Hmmmm, can you elaborate on that?

The people most interested in this theme are Leo Strauss and those who follow him. Plato would agree with you insofar as the Republic is a template for any lawgiver, but he and I both disagree with you with respect to democracy. The relevant eternals would presumably be human nature and its position in the world, and while it's possible that the Founders had some kind of vision, it seems that the democratic aspect of the founding is so much optimism.

And in honor of Spinoza, and because I’m a little nerdy and thought it might be kinda fun, here’s what such a thing might look like (in a quick, tongue-in-cheek sort of way); this is all perfectly in line with (at least Euclidian) geometric standards, so I’m willing to accept God’s existence to be at least as self-evident as any mathematical theorem, at least if one accepts the axioms and postulate as such.

And yes, the postulate is okay; many of Euclid's postulates were stated as exercises for the reader to perform. For instance, Euclid never said that between any two points, there is a straight line; rather, he said that, between any two points, draw a straight line.

Axioms (for our purposes here at least):
I. Everything which is contingent, has a cause
II. Not everything has a cause
III. Everything is either contingent or necessary

Postulates:
I. Note that you exist

Propositions:                
PROP. I. Something exists.
Proof. — This is evident by generalizing postulate i.
               
PROP. II. There is either some contingent being, or there is some necessary being.
Proof. — Something exists (by Prop. i), and it is either contingent or necessary (Ax. iii). Q.E.D.
               
PROP. III. Some necessary being exists.
Proof. — There is either some contingent being, or there is some necessary being (Prop. ii). If there is a necessary being, then some necessary being exists, by definition. If there is a contingent being, then there must be some necessary being besides this thing, because if all things were contingent, then everything would have a cause (by Ax. i), and this is impossible (by. Ax ii). Either way, some necessary exists. Q.E.D.

Last edited by Timotheos (4/17/2016 4:52 am)

DanielCC wrote:

Timotheos wrote:

Greg wrote:

Well, it is not self-evident, even if it is evident, that man has a Creator. There is also a question of how "equality" and "Liberty" are to be taken--and, I suppose, "Happiness."

Idk, it seems to me that one could justifiably say that, for instance, it is self-evident that man has a Creator; I guess it depends on how strictly one is treating the term "self-evident".

Is it not, for instance, self-evident that there is no greatest prime number, or that the Pythagorean theorem is true, or even that Fermat's Last theorem is true?

All of these are necessary truths, but are not obviously true just by looking at the terms; typically, people have to be shown a proof to know for sure that they always hold, and sometimes these proofs, like in the last case, can be so hard and tricky, that few people can ever even evaluate their veracity.

Hence, why can't we treat, say, a cosmological argument in a similar light; if we accept that the principle of causality is self-evident, and that infinite regresses of causality are similarly self-evidently ruled out, then why can't we accept that there self-evidently exists some Creator?

One might worry that this would imply that some Ontological argument must work, but if we allow that there is at least some broad sense in which it is self-evident that at least something exists, then why would the conclusion of a cosmological argument not inherit this self-evident quality?

Maybe we cannot axiomatically say that something exists, from the very idea of existence, but why can't we treat such a premise as a postulate, which happens all the time in geometry?

I think we need to be careful here. One of the greatest mistakes in modern philosophy was confuting the necessary with the self-evident (two marks of the dreaded 'A Priori', according to five generations of mistaken Empiricists, Kantians, Intuitionists and not a few Neo-Scholastics).
 
Likewise why should one 'worry' if some form of the OA comes up correct? Amongst Classical Theists tedious repetition of weak Thomist plaints has succeeded in well and truly poisoning the well for that family of arguments.

What do you take to be the self-evident? I tried to write a response to address your points, but I realized that I couldn't adequately do so until we honed in on that; I'm taking it pretty broadly here, to include pretty much anything that we humans can know to be true by basic observations we all share, coupled with reasoning.

The main concern here of course is not what the term self-evident means in a philosophically pristine sense; rather, it is about what the Founders meant by it, and whether or not they were okay in doing so for the context in which they were using it in.