Eric Nelson, author of 'Theology of Liberalism' explains his views in an interview with Providence magazine
Nelson: .. my book is really trying to look at the ways, often the sort of unrecognized ways, in which what presents itself as sort of robustly secular contemporary liberal political philosophy is in extremely sort of deep and complicated ways entangled in theological debates.
Western Liberalism traces its genealogy to Renaissance Humanists like Erasmus and Thomas More who, in turn, looked back to Cicero as the leading exponent of 'Humanitas'. Here, there were two contradictory impulses- the first was a tolerance of different modes of life based on the notion of a 'universal' human value, which was in tension with an Aristotelian impulse to individual, purposive, 'perfectibility' to be achieved by a self-selecting class.
Rising social and geopolitical tensions as expressed by the Protestant Reformation soon rendered this type of Humanism out of vogue, yet it retained salience for the writers and intellectuals who took advantage of the soaring rates of literacy and consequent demand for printed books and pamphlets in Northern Europe.
With the Counter-Reformation, and the victory of new concentrations of wealth and power over declining socio-economic classes, a new intellectual atmosphere prevailed, in the long Eighteenth Century, in which our modern liberal political ideologies coalesced.
We may distinguish a Calvinist/Augustinian/ belief in predestination associated with the Puritan work-ethic and the rooted opposition to an Established Church claiming Soteriological powers- e.g. that of offering 'Salvation through Works'- i.e. paying to get out of Purgatory and into the Good Place. On the other side of the barricade, there was a more tolerant Arminian meliorism or else a 'natural' theology- i.e. Deism- which looked to a non-Aristotelian Cicero who was Stoic in his theory of Justice but Epicurean in economics. Catholic thought had several 'back-doors' into Protestant discourse- more particularly through the Jesuits who, in China, had discovered a perhaps superior type of 'naturaliter chistiana' civilization.
And so, in essence, the book is trying to lay all of that out and really tell the story of how liberal political philosophy, in the Anglosphere in particular, although increasingly in Europe, but certainly political philosophy in the wake of John Rawls, took a very noticeable turn.
Sadly, it was a stupid turn because Rawls & Co thought Welfare Econ & Social Choice Theory wasn't fucked in the head.
Which, in retrospect, becomes clear once we understand Rawls’s own religious formation.
Indeed. We might also mention the Mussar notion that the material needs of the other are our own spiritual needs a la Levinas. Sadly, this turned out to be meaningless.
So, I really begin there and then try to look at different strands of contemporary liberal and egalitarian political philosophy and scrutinize them for how they either sort of surreptitiously make use of what began life as religious or theological premises
it turned out that the fundamental theorems of Welfare Econ and the implicit assumptions of Social Choice theory were premised on everybody being either omniscient or else being Liebnizian monads synchronized in pre-established harmony
or are sort of unselfconsciously rehashing, as it were, theological debates in drag.
There could be no debate because the 'Econ 101' Rawls, Dworkin, Sen etc. believed in was Liebnizian nonsense.
That is, debates that had already been had before for centuries in an incredibly high level of sophistication but in a slightly different guise. And so, anyway, that’s the general thought.
The ancients weren't making crazy assumptions about an 'invisible hand' or the 'mysterious economy' of the Katechon such that there is some frictionless process by which we always live in the best possible world.
Tooley: How do you define liberalism, and how does this history intersect with the history of Christianity?
I think the answer is that Liberals assume there is some 'natural' synderesis such that there is a Momus window into the soul- i.e. Preferences are always optimal and there is no strategic or other Revelation problem. Essentially, no social process is 'co-evolved'. Why bother with Christ, if we 'are as Gods' and our judgments can always be irrefragable?
Nelson: Well, of course, that’s the big problem, because the term liberalism as applied to any system before the early 19th century is an anacronym.
But the term Whig remained synonymous with Liberal for many decades. Ken Binmore, 'de-Kanting' his subject, describes himself as a Whig.
