I am going to post here two debates I had (many years ago) about whether the Constitution is a secular document or not. I will then post above this work done by two poli-sci professors about the percentages of quotes from sources that influenced the Founders thinking on Constitution.
Debate 1
Excerpt From Some Questions Posed To Me On the Internet
Big Steve, great question! Let us see it again: “How does the Constitution not work for a secular state?”
I cannot answer for
Secularism believes in evolutionary origins, this is easily demonstrated by the high-profile secularists who signed the Humanists Manifesto’s I, II, and III. The Constitution and the previous Declaration of Independence are based on a moral premise, which is based in the doctrine of creation and a Creator. Why is this important?… as all the framers were creationists in some form or manner – even the Deists.[1] Let me explain, and please take the time to thoughtfully understand these lines of thought Big Steve, thanks.
In religious thought, i.e., theistic thought, rape is wrong at all times and at all places. However, if evolution were true in any form, rape is not wrong at all times and at all places. Rape will always be morally wrong to the Judeo-Christian theist. The only “moral” in evolution, if you will, is the survival of the species (or fittest). Notwithstanding, rape might not be wrong in our evolutionary the future, nor might it have been wrong in our evolutionary past if it allows for the species or fittest to survive. Allow me to expound my thought.
Morality can be adequately explained simply as an evolutionary device for survival. Tribes that treated each other morally (kindly, justly, honestly, etc.) survived; immoral tribes died out. Killing, stealing, raping and lying didn’t work. Morality can be explained by natural selection, “the survival of the fittest.” There’s nothing more to it, nothing mysterious at all about it.
Reply
This common objection reduces morality to a biological instinct, learned through trial and error. Cooperation “works” so it becomes “the herd instinct.” This reduction of obligation to instinct simply does not square with our moral experience. We do not experience morality as an instinct, but as a law which tells us which instinct to follow in which situations. No instinct is itself always right, but morality is always right, therefore morality is not just an instinct. Rather, morality transcends instinct, as sheet music transcends the notes on a piano. Instincts are notes; the moral law tells us how and when to play these notes
It is also logically impossible to reduce morality to biological instinct because that would be deriving more from less, “ought” from “is.” The premise or ground or source of morality for the instinctualist is simply “this is an instinct,” and the conclusion is “therefore this ought to be done.” but this syllogism is invalid unless you add the second premise, “all instincts ought to be followed.” That premise is obviously false and impossible, since our instincts often contradict each other.
The idea that morality is a matter of self-preservation is frankly absurd, as we often exercise moral judgments on issues that have no direct bearing on our personal (or societal) well-being, let alone our preservation. Another point is, “how can any culture be an absolute guide for morality if those who drive it have no transcendent reference-point.” The following story should elucidate:
The story is told of a man who stopped outside a clockmaker’s shop every morning on his way to work and synchronized his watch with a large clock standing in the shop window. One day, the owner of the shop got to talking to him and asked him what kind of work he did. Rather sheepishly, the man told him he was the timekeeper at a nearby factory, and that one of his responsibilities was to ring the closing bell at five o’clock every evening. As his watch kept very poor times, he synchronized it very morning with the clock in the shop window. The shop-owner, even more embarrassed, replied, “I hate to tell you this, but the clock doesn’t work very well either, and I adjust it every time I hear the factory’s closing bell!”
When movers and shakers in any given society have no moral absolutes to guide them, how can their culture claim to have any ethical integrity.[3]
Human beings in a given society might agree, for selfish mutual benefit, not to harm each other, but how does this social contract give any meaning to the words such as “rights,” “justice,” “fairness,” “right vs. wrong”? Os Guinness aptly states, “With the death of absolutes the prospects are grim for any lover of justice, freedom and order.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s maxim rings just as true today as it did in his day, “If there is no God, all things are permissible.” Even Voltaire had an inkling that social morality needed some objective basis, and may not have been entirely cynical when he said, “I want my lawyer, tailor, valets, even my wife to believe in God. I think that if they do, I shall be robbed less and cheated less.”
Michael Ruse and Edward Wilson in the New Scientist magazine say that they are the byproducts of evolution:
“Morality, or, more strictly, our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends… Ethics is seen to have a solid foundation, not in divine guidance, but in the shared qualities of human nature.”[4]
Elsewhere they wrote, “No abstract moral principles exist outside the particular nature of individual species.”[5] According to materialistic, or secularist thinking, the idea that there is a divine source of ethical absolutes and guiding principles for human society can be dismissed as a religious illusion; blind, godless evolution explains everything. This ties in with what Francis Crick called his “Astonishing Hypothesis”:
“‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”[6]
This is the standard line now taken by atheistic biologists. Where, however, is the connection between survival and morality? If human beings come from nothing and are going nowhere, what is the sum value of survival,[7] let alone of having ethical standards in the process? Thomas Huxley conceded the point without blinking:
“The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist. Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and evil tendencies may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than what we had before.”
