The Birth of Natural Rights: How America’s Primary Declaration of Rights from God Informs Our Generation

By Dennis Alwine

Where do our rights come from? If you’ve ever pondered this question, The Birth of Natural Rights is probably for you. If you’ve never wondered where they come from, this book is definitely for you. The author traces the origins of rights as exquisitely expressed in America’s Declaration of Independence to their logical source, how they could only have come as expressions of the character of a loving, living God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Aug 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664240360

Dennis Alwine

Dennis Alwine is an international consultant on intelligence, security and intergovernmental issues over a period spanning the last six decades.

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Copyright © 2021 Dennis Alwine.

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Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.®

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Scripture quotations marked (CEV) are from the Contemporary English Version Copyright © 1991, 1992, 1995 by American Bible Society, Used by Permission.

Scripture marked (KJV) taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture marked (NKJV) taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-6642-4035-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-4037-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-4036-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021914182

WestBow Press rev. date: 08/13/2021

CONTENTS

Foreword

Chapter 1: America’s Bold Statement About Rights from God

Secularism, atheism, and naturalism

Is America’s one nation under God’?

What Makes America a Christian Nation?

Chapter 2: The Declaration of Independence on naturalism

Step 1 - Remove specific reference to the Creator

Step 2 - Get rid of an appeal to truth

Step 3 - Delete notions of ‘equality’

Step 4 - Insert a borrowed notion of rights

Step 5 - Invoke social power

Step 6 - Extend social power

Well, there you have it, the ‘Naturalized’ Statement

Chapter 3: We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident

Secularists’ ‘aha’ moment

Self-evident? Really?

Assertion of Moral Truth

Truth on naturalism

The fact-values distinction

Self-evident truth

Truth on theism

Do you get Gettier?

Do rights simply exist? A Neoplatonist challenge

Euthyphro’s false dilemma

Can science declare truth?

Chapter 4: That All Men Are Created Equal

One’s station in life

A glaring omission

Chapter 5: That They Are Endowed by Their Creator with Certain Unalienable Rights

Rights as manifesting the moral Ought

What if moral values are really subjective?

Do you know the way from Is to Ought?

Tripping through the moral landscape

Moral truth vs subjective moral values

Morality and rights as social fiction

Chapter 6: That Among These Are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Rights and the cultural mandate

What of a secular government that believes individual rights?

Chapter 7: That to Secure These Ends …

Why the origin of rights really counts

Government is power

Holmes and I don’t mean Sherlock

From values to the cash value of ideas

Chapter 8: That Whenever Any Form of Government …

The shift in behavior of the Crown of England

Resisting tyranny versus discarding the government

Chapter 9: A Christian nation in a post-Christian world

Why does the Constitution seem so different?

Post tenebras, lux - the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment

Living in a materialistic world

Appnendix A: Jefferson’s Original Rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence

Appnendix B: A Brief History of Human Rights Milestones

Cyrus Cylinder

Magna Carta

English Declaration of Right of 1689

Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen

The United States Bill of Rights

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Appnendix C: Other foundational references to theism

Bibliography

Endnotes

To Rosanne, my wonderful wife,

you have no equal!

FOREWORD

A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.

– Bertrand de Jouvenel

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.

– Benjamin Franklin

D o we have the right to enter a marketplace or public building without wearing a mask in the midst of a pandemic, or any other time? Do we have the right to keep and bear arms, and does that right extend to firearms designed or intended solely for self-defense, which means they are also useful for attack? How far do rights extend? Do they extend to our electronic devices and the content used on those devices? This is just a sampling of the daunting questions regarding the rights of citizens, and we have little hope of successfully engaging these questions until we understand the origin and basis for rights.

The first, highest, and best purpose of the law is to protect the rights of the people—from abrogation by others, but mostly from governments at all levels. This is obvious to anyone unjustly charged or handled, from the person subjected to harassment because his ethnicity somehow ‘mismatches’ the neighborhood through which he drives, to a former President made the object of a show-trial. To misuse the law—intended to protect citizens from government power—as an instrument of power is the surest characteristic of corruption, if not outright tyranny.

But what are rights? I’ll bet you won’t get a snappy answer to that question from almost anyone you ask unless that person is actively and professionally engaged in that very subject. This is due, in part, to the esoteric nature of the question. It’s also due to the fact that we presume rights at such a level that we apply them almost every moment without thinking about what they are. I would suggest rights represent the innate authority to make certain decisions, engage certain behaviors, and exercise our intentionality, either individually or corporately, simply due to our existence. That is the key thought—rights represent authority given to people on the basis of being human, stemming from human essence.

Yet, authority is a thing given, not a thing taken or presumed. So, from where do rights come? Now, to that question, you are more likely to get a quicker response, but how that question is addressed in America’s founding, organic documents form the central theme of this book. When you ask someone about the nature of rights, the response is likely to form along two lines—that they are either the result of a social decision in which the society, through its corporate power, gives you some right (e.g., the right to assemble or own certain firearms) or as the result of a divine determination. Much of this book is about which of these is more likely true.

