Reason and revelation were not antagonists in the view of America’s Founding generation. They were equally given to us by God, and when properly used, they both pointed to the same truths. The Declaration does not claim otherwise. Instead, it proclaims that America’s political system will be based on key truths about human nature that it goes on to identify, and that regardless of how those truths are ascertained (whether through reason or revelation), they are to be held by Americans as “self-evident”—that is, they are to be regarded as foundational principles on which our government rests.

The Declaration of Independence claims that it will enumerate certain truths that are “self-evident.” Unfortunately, that very claim has been anything but self-evident to many people, and there have been continuing debates over whether the truths announced in the Declaration are truly “self-evident.”

In its technical sense, a self-evident truth is a foundational proposition that you grasp as true once you understand it. For example, if you understand what a “whole” is and what a “part” is, you should grasp immediately that the whole is greater than one of its parts. Or if you understand that a = b and b = c, you should know instantly that a = c. Declaration signer James Wilson pointed out that all disciplines have their own first principles, even moral reasoning. (Wilson, Collected Works, I: 603–604, II: 821) Self-evident truths provide the foundation for all additional reasoning in a discipline. “In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend,” wrote Alexander Hamilton. If nothing is self-evident, there is nothing to reason about.

According to this strict definition, it’s pretty clear that at least some of the things the Declaration names as self-evident truths aren’t. They aren’t self-contained propositions that you simply grasp as true once you understand them. They depend on other arguments and evidence to make clear their truth.

But the term “self-evident” is also used in a non-technical sense to refer to statements that are plainly true to most people, even if they aren’t “self-evident” in the technical sense. That seems to be how the term is being employed here.

Some note in addition that the Declaration doesn’t actually claim that the truths it is proclaiming are self-evident. What it says is “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Just like mathematics or morality, a political system requires a set of first principles to build upon. The Declaration seems to be arguing that there are certain crucial truths that Americans should treat as first principles in order to build their political system.

Seen in this light, whether those first principles are actually self-evident in a technical sense is not key. What is important is that those principles are true and provide the foundation for our political system.

Some Christians don’t like the Declaration’s claim of “self-evident truths.” They point out that in Thomas Jefferson’s original draft, the Declaration stated, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable,” not “self-evident.” A couple of years ago, I spoke at a conference where Christian thinker Vishal Mangalwadi argued that Jefferson’s original language correctly founded our government on the truths of “sacred scripture,” rather than the “self-evident” truths of secular reason. Mangalwadi then insisted that deist Benjamin Franklin “pushed the Founders to change the terminology, and this was not a semantic change.” He “put pressure to drop the idea that, ‘We hold these truths to be sacred, derived from sacred scriptures,’ and say, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, meaning derived from common sense.’”

Some secularists agree with this account of what happened, but they think it was a good thing. Atheist scientist Massimo Pigliucci lauds Franklin for transforming the Declaration from a religious document to a secular one: “With a few strokes of his pen, he transformed Jefferson’s religious appeal into a statement of rational self-evidence—a change that would echo through centuries of American thought and governance.”

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