(October 4, 2023 at 3:21 pm)BananaFlambe Wrote: The declaration of independence specifies some "nature's god" but who or what is this exactly? The homeless in the USA are referred to churches for help, mostly Christian, but the libraries have nothing on "Law of Nature" books. What they have is something like 30-40 christian based books, and a few on atheism available to order from another branch.
So, if in school the pledge of allegiance specifies "under god", and there's no books on the law of nature or natural law, then who/what are they actually promoting to be "under"? And is there even a 'nature's god" to begin with or is this an open ended question?
Here is the opening paragraph. I'm sure you know this part:
Quote:When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
I put the relevant parts in bold.
Here I think "Laws of Nature" means pretty much what it always does. The earth turns around. Things fall down if you drop them. Time passes. All those things that happen because they're natural. We don't choose them.
I think "Nature's God" is a way to emphasize that these laws of nature are put in place by God. Nearly all the colonists at the time would have agreed with this. The phrase specifies that, again, these are not laws chosen by people but written into the fabric of the universe. But it's stated in a way that all the different colonists can accept, whether they're Quakers or Deists or Methodists or whatever.
So the answer to your question "What is Nature's God?" would be answered differently by people in each of those different denominations. Catholics think it's the Catholic God, Deists think it's the Deist God. Saying "Nature's God" is general enough to allow agreement.
The key point is the belief that human beings have a "separate and equal station" according to these God-created laws. That our rights and responsibilities are a part of nature every bit as much as gravity and the speed of light. This is in contrast to some older systems, which held that people's rights and privileges are given by the king or other temporal ruler. So the references to nature here mean that it is in our natures to have these rights -- the rights don't come at the whim of another, more powerful person.