If people are simply genetically programmed machines, detrained biologically or in some other way, why should we be concerned over the issues of justness and fairness, or feel any obligation to treat other human beings with respect? Scientist Rodney Holder elaborates:
“If we are nothing but atoms and molecules organized in a particular way through chance processes of evolution, then love, beauty, good and evil, free will, reason itself – indeed all that makes us human and raises us above the rest of the created order – lose their objectivity. Why should I love my neighbor, or go out of my way to help him? Rather, why should I not get everything I can for myself, trampling on whoever gets in my way? After all, I am nothing but a ‘gene survival machine,’ and my sole purpose is to propagate my own genes. The best we can do can be to come to some kind of agreement in our mutual interest along utilitarian [having regard to utility or usefulness rather than beauty, ornamentation] lines to live in peace, but if it suits us we shall be free to break any such agreement. Our behavior could degenerate to that which we see in the animal world – after all, we are just animals anyway”[8]
Judeo-Christian theism will always declare that it is morally wrong to torture children for fun at all times and at all places. Reductionist theories[9] of the mind can never say that at all times and at all places in the universe is it wrong to torture children for fun.
Stephen Hawking, who holds the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Einstein’s chair, at a lecture given to a university crowd in England entitled “Determinism – Is Man a Slave or the Master of His Fate,” discussed whether we are the random products of chance, and hence, not free, or whether God had designed these laws within which we are free. In other words, do we have the ability to make choices, or do we simply follow a chemical reaction induced by millions of mutational collisions of free atoms? Alternatively, the Constitution is a document of liberation, of freedom. We cannot have this “freedom/liberation” in its ultimate sense, as with the words “justness” or “fairness,” if the reductionist view is true. Period.
Words like “rights,” “justice,” “injustice,” “fairness,” “right vs. wrong” lose their transcendent meaning and become merely selfish means to further the individual / society. Laws, then, lose there true – transcendent – meaning, and become the vessels of human selfishness and advancement. Laws, then, become opinions no greater than the opinion of any other man. A society that loses its grip on the ascendant moral values given by our Creator (as our Declaration declares) loses grip on the absolutes that bind us together as a people.
Our thirteenth president, Calvin Coolidge, knew that absolutes existed when he said: “Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws… must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness.” However, this thought is countered by the modern thinker as displayed in a comment made by John Dewey who said:
“There is no God [i.e., a law – truth – moral, Giver and Author] and no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props or traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable [unchangeable] truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or permanent moral absolutes.”
Of course Dewey’s philosophy of thought pervades our academia, and we can see the chaos (callousness disregard for teachers, authority, and crime) that has ensued in education, as well as the declining levels of competence at every level. I hope we embrace the absolutes our Founders did, if only to keep the meaning behind “freedom,” “liberty,” and “justice” alive.
[1] Keep in mind that if you were to look up the word deist in lexiconal books of the time of the Founders, and how it was used in Webster’s original compilation of word definitions, it would mean something quite different than what Deist means today.
[2] “Objection,” “Reply” section from: Handbook of Christian Apologetics, by Kreeft and Tacelli, pp.378-379.
[3] This is the main catalyst behind the political-correctness movement and the multi-culturalism we find in the secular state, what’s called cultural relativism
[9] Reducing the mind to natural / biological interpretations only
Debate 2
Big Steve [second response],
Preamble to the Constitution:
We The People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare [goodness], and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Amendment XIII is the Amendment against slavery. Now, the words “liberty,” “justice,” and “[goodness],” were used. Alternatively, Big Steve, is slavery a wrong? Is it unjust? Yea or nay? These words and concepts have a “moral oughtness,” or obligation to them and their concepts.
Now, I have mentioned that all, I repeat all, who signed the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were creationists, in other words, they rejected evolution (evolution has existed for well over 2000 years, I have already posted about this in this thread in response to someone else).
“Preamble” to the Declaration:
When in the course of human Events it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.
Where do the Founders get the authority to “assume the Powers of the Earth?” What is the source for “Respect to the Opinions of Mankind?” How can they “declare the causes which impel them to the separation?”
“the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” They believed in Natural Law, which is implemented by God, the Lawgiver.
Alternatively, what were these causes… ultimately? Next paragraph of the Declaration:
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that the are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
All this comes from their “Creator,” and are “self-evident.” The Preamble to the Constitution in fact, mentions the “Blessings of liberty.” Where do blessings come from? (Especially in the minds eye of our Founders.)
The Constitution is a document of “liberty,” “unalienable rights,” and the like. It is merely all of these put into official form to restrain the government from encroaching on any of these “self-evident” rights. Without the basis of Natural Law the Constitution couldn’t make claims to the “rights” of the people. You may not understand this, but the Founders did, for they believed in Natural Law.
Some excerpts from my paper (some additions to it have happened since I posted it on SB [Yes, I appeal to myself as an authority]):
Human beings in a given society might agree, for selfish mutual benefit, not to harm each other, but how does this social contract give any meaning to the words such as “rights,” “justice,” “fairness,” “right” or “wrong”?;
Words like “rights,” “justice,” “injustice,” “fairness,” “right” or “wrong” lose their transcendent meaning and become merely selfish means to further the individual / society. Laws lose there true – transcendent – meaning, and become the vessels of human selfishness and advancement.
Laws, then, become opinions no greater than the opinion of any other man. A law then, would simply be the opinion of the majority. A society that loses its grip on the ascendant moral values given by our Creator (as our Declaration declares), it loses grip on the absolutes that bind us together as a people.
Our thirteenth president, Calvin Coolidge, knew that absolutes existed when he said:
“Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws… must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness.”
However, this thought is countered by the modern thinker as displayed in a comment made by John Dewey who said:
“There is no God [i.e., a Natural Law, Giver and Author] and no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props or traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable [unchangeable] truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or permanent moral absolutes.”
