Article I of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 states that "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights."
Unfortunately, the worthies who composed this statement chose not to explore the deeper question of how being born a human being gives us either equality or dignity. Indeed, where does the idea of human dignity come from? And where do our rights come from?
Dignity (by "dignity" I mean worth, value or significance) derives from our ability to choose between right and wrong actions. Thus, dignity is related to morality. Immanuel Kant writes in his Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals that, "Morality, and humanity in so far as it is capable of of morality, is that which alone has dignity."
But this is at odds with the prevailing worldview of our modern secular society. We may pay lip service to dignity, but in a secular world which no longer believes that God is relevant or even exists why should anyone think that anyone else possesses such a thing?
Psychologist B.F. Skinner titled his most famous book Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) and urged us to get over thinking that we possess either free will or any other specialness that conferred dignity upon human beings.
Cosmologist Stephen Hawking claimed that “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.” If we're just scum from whence do we get the idea we have anything remotely resembling dignity?
The brilliant early twentieth century Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that "When one thinks coldly I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand." Well, how much dignity do either a baboon or a grain of sand possess?
There's actually only one adequate source of human worth, but it's a source not open to naturalistic thinkers like Skinner, Hawking or Holmes. If it's true that we are in fact, as our Declaration of Independence states, all created equally and also true that we are created in God's image and prized by Him, then human beings do indeed have enormous value and significance.
If, however, there is no God, then it follows that what we call human dignity is a fiction we tell each other to make ourselves feel noble. And, if the notion of dignity is a fiction then so is the idea of human rights for there can be no rights if man has no special worth or significance.
If man has no special value then human rights are just arbitrary words hung on skyhooks; they're like paper money that has nothing of value backing it up.
Put differently, if there is no God, if all there is is the material universe, then Skinner is correct and human freedom is an illusion. We are all in the grip of the physical laws of nature and what we "choose" is what we've been determined by our environment or our genes to choose. And, if there is no freedom, if our choices are the inevitable products of factors beyond our control, then there can be no morality, since morality depends upon the freedom to choose, and if there's no morality there's no dignity, and if no dignity then no human rights.
We are, as Holmes suggested, simply a different species of baboon.
Freedom, morality, dignity and rights are all ontologically dependent upon there being a personal God. One can say, of course, that there is no God, but what he can't say, and be consistent, is that there is no God but that morality, human dignity and human rights all nevertheless still exist.
To say that is to talk nonsense.
