00:41:15] Speaker B: Yeah, well, we're going to leave it there for today. But in part two, we'll look at what happens when the foundation of these unalienable rights is removed, and how science, especially Darwinian ideas, has been used to challenge the Declaration's core claims.
So we got that to look forward to. Dr. West, thanks for your time.
[00:41:35] Speaker A: Thanks for having me.
[00:41:37] Speaker B: Well, you can learn more about the book and get your copy at Discovery Press.
Discovery Press is the website to go to. You can learn more and also secure your own copies. Friday the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. You thank. Thanks for joining us.
[00:41:53] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