So, if you’ve ever wondered where rights come from, this book is for you. And if you’ve never wondered from where they come, this book is definitely for you. Because the origin and nature of human rights are arguably more important than knowing what they are. If rights are established by other people, you can never know what they are, and they are always subject to change, always ‘alienable.’

Since you have rights, no matter their origin and content, you will experience laws to hopefully protect them. The law is a standard of defense, intended to protect rights, yet only a standard. It requires the allegiance and the capabilities of people in positions of responsibility to put it into practice. But law’s defense of liberty, while strong in the ideal, is fragile in operation, for it requires only a decision of the will of those in power to turn the law, this protection of rights, into an instrument of state power that strips your ability to put those rights into effect. And this is why government, the expression of social and civic power, should have minimal and carefully-metered authority, continually subject to modification or even removal by an enlightened people.

When the law stops being protective, it becomes a cudgel, pummeling the rights of everyone when it does so to the rights of even a few. This is why it is so important to take seriously charges of the violations of the rights of even those charged with a crime. And when the people, who ultimately have the power, whether they realize it or not, fail to check these abuses, tyranny grows. Therefore, it is essential that we, the people, remain familiar with the sources of our rights, power, and responsibilities to one another.

Our Republic is seeing troubling times, careening through accumulating crises of increasingly destructive potential to everything America holds dear. Our liberties, including the right to vote and self-determination, even the right to life, are in peril as never before. The collusion of industry giants, politicians, and left-wing interest groups has created in the Cancel Culture a new kind of Inquisition. Generations of this kind of corrupt cabal have eroded the pillars of America’s unique experiment as to whether liberty can survive or whether it must decay and collapse of its own weight. The ability to continue to maintain our liberties is in question.

Power without legitimate authority (authority ultimately comes from no human but can only be recognized by humans) devolves to the proverbial discussion, among wolves and sheep, over what’s for dinner. Yet, it’s so difficult for wolves to see problems with that arrangement, for they know only the apparent utility of power. It’s past time for us, the sheep, to become reacquainted with the foundations of American liberty.

CHAPTER 1

America’s Bold Statement

About Rights from God

These are the times that try men’s souls.

– Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

T he word try, in Paine’s parlance, implies a testing, a means by which one can determine the content of a thing. Yet, a test is only as good as the willingness of the one examining the results to see them clearly. Richard Feynman, one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century, said, The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. These times will indeed try us, individually and corporately; it is up to us not to fool ourselves about what the test reveals.

One day, in 2010, I observed the then president, President Barack Obama, a fine and admired orator, address a crowd with one of his polished, well-delivered stump-variety speeches. I have often admired President Obama’s meter and modulation, as well as his sense of his audience. On this day, the President chose to borrow, in a manner of speaking, from America’s Declaration of Independence, when he misquoted, All men are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights. It was a familiar-sounding line, delivered with such polish to disguise the intent of its misquoted misuse.

I must admit, the first thing I noticed was that he used the term inalienable rather than the word unalienable contained in the draft of the Declaration signed by Congress. A minor nit, yet nonetheless a mistake such a brilliant orator and former professor of law would probably not make, except perhaps by a lack of oversight of a feckless speechwriter. A moment later, though, it also dawned on me that Mr. Obama omitted, more obviously by intent, the phrase by their Creator, an omission I found rather unfortunate. I had to obtain the transcript to verify what I thought I’d heard. Now, I won’t opine Mr. Obama’s motives in doing this, yet, it wouldn’t have been the first time a politician wanted to gratuitously feed the notion that core American ideals have nothing to do with God, or even that overt public references to God are something our society, or at least political officials, should avoid.

What became a growing conviction over the next several years is how merely omitting by their Creator did nothing to eliminate God from this fundamental statement of human rights in the bold Declaration misquoted by the President, a document that founded our nation. So, I want to, first, thank Mr. Obama for inadvertently inspiring this book.

Through the influence of worldview thinking authors like James W. Sire, Francis Schaeffer, Nancy Pearcey, Frank Turek, and others, I have come to realize why America is indeed a Christian nation not just in the sense of the historical process that formed our nation, but that no worldview outside the Judeo-Christian could have served as a foundation for our Declaration of Independence for this nation. While other nations lacking a major Christian culture have adopted some of the principles of American self-governance, those principles did not originate there and likely would not have taken root there but for the foundation laid in the American experience.

In particular, the secular worldview that dominates today’s American culture is highly unlikely to have originated the ideas on which America is founded. That realization permeates our foundational documents and sayings, including our Declaration of Independence. That America is founded on Judeo-Christian principles and could not have been founded on secular principles is the personal revelation that grew into this book. Merely extracting by their Creator from that central phrase of our foundation Declaration does not remove God from the work. Indeed, the spirit of God is all over the core understandings of that Declaration of liberty.