Liberalism as an ism, the term liberalism, is a product of the decade following the French Revolution in France and debates about the French Revolution.
In other words, it could be used in contradistinction from the more radical Jacobins of the first Paris Commune. In England, this meant that the post 1832 Whig party morphed into a Liberal party opposed to both the 'Chartists' and the Tory/Conservative party which, however, going forward, could gain the votes of the skilled artisan or upper working class by appealing to 'One Nation' Imperialism.
And so, whenever we use it in relation to earlier periods and earlier theorists, we’re engaging in a kind of anachronism, or it’s a kind of sleight of hand about which we have to be careful.
Whiggery had been anti-Catholic. Liberals, like Lord Macaulay, had no such prejudice. Gladstone was an outlier in that he had strong Anglican convictions.
On the other hand, of course, the kind of distinctive constellation of institutional commitments that we associate with liberalism, things like religious toleration, freedom of speech, some sort of doctrine of the importance of privacy and its protection, government by consent, the whole set of sorts of commitments that we identify as liberal, did have their origins in the early modern period.
In America, yes. The separation of Church and State was important as was 'Dual Sovereignty' which gave higher salience to the Judiciary. One might say that the US went down the path of Coke, Pym and Hampden while Britain took the path of Bacon and Wentworth. It was only quite recently that the UK got a Supreme Court.
So, we sort of inevitably look back to the 17th and 18th centuries to look for the antecedents of this cluster of commitments,
one could start earlier. On the Continent one might mention Ulrich von Hutten, a humanist knight who threw in his lot with Luther.
and that’s not stupid. That makes a great deal of sense. That’s where they come from, but they weren’t cold liberal, and they were all show.
Some were. But, in Britain, intellectuals had to be wary of the Church. The Blasphemy laws were not to be trifled with.
And here’s where it gets very tricky. The same basic let’s say political commitments, things like religious toleration, for instance, were often defended on very different grounds.
Macaulay's position was that it was inefficient to limit one's choice of MP. Maybe a Jew or a Catholic could serve our interests better. But those interests including defending the Established Church. America was a different kettle of fish. On the Continent, however, you had laicism or outright anti-Clericalism.
And so, really what we’re talking about is a set of liberalisms, a set of very different traditions of thought that sort of deliver this overlapping consensus in favor of this recognizable set of institutions.
Sadly, there was no 'overlapping consensus' then or now. Must liberals be 'pro-choice'? What about affirmative action? Wedge issues remain so even if Rawls and Habermas wish they wouldn't.
So, what I mean by liberalism and the thing that I’m really interested in thinking about in this book is not just that set of commitments, but one kind of rationale for them, namely the kind that derives them from a fundamental commitment to the autonomy of individuals as choosers.
Why be committed to something which can't exist? When making important choices- e.g. where to live, what job to take, which type of technology one should 'lock into' (e.g. locking into the Apple or the Windows or Android ecology)- we have to look what the majority of well-informed people are doing. Tardean mimetics- i.e. imitating the superior- is a survival strategy. If we don't autonomously choose to do sensible things we lose autonomy or our choice menu narrows till we go fucking extinct.
And so, a view that places extreme importance on the protection of voluntary action, and then, as it were, reasons from that to this set of commitments.
Why not place extreme importance on the protection of voluntary farts? It is all very well saying 'I disagree with what you are saying, but I will shed my last drop of blood to defend your right to say it', if you are as weak as fuck and haven't actually shed any of your blood at all? When is the last time you saw a bunch of Liberal political philosopher armed with baseball bats defending your right to tell a bunch of Hell's Angels that they would greatly prefer wearing frocks and sucking you off?
And I call it, maybe a bit clunkily, “dignitarian.”
Because 'nice-tarian' doesn't sound high IQ enough
That is the idea that sort of positions commitments like religious tolerance, free speech, the prevention of coercion in relation to private behavior and selling, that these things should be understood as implications of the correct understanding of persons as possessing dignity.
