These gomers make it so hard to celebrate Independence Day

It’s Independence Day, which means most Americans are thinking about hot dogs and fireworks, neither of which interest me, and the Christian Nationalists are all reading that one line in the Declaration of Independence that represents the totality of their perspective: “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Forget the Constitution and forget that the bulk of the Declaration was an enumeration of the offenses of the British king, which the current American president is trying to repeat. The Discovery Institute is going all out on that line, with John West writing a whole book, Endowed by Our Creator: The Bible, Science, and the Battle for America’s Soul on their obsession. Wait…the Bible? I thought the Discovery Institute was scientific and secular!

Anyway Charles Thaxton and Stephen Meyer have written an op-ed plugging that theme. It’s terrible, muddled and sloppy, exactly what I expect for the DI.

It’s trying to argue that there are two perspectives, one God-centered that enables human dignity, and the other is scientific, which…they avoid specifying. It’s just not giving God credit, and therefore it’s implied that respect for human dignity will be somehow diminished. It’s an argument based on potential consequences which they don’t support with evidence.

Yet we in the U.S. and other Western countries, with our own familiar materialist scientific view of man, have created a curious situation. The orthodoxies of Judaism and Christianity contend that man has dignity because he has been created in the image and glory of God. If the orthodox view is false, as is widely assumed in the academic and legal professions, then one must wonder how long it will be until we in the West reason correctly from a strictly scientific perception of human nature.

The religious perspective has done a poor job of supporting the value of human lives — Christian orthodoxies are all about an afterlife, and has been used to justify slavery. That half of their argument is unsupported, and they don’t bother to support it — just assume that religious beliefs are good. The other half, that science is going to diminish us, is even weaker: they don’t have evidence, we are expected to wonder how long it will be until a strictly scientific perception of human nature leads to some inevitable outcome, which we should assume will be dire.

I’m amazed at how frothy and vague their argument is. It’s the Discovery Institute, though, so they think handwaving at Darwin and Marx is sufficient to prove their thesis.

We might well remember that neither the edifice of Western technical sophistication nor the “science” of Marx, or of Darwin, can provide any firm ground for asserting these rights. Instead, productive proclamations of human rights depend upon a shared conviction that man’s dignity is inherent — safe from any political expedient — as our Western religious heritage once asserted, and as the Declaration of Independence still does

The Declaration of Independence is a 250 year old document that tried, successfully, to justify a separation from a colonial power. I don’t care if it “asserts” an 18th century view on the relationship between humanity and an imaginary god. I have a belief in man’s dignity based on an evolving humanism, not the words of a slave-holder.

Public, and especially political, references to this heritage doubtless offend the sensibilities of a secular age. Nevertheless, if the traditional understanding of man is correct, if it is not only doctrinal but factual, then governments can derive human rights from a dignity that actually exists. But if the traditional view is false and the modern scientific view prevails, then there is no dignity and human rights are a delusion, around the world and in the West as well.

Weird. So if you derive human rights from your fantasies about an invisible superman, then that actually exists. But if don’t believe in this god (and don’t forget, it has to be their specific Christian god), then human rights are a delusion. You know, humanists aren’t the ones arguing for the violation of human rights, that seems to be the domain of sectarian and racist ideologies. Thaxton and Meyer can try to wrap themselves in the thin thread of a single line in an old document, but it still leaves them naked.