God-Given Rights: A Modern Example of “Faith”
Faith as usually understood is a somewhat puzzling concept. Believers often say that they can give no reason for their beliefs. Unbelievers often have the same impression. Except that believers regard faith as a virtue, admirable precisely because they believe without any rational proof, while unbelievers look upon believers as foolish precisely because they believe things without rational evidence.
I think we should start with the assumption that there is no such thing as belief completely without reason. Large numbers of people do not commit themselves to certain beliefs for no reason whatsoever. Something motivates them to believe what they do. It may be difficult for believers to fully understand the reasons for their beliefs, and they may resist examining their reasons. But it is not credible that there are no reasons.
I think one difficulty that educated people have today in understanding the nature of faith is that this whole concept often reflects habits of thought very common in pre-modern times, but which modern modes of thought have rendered problematic. One way of putting this is that “mythological” ways of thinking and talking came naturally to premodern peoples, in a way that these do not come naturally to us anymore. There are thus few examples of mythological thinking readily understandable to us today, that will give us an entry into the understanding of premodern peoples.
Jefferson on “God-Given Rights”: A Modern Example of Faith and “Mythological” Imagery.
There does exist one example, however, that can help us in this endeavor. It is the idea of “God-given rights.” Thomas Jefferson for example seems to claim that a Creator-God exists who decided to endow everyone with specific rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Others might regard some rights mentioned in the bill of rights in the US constitution as “God-given rights.”
This is basically an example of “mythological” thinking and talking. That is, taken literally, it seems to assume belief in some unseen supernatural event, that is, that a supernatural being, “God” at some past time made a decision to endow people with certain inalienable rights. I will describe this as a “mythical narrative,” using “myth” here in a more technical sense often used by anthropologists. This is different from the meaning that “myth” has in popular discourse today, in which the main point made in calling something a myth is to say it is untrue. “Myth” as I use the term here, simply refers to narratives involving entities and events pictured as happening in some unseen supernatural world.
The idea of God-given rights involves a “mythical” narrative in this sense. It is a good example of mythical thinking because this belief is almost never regarded as in itself an obligatory religious belief. It is never recited as part of a religious creed. People always appeal to “God-given rights” in some particular context where it is obvious what practical purpose is served by this appeal. Jefferson’s appeal to God given rights occurs in the declaration of independence, where its ultimate point is to justify the American revolution against English rule by claiming that English authorities were violating some universal rights that God had given to all people. Almost no one today simply asserts belief that God gave everyone certain rights, just for the sake of asserting this belief, the way a Christian for example might assert belief in the Trinity because this belief is regarded as obligatory for all Christians. Appeal to God-given rights are almost always made in some context where some individuals feel that certain rights are in danger of being violated. The obvious purpose is then to assert that these rights are “sacred” and untouchable. No human agency gave them these rights, so no human agency can take them away.
The Importance of Context.
I offer this example of God-given rights as a somewhat rare remnant of “mythological” thinking fairly easy for us to understandable today, and useful for us to reflect on to help us make sense of mythological thinking and thought-habits of premodern peoples, that otherwise seems hard to make sense of.
That is, suppose we imagine a person unfamiliar with the concrete contexts in which Americans appeal to God-given rights, and the practical purpose it serves in these contexts. Suppose this person just focuses on the idea itself, the idea of a creator-God who when he created people decided to give them certain rights. This would appear to be a religious belief in a narrative involving unseen supernatural events which anthropologists would describe as a “myth,” comparable to other mythical narratives that tribal and premodern peoples believed in. For this person, this belief would raise the same kinds of questions raised about “faith” earlier in this chapter. How could anyone know that at some time very long ago, an unseen supernatural event occurred in which God endowed people with certain rights?
But I would guess that such questions would seldom occur to Americans today. The reason is that while we find some Americans asserting their belief in the Trinity quite apart from any practical point being made beyond the assertion itself, we never hear people bringing up the idea of God-given rights in this same way. We almost always hear it brought up in some concrete contexts where it is clear what practical point is being made, and why someone wants to make this point.
These are ideas central to my treatment of the origins of many different religious beliefs in these essays. That is, I’m going to proceed on the basic assumption that, in the beginning, when some community of people first began adopting and committing themselves to a certain set of beliefs, they did not do so after the manner of modern Christians reciting some elements in an obligatory creed. They did so in contexts which made clear some practical point being made, and also why someone would want to make such a point.