If other people possess dignity, you can't tell them they are fat slobs who are shit at their jobs. You must say 'Dear President Trump, you are never more dignified than when you sit on the toilet eating cheeseburgers and tweeting nasty things about Sleepy Joe and Comatose Kamala. Moreover, the gravitas you display when grabbing a pussy is such as would befit the Pope or the Dalai Lama'.
Where dignity is understood as something like the capacity for morality, the ability to choose.
So if some one has the capacity to stop raping you, they have dignity. You should speak to them politely rather than tell them to fuck the fuck off.
And that’s really the line that I’m looking at.
It is a foolish line. We suspect that people who gas on about dignity were notorious for shitting themselves in Swahili class. I'm not saying that is what happened to me. It is the sort of thing which could happen to anybody.
So, it’s very important to say there are other ways of getting to liberal commitments.
Because, if you don't say that, you may turn into a werewolf.
For instance, let’s take a very obvious one, you could get to liberal commitments because you’re a utilitarian, right.
Only if you are a Professor of useless shite in which case you aren't really a utilitarian. The greatest good of the greatest number requires you to give beejays to hobos. If you aren't literally dripping with cum you are not a utilitarian.
You could just think look, what I’m interested in is maximizing wellbeing. And oh, by the way, I make the empirical claim that the way to maximize wellbeing is to sort of protect people’s rights in this broadly liberal way.
That is not an 'empirical' claim because you can't measure wellbeing.
That would get you a defense of the same cluster of commitments but via a very different route. So, this is not the only route, but obviously it’s an extremely important one.
It is only important if you think failing to take that route might cause you to turn into a werewolf.
And it’s the one that the philosophers in the contemporary period, the sort of second half of the 20th century into the early 21st, whom I’m looking at, take themselves to be endorsing.
They thought they were endorsing a supposed consensus regarding Income redistribution. But voters, blue-collar workers, rejected redistribution from the early Seventies onward.
That’s to say the people I’m looking at are dignitarians. They’re not utilitarians.
They are nothing at all. I believe that we must all acknowledge and promote the right of all people to fart occasionally- more particularly when doing Number Two. But, currently, there are no academic appointments available for Philosophical proponents of fart-arianism. This is coz I iz bleck.
They’re not any number of other kinds of things. And so, that’s the tradition that I’m looking at, so I’m really trying in the first part of the book to think about where this thing called dignitarian liberalism comes from.
It comes out of the Civil Rights movement. Don't be nasty to blecks. Try not to make fun of homos. As for trans people, just let them win all the medals in female athletic events.
I make the case, as you know, that this is really a position that begins as a theodicy
Liebniz's monadology was indeed a theodicy. But it is one thing to say God is the only efficient cause and another to pretend that markets are frictionless and devoid of Knightian Uncertainty. This is because God may want there to be periodic market crashes. Arrow-Debreu securities, on the other hand, are active weapons of financial mass destruction. In other words, it is okay to say God may have a good reason for letting some really bad shit happen. It is another to pretend that there is some magic to the market or to public discourse such that bad shit can never go down because we are always in the best of all possible worlds.
and then I sort of go from there.
Even if this dude's theology is right, the fact is he doesn't get that Rawls et al, had the wrong economic theory.
Tooley: And you draw into your genealogy of liberalism several categories from Christian history, Pelagianism, Augustinianism, Calvinism, and Arminianism, related to the political struggles in Britain in the 1600s between the Calvinist Parliament and the more Arminian Royalists. So, how did all that play out?
Those who took that shite seriously got on the fucking Mayflower and fucked off. The Red Indians were terribly grateful- thinks nobody at all.
Nelson: Well, in essence, again, I should just say these are all very problematic categories, and so, I tried to be very careful about how I use them. Pelagianism, in particular, is a very tricky one because Pelagian is a term of abuse in the early modern period.
