While looking forward to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we observed yesterday, as Leon Kass put it, “the erosion … of the idea of man as something splendid or divine.” That is what the Declaration recognized in man’s status as having been “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” John West’s new book — Endowed by Our Creator: The Bible, Science, and the Battle for America’s Soul — reflects the fact that our special human stature has been under attack, with science often enlisted in the assault.
In this context, the rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence may seem no more than the chauvinism of our species. In response to such absurd but seemingly inescapable conclusions, some have hoped that merely reiterating the Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation will restore the grounds for preserving human dignity. But no doctrine can give man dignity, let alone one that is no longer believed. No “useful fiction” can rescue man from his current moral dilemma; for fictions remain useful only as long as they are not regarded as such.
What Establishes Our Dignity?
Even so, Judaism and Christianity do not teach that the doctrine of man’s creation in the Divine image establishes his dignity. They teach that the fact of man’s creation has established human dignity. Only if man is (in fact) a product of special Divine purposes — what is called intelligent design — can his claim to distinctive or intrinsic dignity be sustained. Indeed, if dignity is built into man by his Creator then certain rights are “unalienable.” Moreover, it follows that if man’s dignity is a fact of his origin, human rights are independent of religious or philosophical convictions, just as they are independent of the state. If the traditional view of man’s origin is correct, people have human rights whether they believe they do or not.
Voltaire said that madness is to have erroneous perceptions and to reason correctly from them. Historically, from the standpoint of human rights, madness prevailed under Marxist government like the Eastern bloc at the time of Soviet domination. Moreover, such madness adhered, and still does in other nations, to the pattern Voltaire described: indifference to human rights is reasoned correctly from an erroneous perception — a materialist perception that Karl Marx himself held to be scientific.
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.
A Crucial Shared Conviction
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
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.
Editor’s note: This article is adapted from an essay originally published in the Los Angeles Times.