Google releases Workspace ad showing the Founding Fathers using Docs, Gemini, and eSignatures for the Declaration of Independence

Definitely fun! Unfortunately, it perpetuates the unverified assertion that it was Benjamin Franklin who replaced the words “sacred and undeniable” in the draft Declaration with the phrase “self-evident.” Christians and non-Christians alike have seized on this unsubstantiated story to either praise or attack the Declaration. Non-Christians use it to praise the Founders for allegedly replacing the Bible and religion with unassisted human reason, and some Christians have condemned the change for the same reason. In truth, there is no solid evidence of who proposed the different wording (the editor of the papers of Thomas Jefferson, thought it was Jefferson). More importantly, there is also no evidence that the new phrase was regarded by anyone as a substantive change, let alone a dismissal of Christian revelation.

Yes! Within the intellectual world of Founding Fathers; James Wilson, John Witherspoon and the metaphysics of Thomas Reid (whose work was so foundational to them), ‘self-evident’ did not mean ‘true because I personally think so’. It referred to first principles immediately apprehended by common sense - the Aristotle/Aquinas inheritance of the Founders own scholastic education, in which reason was understood as a faculty operating within a created order - not independently of it. Under which reason discovers the created order - it does not create it. ‘Self-evident’ and ‘endowed by their Creator’ are complementary and consonant, not contradictory. That is why the Declaration immediately grounds rights not in human reason but in ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’ and in humanity’s being “created equal” (essential created nature) and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights’ due to that created nature. The argument is not confessional, despite it remaining explicitly theistic - and this is what I’ve found modern education has no known category for, making it hard to speak about because we lack the language to do so. It’s been off the table in schools and higher ed for so long!