I was reflecting on the phrase “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” recently. Most people reading that famous phrase have no idea what those words mean.
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that “the Laws of Nature” refers to a set of semi-formal principles about how people and states relate to each other. The Laws of Nature are also called the Laws of Nations, or at least they were in 1776. They were sort of a predecessor to political science. They were also a kind of code for how relations should relate to each other. Like the Geneva Conventions are a set of principles that nations should follow during times of war. The Laws of Nature were principles that were derived by observing human behavior. They were not a set of laws in the same sense that a State has formal laws. Rather, they were intended as a set of natural principles, such as we see in mathematics or physics.
The second part of the famous phrase is “and of Nature’s God,” which is a shortened form of “and [the Laws] of Nature’s God.” I read somewhere that this refers to revealed laws, that these are the laws of the church. After having had some time to digest this, I’m not so sure that understanding is correct. This idea that the Founders believed that revealed faith or religious law was a primary principle in governing the relationships between nations never sat well with me.
The words were originally written by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was chosen to write the original draft, perhaps in part because he was a Deist. He did not have personal attachments to a Christian church, which would have made it easier for him to deny the authority of the Christian King. His soul was not at stake. With a Deist as author it could not be claimed that the wording of the Declaration meant one Christian sect was attacking another. Perhaps.
But what did Jefferson mean by “[the Laws] of Nature’s God?” I would suggest that may not have been a reference to revealed faith. Rather, it may have been a reference to natural philosophy. Where “the Laws of Nature” refers to a semi-formal code of discovered principles, “[the Laws] of Nature’s God” would be natural principles themselves. Jefferson was not inclined to accept religious revealed law as a proper control over society. To the contrary, he was very much a rationalist. He read history. He knew that when religion held too much sway over a society, tyranny would always be the result.
Jefferson and the other Founders did believe that government depended on virtue, and that healthy religion was a primary source of virtue. They knew from reading history that unhealthy religion was a source of corruption. But I find it hard to believe that the same people who understood the necessity of creating a wall of separation between church and state when creating the Constitution would say that revealed faith was a key part of the relationships between nations. That just doesn’t make sense.
So I’m inclined to believe that “[the Laws] of Nature’s God” means natural, or rational, truths, and not revealed truths.
I would love to find some documentation about the meaning of this phrase.
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4 users commented in " Another look at “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackArticles I need to look into:
http://www.prca-tucson.org/documents/Articles/Abr…
It has this text:
"2. The revealed or divine laws of the Scriptures. In this statement he points out that the revealed laws as found in the Bible are really a part of the laws of nature. "This law of nature, dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. No human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this. The revealed or divine law found only in the Holy Scriptures are found upon comparison to be really part of the original law of nature." It seems astounding that these words come from the premier law book of the 18th, 19th and early 20th
centuries. In Blackstone's law book, when the human law was cited, it also cited the Biblical reference upon which that law was built."
The author makes other statements that throw a lot of doubt on his credibility, but Blackstone might be a clue.
American Heritage has an interesting article that I should dig into:
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine…
It doesn't mention the phrase "Nature's God" but it does discuss some of Jefferson's religious philosophy.
Sullivan County has something interesting to say:
http://www.sullivan-county.com/id3/jefferson_deis…
Sullivan County points to Blackstone also as the origin of the phrase.
http://vftonline.org/Patriarchy/definitions/natur…
Blackstone considered the Laws of Nature's God to be divine law. Jefferson compared the teachings of Jesus to the teachings of Socrates. He believed that the written Bible was a flawed document; that the original Jesus was a rabbi or guru and that the stories of miracles were great exaggerations. Where Blackstone says "The doctrines thus delivered we call the revealed or divine law, and they are to be found only in the holy scriptures" Jefferson did not believe in the divinity of scripture. He found only a sublime philosophy in the pages of the Bible.
Another interesting article:
http://www.freedomformula.us/articles/gods-law-th…
More reading for another day:
http://www.laissez-fairerepublic.com/blackstone.h…
If you really wish to understand the laws of nature and natures God, then you must go to lonang.com. It is excellent laying the foundations of jurisprudence of law and equity for all time and all places. Anything not in line with lonang is out of line with God.
I suppose that when people arent around to define things for themselves, we can make them into what we want them to be, until we are shown different. This is what Jefferson himself had to say in 1816:
I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.
Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Albert Ellery Bergh, editor(Washington, D. C.: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1904), Vol. XIV, p. 385,to Charles Thompson on January 9, 1816.
I'm quite familiar with the LONANG website. It has a lot of useful information.
Please read more about what Jefferson had to say about what he thought of the Christian faith. Read Jefferson's own words, not other people's bizarre interpretations, backed up by misquotes taken out of context.
Are we misunderstanding the entirety of the quote?
"I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus, very different from the Platonists, who call me infidel and themselves Christians and preachers of the gospel, while they draw all their characteristic dogmas from what its author never said nor saw. They have compounded from the heathen mysteries a system beyond the comprehension of man, of which the great reformer of the vicious ethics of deism of the Jews, were he to return on earth, would not recognize one feature." — Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson was a rationalist. He described himself as a Deist (in the classic liberal sense) or a Unitarian. He wrote many times that trinitarian Christianity was a form of insanity and a perversion of the original teachings of Jesus.
I've always found that when one person passes judgment against someone else, the person passing the judgment is always guilty of the crime themselves. You have provided me no reason to believe that you are an exception to this rule, MACATAC. You have only given me one more reason to believe what I already know.
Have you never read this:
"Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."
Do you not comprehend what that guy was saying either?
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