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It's "Nature Or Nature's God" reversed, the Jeffersonian part of his attributes that doesn't require providence or miracles. I use that because the Liberal argument for rights ties itself specifically to that part of the idea and only requires an extremely limited form of Deism that's tantamount to Kantianism.
This I think defuses the rest of your argument. The existence of Nature and its game theoretic reality explicitly do not require belief in the supernatural. We are a certain way, which means that there is a category of rules that are good for us to follow to be good whatever-it-is-we-are, and that category is natural law, from which rights spring. God is a reification of this.
There are certainly patterns of behavior that are more adaptive for living in reality than other patterns of behavior are, but then to say that your individual natural rights come from those patterns is either extremely metaphorical or just inaccurate, depending on what you mean by "rights".
To have a "right" implies having a claim. And nature, from what I can tell, gives no-one any claims on itself. Why would any rights spring from a set of behavioral patterns that are adaptive for humans to follow?
How else do you understand the concept of Natural Law exactly?
A moral claim, yes. Not some receipt from power. Later reactions to Liberalism would end up opposed to this of course.
What is the aim of ethics? Flourishing. Eudaimonia.
You can attack the problem from a lot of angles, but be you Kant, Aristostle, Aquinas or Mill, you always end up requiring of humans that they be good at being human.
All logical approaches of ethics require then that the individual choose virtue consciously and from that stems various systems of political organization, Liberalism and its concept of natural rights being one of them.
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