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tried to declare that 2 + 2 = 22, or by printing money, there was more “value” in an economy with which to purchase goods and services. As St. Thomas More’s character states in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, “Some men think the Earth is round, others think it flat; . . . . But if it is flat, will the King’s command make it round? And if it is round, will the King’s command flatten it? No.” Clearly, the Eternal Law is an absolute limit on the will and power of the government. Thus, it is another self-evident truth that humans can never alter, and are always trumped by, the eternal and natural laws, or if you prefer, God’s laws and nature’s laws, or as Jefferson said, “The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”

The Yearnings of Mankind

St. Thomas Aquinas stated that the Natural Law was the role in which human beings play in the Eternal Law. The primary distinction between human beings and other objects of the Eternal Law is that we are in possession of reason and free will. As stated above, human beings are able to recognize self-evident truths about the world in which we live through observation and the application of reason to those observations. Thus if we go to bed at night and the ground is dry, and we observe the next morning that the dirt has turned into mud, we are able to reason that it rained during the night. Moreover, we exercise reason and free will in order to realize all of our fundamental human yearnings, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This inclination to reach a proper end (our yearnings) through the application of reason is the Natural Law; it is our human nature. Although this may all sound abstract, we experience this process on a daily basis: Since we have a human yearning to provide for ourselves and our loved ones, we have learned through the exercise of reason that we can best accomplish that “proper end” by going to work nearly every day. Thus, it is a fundamental human inclination to exert energy to meet one’s natural needs. If we don’t, we die.

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This, of course, begs the question of what are those “proper ends” that God has dictated we as humans naturally strive for, or—for our secular readers—what nature has dictated that we instinctually strive for. Indeed, it is the perceived subjectivity of the answer to that question which has made Natural Law an unappealing philosophy to many. As was mentioned above, one of the traditional answers was “all of those things which we yearn for.” To begin with, all living things strive for self-preservation. Thus, it is a natural inclination to consume food and water, and to defend oneself from attacks. However, as humans possess certain traits which are peculiar to themselves, there are additional “ends” which we do not share with other animals. For example, it is a natural yearning to love, to acquire knowledge, and to express oneself creatively. Those yearnings, however, do not lend themselves to being “listed.” In fact, to do so is to tread into dangerous territory because if we only recognize those listed yearnings, then we are in danger of disparaging others that we leave out. As we shall discuss below, the Founders recognized this problem and provided a solution to it with the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Since I first read the Declaration of Independence as a high school student, I have been fascinated with the concept of self-evident truths. If we agree with the generally accepted definition of self-evident truths—those which do not require hard evidence in order to evince acceptance—we run into two problems. The first is that at some time there surely must have been some evidence that caused universal acceptance of these truths; as in, it is self-evident that the Sun rises in the east every morning because the ancients and we have seen it there; as in, every human being has material needs to stay alive because the ancients and we have gotten hungry and cold and awkward at nakedness; as in, all things are subject to the laws of cause and effect, except for the uncaused cause, whom believers call God and our secular