The Foundation of Human Rights

Here is a quote from Mark Levine which he spoke on his radio show on Thursday (4/14): “But in order to have unalienable rights, there has to be a power beyond man and beyond government.” To set the context, Levine was talking about elected officials who want to be fiscal conservatives but avoid the social issues. Levine’s point was that our country was founded on morality that came from religion (another quote from the same segment is “the founding [of our country] is based on a belief system,”), so one who wants to be a conservative but is avoiding a moral code is in fact acting contrary to the constitution and is thus not a true conservative.

I agree with Mark Levine. I agree that our country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles derived from the Bible. In particular, I want to focus on the idea in the first quote above: the idea that unalienable rights (which are considered to be precious in our country) can only exist if there is “a power beyond man and beyond government.” I will do this by contrasting two ideas for the foundation of unalienable rights. The first idea for the foundation of unalienable rights is the Judeo-Christian view. In this framework, rights come from God. Quite simply, that is why they are unalienable: they come from Him and since He is unchangeable and all powerful, He will not take them away and no one else can take them away. In this sense, to say that unalienable rights are natural is to mean that because they have been given to us by God, they are therefore part of our nature. In a similar fashion, since God is the Creator of the world, He is also Nature’s God.

The other view of unalienable rights also sees rights as natural, but their idea of nature is different. Instead of being a part of the nature that God gave to man, rights are natural because they are derived from nature. This is the atheistic or agnostic view: since God does not exist (or we don’t know or care whether He exists), rights are not coming from an outside authority, they are simply intrinsic in the way the world works. The problem with this view is that rights can not be unalienable. If there is no eternal God outside of nature, then there is no guarantee that these rights will not change. For instance, most atheists and agnostics acknowledge some form of biological evolution. In this framework, man has not always existed. Rather, man’s lineage arose from apes. So were there human rights before man existed? There couldn’t be, because there was no concept of a human. Human rights must have arisen after the arrival of humans. Therefore, human rights can not be eternal, for they must be conditional on something (at the very least, on the existence of humans). If those conditions change, the rights change (or vanish).

Some sharp atheists might note, “But in the Bible, humans weren’t created until the six day. Therefore, human rights could not have been in existence the first five days of the creation week and therefore, they must also be conditional on the existence of humans.” The error with this statement is simply that in the Bible, human rights are not dependant on humans: they are dependant on God. God always intended to create humans (He even built the world around the existence of humans) so He had human rights in mind from the beginning of creation. Without an outside authority who bestows rights on His creation, the only thing rights can be derived from is the natural world itself, and if that is always changing, human rights can also change, and they are therefore not unalienable.

So I agree with great conservatives like Mark Levine who hang our sacred rights on the existence of a God who grants rights to His creation. Denying this outside authority is to deny the foundation of human rights.