Another way of saying this is that, in order to fully understand the appeal of modern American belief in the myth of God-given rights, it is a mistake to consider the content of this myth in isolation. In order to really understand this belief, we need to do what we can to understand the place this belief might play in the concrete lives of concrete individuals.
In the same way, I think we have not really understood beliefs brought in in classics and scriptures that have come down to us, until we have at least made some educated guesses about the place that these beliefs had in the concrete lives of individuals who were first attracted to these beliefs. This is in fact one of the main things that study of these classics has to offer us today: they bring us as close as we can get to the human origins of these beliefs–”origins” here understood as what originally motivated the attraction these beliefs had for a particular community of individuals, and the practical implications attributed to these beliefs in the earliest communities who adopted them. What were the particular problems and concerns individuals in this community had, to which these beliefs originally promised a resolution? What practical conclusions governed the way that these beliefs impacted the lives of their original authors and audience? And so on.
Later Conversion of Mythological Imagery into Obligatory Doctrinal Beliefs.
This approach can be contrasted with the way later generations treated these writings after they had attained the status of authoritative “classics” or “scriptures.” In this situation, original contexts were forgotten, and people began to treat these writings mainly as repositories of certain doctrines believed to represent objective truths which could be fully understood quite apart from the kind of human “origins” described above. In the Christian case, later Christian thinkers extracted from biblical writings a set of doctrines held to define Christian orthodoxy, embedded in “creeds,” belief in which then became obligatory for anyone wanting to be a member in good standing of a particular Christian community. This still governs how many understand Christian “theology” today. Theology simply is an attempt to explain what a given theologian regards as a set of doctrines, which are themselves understood as objective truths about a supernatural realm, which preachers might connect to any number of edifying thoughts, but which are in principle able to be understood without any necessary connection to human lives.
This is not different in principle from those approaches which treat Buddhism as a “philosophy.” Whereas what the earliest Buddhist writings mainly claim to teach is a set of guidelines giving practical instructions how individuals might bring about a fundamental restructuring of a person’s internal psychological dynamics, treatments of “Buddhism as philosophy” try to extract from Buddhist writings a set of doctrines understood as claims to be giving us an accurate description of “the nature of reality,” to use a phrase often occurring in this context.
Reasoning about Beliefs.
Another important implication of the discussions above has to do with critical rational evaluation of religious beliefs. That is, once believers have already committed themselves to particular beliefs, they often regard those beliefs as “the basis” for certain ways in which they lead their lives. These beliefs are regarded as the ultimate basis, in the sense that, in the minds of believers, there is nothing else more basic, that forms a basis for these beliefs. And this in turn determines the focus of attempts to subject religious beliefs to critical rational evaluation: Since believers think of certain beliefs as the ultimate basis on which they lead their lives, it seems proper to take these beliefs as what need to be critically evaluated.
“Belief in God” is a good example. Since this belief appears to many to be one of the most important bases for a Christian life, it is one of the things focused on when people try to subject Christian belief to rational examination, leading to widespread attention to alleged “proofs for the existence of God,” both among believers and non-believers.
I think the example of God-given rights points to a different approach, because here it is obvious that belief in God-given rights is not a free-standing basis for anything. People do not first, for some unknown reason, commit themselves to belief in the literal truth of a supernatural event in which God endowed all human beings with certain rights, and this then becomes a free-standing basis on which they assert that some rights are sacred and untouchable. The reverse seems true: Some people experience certain rights to be sacred and untouchable, and the fact that these rights are experienced as sacred makes it convincing to picture them as having their origin in God. Tracing their origin to an act of God gives these rights an apparent basis in something that appears more objective and concrete.
“Good Reasons” for Beliefs.
