Page History

...

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among me, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organzing organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

True, the deistic God-talk evident not only here but elsewhere in the Declaration (especially in the appeal to "the laws of nature and of nature's God" in the first paragraph) is sufficient to make clear that the political faith thus confessed is exactly that---a faith, and that it therefore necessarily presupposes a basic faith in the meaning of ultimate reality for us by which it itself is necessarily implied as the only valid political faith. In this sense, the theory of the validity of a political faith necessarily presupposed by the Declaration is formally realistic, or, if you will, naturalistic, instead of positivistic. Thus it takes itself even as a political faith, no less than any properly religious of philosophical faith, to be grounded objectively in the meaning of ultimate realitty reality for us and thus, indirectly, in the structure of ultimate reality in itself. But what makes ir properly political, as distinct from properly religious or philosophical, is that it delibarately deliberately abstracts from all religions and religious or philosophical, is that it deliberately abstracts from all religions and philosophies as such in order to express solely the properly political implications of the basic faith in the meaning of life that it itself necessarily presupposed but does not and need not make fully explicit as religions and philosophies, in their different ways, properly do.

...