Because if there is no such thing as Original Sin, how come women bleed from their kooch once a month? You can't say Eve didn't do something really wicked to bring down such a curse on their kind. Also, if Ham hadn't seen his Daddy naked, how would it be cool to enslave black peeps?
No one says, “Hello, my name is John and I’m a Pelagian.”
Deist would be fine. Later on you could be a Theosophist or Christian Socialist or some such thing.
It’s what you call someone you don’t like. So, first of all, that’s a challenge, and it’s also a challenge because Pelagianism takes its name from a particular figure. As many of your viewers will know, that is this sort of late fourth, early fifth century British kind of lay monk named Pelagius, who was then attacked by Augustine in a series of late polemical theological works.
One might say that Pelagius represented the opposite pole from Manichaean or Gnostic thought.
And about Pelagius himself we know relatively little, and figures in the medieval and early modern periods knew even less. They possessed virtually no texts by Pelagius, so they knew him, as it were, through the bits that Augustine quotes and then attacks. And so, Pelagianism as an ism bears a complex relation to the actual figure of Pelagius, about whom we now know a bit more because various texts by Pelagius have been identified and studied in the last hundred years or so. But basically, the debate is classic and pretty simple.
Either there is pre-destination or there is nothing definitive anyone can say about the future.
It’s that basically if you begin by thinking that if you’re what philosophers call a rationalist about morality,
as opposed to a mystic who says, as the Vatican says now, that Faith is founded upon a mystery
that’s to say you think that morality or moral principles just exist necessarily and they’re not the result of God’s willing them to exist, God being perfect simply conforms himself always to these free-standing principles.
Also God- unlike me- could never be accused of sexual self-abuse- which is the reason I am currently suspended from primary membership of the Institute of Socioproctology though my accuser, who is also me, remains the Acting President pending a Tribunal hearing which, quite unfairly, is also presided over by me despite the fact that I've sexually abused the fuck of that self of mine. I sometimes feel that Socioproctology is institutionally racist. How come none of its white members have faced such accusations? Come to that, how come no white peeps have joined?
So, the other view, which we know as voluntourism, is the view that says no, it’s God who makes these principles. God sets the rules. And for any number of reasons, that was taken to be a very unattractive view for orthodox theology. So, the overwhelming majority of Christian theologians, as Jewish theologians, Muslim theologians, were rationalists.
I think Islam was the first to break away from that academic availability cascade. Still, there had been a 'Rationalist' (Mu'tazilite) inquisition.
So, they would say yes, moral principles just exist and God is perfect, and so he unvaryingly conforms his behavior to them. But wait, if all of God’s behavior, if he is indeed omnibenevolent, perfectly just, and so on, how do we account for the fact that there’s so much evil in the world and suffering?
Also how come God gave me such a tiny dick?
And that issue becomes the debate known as the theodicy debate, although that’s a term invented by Leibniz, coined by Leibniz in 1710.
Liebniz may have come up with the least action principle before Maupertius. Essentially, if God choses Newtonian gravitation it must be because it is the best theory. But, this means there could be a similar 'best outcome' choice for an Occasionalist God who, however, chooses to preside over a clockwork universe coz....urm... clockworks are cool, right?
It’s a debate that had been going on for a millennium and a half at that point, at least.
What was new was Newtonian physics. No more Aristotelian teleology. But if telos was out, how could one continue to believe there was some design or purpose to the material world? One solution was that this was the best of possible world. This is like saying the free market is better than any other system even though it might seem to feature avoidable suffering or injustice. This may be true, but it may also be true that a Dictatorship is better than Democracy or a foreign occupier might be less shitty than any government we might devise for ourselves. Still, if there really is a particular outcome everybody would agree was the best possible then we could say there was a 'natural', or 'canonical' or non-arbitrary' solution to a large class of problems. This suggests there might be a mathesis univeralis which using some sort of mathematical, or logical, array of symbols, could algorithmically crank out all knowledge. This is like the 'Zairja' of the Arabs or Raymon Lull's 'Ars Magna'.