The question of a secular America is one that was addressed when I was growing up in suburban Pennsylvania in the 1960s. I can remember my Christian second-grade teacher telling my whole class, in 1964, that for the first time in her long career, we could not begin the day with a prayer or talk about God in the classroom anymore. That generation politically concluded America is a secular nation with a Christian heritage. Now, we seek to eliminate or utterly distort that heritage, while we create a culture that believes it can build a kind of paradise in which it often seems the only moral evil is to name it, an endeavor the attempts of which frequent history’s ash heap.

Is America a secular nation (founded on secular, non-theistic terms) or a Christian one (founded on Christian theistic terms)? That’s a big and complex question, though it can be answered definitively. The culture in America currently exerting dominant pressure seems to have answered with a tilt toward secularism that has become more pronounced to the point at which it demands the removal, the outright banning, of all competing ideas. The unfortunate consequences of that dominance–the destruction of nuclear and generational families and the rejection of moral truth in favor of a decaying political expedient–are apparent.

Is our nation’s theistic religious character defined by a certain percentage of Americans who believe in the existence of the Christian God or who attend church? Do we answer this question by polling? Is our nation itself founded on principles uniquely derived from the character and person of that God? If so, we are certainly a Christian nation in our foundation, even in what many now describe as a post-Christian world. On the other hand, is America a secular nation as a description of our government institutions and a perceived separation of church and state? If that idea is true, our nation is run according to something akin to Nietzsche’s will to power.

A desire to avoid a formal theocracy–a political bond between a church institution and the power of the state–figured prominently in the minds of our nation’s founders. For thoughtful students of modern history, theocracy is something most Christians should desire to avoid. It is an arrangement that has been disastrous for the Church and for the cause of Christ, resulting in Church involvement in cruelties and damaging wars between alliances of state actors and their sectarian allies.

Yet, does a desire to avoid theocracy mean that any reference to Christianity’s God or a theistic God must be expunged from civil or official discourse? Does it mean the consideration of Christian morality should rightly be the Ferris Bueller of the public square, absent more than present? Does it mean discussions of public policy cannot refer to God or that Christian morality cannot be a part of the calculus of public policy? Most importantly, does it mean the codification into law of religious morality threatens human freedoms?

From the beginning of the European colonization of North America, the general trend has been one in which Americans pressed for a separation of sort between the organs of Church and the state, while some sought to perpetuate and even strengthen those bonds. Puritans in New England, not widely known for a secular doctrine, nevertheless came to value this separation. These same cultures would have generated shock and outrage at the thought of separation between Christian principles and the conduct of their government, as well as the content of their laws and lives. They would have been horrified at the notion that no law of religious origin has validity.

Yet, a careful analysis will suggest that the total separation between good government and Christian morality is unwarranted, indeed incoherent. A theistic God, specifically the Christian God, is not only in our nation’s very founding principles; He is there in our founding documents in ways inseparable from our cultural character. Attempts to remove God from that character, from those principles, and from those founding documents is not only futile but like trying to remove the heart and liver from someone’s body with an expectation that such a body will long survive. God is rightly the heart and spirit of that which we know as America, even when it seems as though that spirit, as seen through us, is at times weak.

At this point, several possible pre-drawn conclusions might arise. A secularist reader might say, "America is a secular nation because I don’t want the Church peering into my bedroom or telling me what to do! That’s why we keep religion out of the laws and public institutions, OK. If you allow religion in there, it’s only a matter of time before they start executing gays and forcing women into back-alley abortions. Why, they might even start closing stores on Sundays again! Where would it end?"

Law in America has never been served by efforts to simply encode the Bible line for line in the public law. Throughout our history, the public good seems to have been best served when the law is metered against two criteria: morality and necessity. I would assert that first, it must reflect morality. But secondly, it must also reflect a public necessity, not in disagreement with the first principle; the moral good validates the law, while the social necessity legitimizes its use.

Not only are these two principles, morality and necessity, critical to good government, the order in which they are considered is equally essential. Any law must first be good (or at least not evil). As a second assessment, it must also be socially necessary, primarily toward the protection of the rights of the people. First principles are essential, as is the need to put first principles first. Social expediency lacking in moral goodness will eventually collapse into a utilitarian miasma, while law borne of moral goodness devoid of social necessity leads to moralistic tyranny.

It’s also worth considering how a Christian reader might say, Well, considering that most of the Founding Fathers were Christian, it stands to reason they would bring forth a Christian nation, and many of them said just that! All this might be true to a greater or lesser extent. However, two things are reasonable: 1) Not every utterance from the lips or pen of a Christian is a Christian utterance, and certainly not every deed committed by a Christian is Christlike; and 2) It would be beyond anyone’s ability to truly identify beyond any reasonable dispute that all or even nearly