We hold these truths to be self evident

By Fred Hutchison

(Letter to the editor, The Dispatch, July 4, 2008)

Columnist George Will claims that when Thomas Jefferson wrote "We hold these truths to be self-evident" he meant, "they have decided to believe it , thereby making it a self-validating tradition." Not so. Jefferson meant no such thing.

In mathematics a self-evident truth is an axiom which cannot be doubted but which cannot be proven. Rene Descartes, 17th century philosopher and mathematician, knew all about self-evident truths in mathematics and searched for self-evident truths in philosophy. He said that these truths were to be discerned through "intuitions of pure reason."

Descartes idea was a very old one. Philosophers Aristotle, Cicero, St. Thomas Aquinas, Hugh Grotius, John Locke and Montesquieu all spoke of rational human faculties which are capable of discovering natural laws and truths. All these philosophers spoke of the discovery of truth and none uttered a word about inventing a truth by "deciding to believe it." Jefferson, a natural law philosopher in his own right, would be the first to say to Mr. Will, "deciding to believe it" does not make it so.

Natural Law philosopher John Locke wrote a philosophical support for "The Glorious Revolution" and the English Bill of Rights (1689). Locke argued that natural law includes natural rights, which we can discover through reason.

Jefferson argued in the Declaration of Independence, that the English king exercised his power in an arbitrary manner to deny the rights of Englishmen to his subjects in the colonies. As such, he was a tyrant, and therefore, no lawful king. He was much like a usurper to the throne.

Mr. Will, it was the king who decided for himself what his power was to be and what the rights of his subjects were to be. The colonists made no such arbitrary assertion based upon what they decided to believe. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson appealed to "the laws of nature and nature's God."

Jefferson's arguments implied that the king had exceeded his franchise, as established for the House of Orange in 1689. The Glorious Revolution involved the extinction of the Stuart line of kings. The implicit penalty for violating the grand bargain of 1689 was removal from the throne. Jefferson's Declaration of 1776 could not have been more explosive in its implications.

Jefferson informed the king that the colonists refused to forfeit those ancient rights granted by to them by God and by nature. He explained to the wayward king that his colonial subjects knew about those rights because they are self-evident to reason. They are self-evident just as certain mathematical axioms are self-evident to the rational faculties of the mathematician.

Mr. Will, you object when liberal judges decide to believe what they want to believe. Why then do you observe that this is what Jefferson and the founders who signed his Declaration were doing, yet fail to rebuke them? We can praise the founders because this is precisely not what they were doing.

Down with King George, who arbitrarily invented new powers for himself! Hurrah for the American founders who defended our ancient rights using reason and securely founded our rights on the unchanging rock of the Creator's laws of nature!

© Fred Hutchison