This has consequences for when it comes to critical rational evaluation of claims about God-given rights, whether people might have good reasons for appealing to God-given rights. When judging whether people might have good reasons in this case, we should focus on what reasons generally motivate them to have these beliefs. According to the above analysis, reasons people generally have for appealing to God given rights are not the kind of reasons that would be needed to show some objective facts of the case–that some actual event happened at some past time in which God endowed people with certain rights. On the above account, the reason people generally have for appealing to God-given rights derives from the experience or perception that certain rights are sacred and untouchable. This perception might be well-founded or ill-founded, but the claim that this perception is well-founded is what we should subject to critical rational evaluation. The question to ask then is not what evidence do we have for some objective facts about an event in which God endowed people with certain inalienable rights? It is rather: What can be said in favor of regarding certain rights as sacred and untouchable?
Treating it this way would also make it more clear that the claim that certain rights are untouchable is a basically ethical claim. What it really says is that it is morally wrong for anyone to take away these rights, they ought not do this. And as David Hume pointed out, it is a logical mistake to try to support claims about “oughts” by an appeal to objective facts that do not themselves involve claims about oughts.
This applies also to statements about God. “Proofs for the existence of God.” for example, are typically cast as proofs of God’s causal power, the power to cause the physical universe to come into being. But brief reflection should show that it is a logical mistake to think that causal power in the physical universe can serve as the basis for ethical judgements. This would mean that “might makes right.” Proof that there is an extraordinarily powerful being who has great power to bring the material universe into being, and cause things to happen in this universe, would by itself have no relevance to any claims that the decisions of this being are morally binding on anyone.
These remarks are intended to further tease out the ethical assumptions, necessarily implied though not stated, when in some concrete context someone appeals to God-given rights. This is a basically ethical claim clothed in an appeal to some alleged objective facts about an event in which God endowed people with rights, assuming also that the decisions of this God are ethically binding. This in turn means again any attempt to subject claims about God-given rights to serious critical rational evaluation, it is a mistake to suppose that these are claims about objective facts. Mythical language here, appearing to be an appeal to some objective facts about the decisions of God, is liable to lead us astray, and mask the fact that when people appeal to God-given rights they are making a basically ethical claim, which must be evaluated as such: Is it ethically wrong, or not wrong, to coercively violate some particular rights people claim to have. Rightness or wrongness here has nothing to do with alleged objective facts about alleged decisions of God to give people rights, which are impossible to prove in any case.
Misleading Aspects of Mythological Language
The main point of the above arguments is to draw attention to something misleading about mythological language when it comes to any attempt to subject mythical statements to rational critique. That is, when someone appeals to “God-given rights,” to protest any attempt to violate some rights they claim to have, it might appear that belief in an event in which God endowed people with these rights, is the ultimate basis validating the ethical judgement that it is wrong to violate these rights. This would invite anyone wanting weigh the validity of this ethical judgement, to inquire into evidence for the existence of this supernatural event. But the point of my arguments above is to show that this is a mistake. The reverse is actually true. In this case the validity of ethical judgement is the basis on which people might be persuaded to regard certain rights as God given. For example, if someone holds that it is morally wrong for the government to make it illegal to pervent the purchase of a certain kind of weapon, they are likely to be inclined to accept that the right to purchase this kind of weapons should be included as a “God-given right.” If someone makes the moral judgement that the government ought to make it illegal to purchase of this weapon, they will be inclined to deny that such purchase is a “God-given right.” Either party to this argument might be right or wrong, but it would obviously be a mistake if either party began trying settle the argument by trying to produce evidence for or against the existence of an actual event in which God gave people the right in question.
I propose these observations about God-given rights as a model for understanding mythical language and mythological modes of thinking in general. The fact that some believers take certain supernatural beliefs as an all important “basis” on which to make judgements about how they ought to lead their lives, should not mislead us to suppose that these beliefs are also “basic” in a logical sense: that the validity of the judgements people make about how they ought to lead their lives logically depends on the literal and factual truth or falsity of supernatural beliefs that they have.
All this is very relevant in the present context because one of the aims of the present essays is to give a fully rational account of many kinds of religious beliefs. That is, I try here not only to describe the beliefs that are recorded in a number of religious writings that I treat. I also try to subject these beliefs to rational criticism. I ask not only what did the authors of these works believe, but what good reasons might they have had for these beliefs. The discussions above outline a theory about what kinds of “good reasons” are relevant in this case–namely that, considered in the concrete historical context of original individual believers, “good reasons” in these cases need to be “ethical” reasons, in the broad sense of “ethical” defined elsewhere in these essays.
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