Sadly, it appears 'naturality', save for some narrow purpose, is far to seek till, perhaps, the end of mathematical time.
And this is the attempt to try to explain how the evil or badness that exists in the world of different kinds is compatible with the hypothesis that an omnipotent and perfectly just God could have elected to create this world. And one of the kinds of badness which was most worrisome was the evil of punishment for sin. That’s to say, if you were an orthodox Christian, you believed that, particularly in the earlier period, you believed that the vast majority of the human race was going to be damned, and you needed to explain why God’s justice was compatible with that fact.
The bigger problem was why the Chinese were inferior even though they manifestly weren't. What is the point of believing in God if he isn't as racist as fuck?
And so, the most natural line of response, which is the one that Pelagius himself took, is to say well, easy, it’s because we’re free. We’re capable of morality. We’re always capable of not sinning, of choosing not to sin, and, therefore, if we do sin, God is just in punishing us.
This was all very well. But the God business was what gave many an educated man his livelihood. Welsh dudes were welcome to become hermits and to live on berries- though Pelagius himself showed no such inclination.
So, fair enough. And then you could use that same argument to address a different but related worry, which is how might you explain the fact of physical suffering in the world?
You might well explain anything away if that keeps your from the Inquisition's rack.
Why is this a world that has earthquakes and cancer and all of these things?
The answers to these questions turned out to be more interesting and useful than theology. Still, Religion too could have utility.
Well, you might say that the thing that’s transcendently valuable is that there should be creatures like us who are capable of morality, of free choice.
and farting. That's transcendentally valuable sure enough.
And perhaps we can imagine, although we could never prove, that in order for there to be creatures like us who are capable of morality, you need this complex recipe of natural forces and elements, one of the byproducts of which is going to be things like earthquakes and cancer.
Without both, our farts would lack in poignancy or piquant humor.
And that the badness of those things is outweighed by the transcendent value of our morality, of our capacity for morality. And that’s basically Pelagianism.
My transcendentally valuable fart redeems the Cosmos.
The problem for Augustine, which is why he attacks Pelagius, is that this seemed to him, and to many who followed him, to possibly help you in the theodicy debate but to be very, very dangerously incompatible with Christian doctrine.
My farts are transcendentally valuable because I alone incarnate fart-arian doctrine in the pure and unalloyed form. As to why I, not you, was blessed in this regard- that is a mystery or transcendentally valuable fart of a fart.
Because if we’re all perfectly capable of choosing not to sin
i.e. to fart non-sinning
and thereby electing and meriting God’s favor and election or salvation,
or the fart which by its own Grace farts itself
why did we need Jesus to come and be crucified?
me to shit myself in Swahili class? Crucifixion is a piece of cake compared to what I endured. Indeed, it was the reason I quit teaching.
Why did we need the atonement? What’s the role of grace, doesn’t that all just collapse? And so, Augustine responds by doubling down on his sort of massively important formulation of the doctrine of original sin, which says that we’re not free not to sin, that we’re actually in bondage. The spirit is depraved and incapable of avoiding sin, and therefore the only thing that saves us is unmerited, irresistible grace.
This is a Deus out of some other Machine. The Fart-arian fart that farts itself as Grace exists in a different dimension. Why it chose me is a mystery that surpasses understanding.This may be absurd, but it is a logical absurdity.
Which is the position he takes until the very end of his life. In the subsequent history of Christianity, this has been a dialectic, right. So, most Christian theologians try to come down somewhere in the middle. I mean, you had Calvinists and Jansenists who went the full way of Augustine and the full predestinarian salvation story and damnation story, but most tried to do something in the middle. Grace is necessary but not sufficient, or that we can make ourselves somehow open to grace, we can at least accept it or reject it. We have some role in it and so on. But the orthodox position, the one that really comes out of Augustine, must assign a very large role to grace.
