See “Natures God, the Heretical Origins of the American Republic” by Matthew Stewart. Michael, I am a huge fan of yours, but was disappointed by severe omissions in your latest book. Please read Stewart’s book and Jonathan Israel’s trilogy on the Enlightenment – you will be better armed as you continue the Revolution.

Who’s conflating, I or Shermer? Shermer said, “Consider the principles underlying the Declaration of Independence. We usually think of this great document as a statement of political philosophy, but it was, in fact, a type of scientific argument.”
Shermer considers it a scientific argument. I don’t see physicists saying, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that the total energy of an isolated system remains constant.”

Shermer continued, “After the Enlightenment it was necessary to provide reasons for your beliefs and values, and those reasons had better be grounded in rational arguments and empirical evidence or else they could be ignored or rejected.”
So where’s the rational argument and empirical evidence that all men are created equal? If anything, I can show evidence that all men are not created equal.

Then, starting from that ground, we can construct reasoned arguments. But anything beyond that ground has to gather evidence to support it. The evidence may come after the argument is begun. The couching of the argument presents necessities for evidence. Until the evidence is in, any further construction is unsupported, and therefore not established.

Your apparent dismissal of the necessity of establishing the common ground from which to begin the construction is literally undermining the whole concept of rational discourse.

I don’t know you, so I don’t know whether you are aiming to do that with this faux reasonable confusion of the two distinct concepts of “rational” and “evidence”, but if it is simply sloppy /dashing thought and expression perhaps you should pause before blurting such apparently disingenuous subterfuge in future.