Missing Shades of Grue

This is our KY governor in his State of the State speech the other night:

As I close, let me recognize Kentucky's veterans. You have served to protect our liberty and the freedom that spurs our quality of life in this nation. Please know that this administration is committed to supporting you.

And where does this freedom come from that many have died to protect?

Our founding fathers recognized that we were endowed with this right by our creator.

So I ask, what is wrong with teaching "intelligent design" in our schools. Under KERA, our school districts have that freedom and I encourage them to do so.

This is not a question about faith or religion. It's about self-evident truth.

What is Fletcher's epistemological view here? Founders "recognize" what is "self-evident." Why think it's recognizing and not just believing or firmly believing? Self-evidence? I doubt that he has a specific theory about the nature of self-evidence. It's a rather problematic issue even for professional philosophers. And notice it is not the rights themselves that are self-evident; it is not self-evident that we have a certain right. He seems to be saying that it is the claim that we were endowed with rights ("this right") by "our creator." So, what is self-evident is the exact genesis of the right(s). And it is not really rights but "liberty and freedom" that are the endowment. So, that a (or the) creator endowed us with something is known to be true. I suppose we could still be mistaken about what we are endowed with. It looks like liberty and freedom, but perhaps it is something else. And is it self-evident that the endower was a creator?

To sum up: our evidence for the claim that a creator-like being endowed us with something is the claim (the fact? the proposition? the observation?) that a creator-like being endowed us with something.

Of course, he might just mean that what is self-evident the proposition that KERA provides every school the right to teach intelligent design. That's not a question of faith or religion. But it is a legal question that a court in PA has already ruled on.

I thought Fletcher was supporting higher education, and specifically research oriented institutions, in order to attract more business. We've gone from "Education Pays" to "Unbridled Spirit" to "Self-Evidence over Science."

Confused? Obviously.

They Just Keep Piling On. The Loom.