The 'Achilles Heel' of Libertarianism

It used to be that most school children had to memorize at least part of the Declaration of Independence, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if some judge somewhere has ruled that the practice is unconstitutional. I suggest this because the Declaration is overtly theistic and, some would argue, Biblical.

After declaring their compulsion to state the causes that impelled them to their separation from the British crown, the authors of the Declaration affirmed their belief in a Creator Who endowed them with 'certain unalienable rights.' Let's pause and consider what these men were saying.

First, perhaps, is what they were NOT saying. They were not declaring a set of strongly held opinions or preferences. They were not appealing to a set of generally shared beliefs. Rather, they were appealing, first of all, to what they said was self-evident truth. Self-evident means obvious; requiring nothing to make it comprehensible. The grass is green, the sky is blue, and all men are created equal. Further, and to them equally self-evident, is that men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.

The framers of our American republic were not foolish, ignorant, or pre-scientific. And Darwin was not some scientific luminary who clearly saw truths that others could not perceive. Darwin's theory of Evolution did not repeal, or even amend, the Declaration of Independence. It wasn't even original with Darwin.

Ideas about how we might have originated without a Creator had been considered for ages. Theories on 'spontaneous generation' and the like had been tested and dismissed as illogical and inconsistent with what men could clearly observe in nature. The people of our founding era were aware of these quasi-scientific and philosophical ideas about origins, and had dismissed them.

The "theory of evolution' is not science. It is philosophy in drag. Any theory, to qualify as 'scientific,' must be testable, observable, falsifiable, consistent and non-arbitrary. My purpose is not to debunk evolutionism, but simply to show that, as a philosophy, it completely undercuts the self-evident truth presented in the Declaration. Further, if evolutionism were true, it would destroy the ideas of personal freedom, private property, and personal responsibility and replace them with 'survival of the fittest,' which, in political terms, means 'tyranny of the strongest.'

The Framers rejected this, as should we. They affirmed an inherent dignity in man and extrapolated from that core affirmation that men had rights they had received from their Creator. It logically follows, then, that if you reject the Creator, your status as a creature, and the event of creation, you reject the philosophical foundation of your personal rights and your political freedom. As a man with God-given rights, you have life, liberty, the right to own property, and the right to so arrange your own life as to be happy, safe and fulfilled.

Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' destroys all that. There is no 'right to own property' in Darwin's model. The strong take the cake, and everyone else fights over the crumbs. As a man that simply 'evolved' from lower life forms and, ultimately, from non-living matter, you have nothing but preferences and opinions, plus those privileges that those higher on the evolutionary ladder may choose to grant you. The 'elite', being more highly evolved, are the ones who rule. The peasantry does as it is told. This, of course, was totally unacceptable to the Framers.

The failure to grasp this is the Achilles heel of Libertarianism. When one rejects creation, one rejects divinely-endowed and unalienable rights. What remains is alienable privileges, granted by the strong to the weak, or if you prefer, by the elites to the peons. An 'unalienable' right is a right that cannot be converted into a privilege and then vendored or licensed back to the person enjoying it. For example, you have a God-given right to travel. In the evolutionist model, however, there are no rights. The elites grant you the privilege of travelling, and they license that privilege to you. A raw deal, you might think, but this is where evolutionism invariably takes you.

This, I believe, is the reason that the ruling class in this country has been so adamant about keeping the discussion of Creation, and the evidence for it, out of the schools, out of the media, and out of the culture. Those suggesting that we did not evolve are marginalized and vilified. Serious scientists who have examined the evidence and have concluded that Darwinism simply does not explain the data can expect to never get any research grants or be published, regardless of their expertise or credentials. Those who rule over us are dead serious about keeping control, and they may sense what would result were Evolutionism ever discredited.

Unfortunately, they have plenty of help from the Libertarians who, for whatever reason, tend to reject anything religious as being at cross-purposes with their political objectives. Once they figure out that creation and the Creator are really their strongest allies, the political tide could quickly turn.