Equally, with Arjuna, one might say that anything God gives is only valuable if it is given gratuitously. One might say the same of a kiss from one's sweetheart. Love is like that only.
And this seemed to many of the figures that I’m talking about in the book to turn God into a kind of tyrant, and therefore to be absolutely unacceptable.
In Urdu poetry, the beloved is a tyrant. Nothing wrong in that. Baby is a terrible tyrant because he is sleeping even though Daddy wants to play. I suppose Professors would have felt a bit foolish gassing on about Lurve while their students ask 'will this be on the Test?'
That’s to say, if God first depraves your spirit so that you can’t sin and then punishes you for the sin you couldn’t avoid, that’s the behavior of the tyrant.
Baby is very tyrannical. First he is causing Daddy to want to play with him but he is obstinately at sleep when Daddy comes home eagerly from the office. Boo!
And so, they were, the figures I’m interested in, this kind of long train from Milton
for whom Adam & Eve's mutual love makes anything, even expulsion from Paradise, worthwhile.
through Locke, Kant, and so on, were all becoming increasingly Pelagian, rejecting the doctrine of original sin, being led to very heterodox views about things like the Trinity or the divinity of Christ.
Not really. It is one thing to desire political change of a particular type. It is another to say this involves some ancient heresy.
They were becoming something very much like later sort of what we would know in the later period as unitarians.
Knowledge of Islam, Chinese Buddhism and the Upanishads revived interest in a simple Monism as opposed to the mystery of the Trinity.
They were kind of getting very, very far away so that they could defend the justice of God.
The trouble is that every serial killer thinks it very unjust that he should be sent to jail. Why isn't he being given a medal? As for God, did I mention my complaint re. my dick size?
And what I try to show is that all of these commitments to religious freedom, toleration, the sort of respective political institutions for individual choice, they all justified on the model of that theodicy, and as a result of it.
How so? We stop 'committing' to tolerance and religious freedom when crazy Jihadis blow us up. Political institutions are changed or abandoned if they are ineffective. This has nothing to do with God or the Devil.
Because if the thing that’s transcendently valuable is that we have to be capable of morality, and if being capable of morality means being capable of freely choosing to do the right thing, then we have to be, as it were, let alone to make choices, including bad choices.
But this is always true for the vast majority of us. Only a few dangerous lunatics or wealthy imbeciles with professional minders are not left alone to make choices. Still, no doubt, from the theological point of view it may be safer to just incarcerate everybody.
And that’s the sort of view that I take to be distinctive of dignitarian liberalism really until Rawls.
Rawls didn't know that people buy insurance just in case they get sick and can no longer work, or their house or factory burns down. Thus Rawls thought people would agree that Society should prioritize the needs of the worst off just in case they found themselves in that position.
And my story is really about how Rawls turns all of this upside down, because Rawls really, as we now know, although we didn’t for quite some time, or very few people did, Rawls began his intellectual life as a very committed Christian who was studying theology and who was planning to become an Episcopal priest. And his formation was deeply, deeply Augustinian and very anti-Pelagian. So, he was completely opposed to the idea of the possibility of merit for human beings, of earning, and I tried to show how those commitments remain with him even later in life when he’s writing what purports to be secular political philosophy.
I suppose, if you believe God is the only efficient cause and he is racist son of a bitch, then one way we can frustrate his evil plan is by sharing and sharing alike. Perhaps, American Churchmen of an earlier period believed that African Americans were a lesser breed whom God had cursed to serve their betters. But this is not bad theology, it is priests repeating the conventional wisdom- or convenient dogmas- of the period.
So, that’s the short version, or as short as I could make it,
To be fair, Rawls was mislead by the mathematical economists of the period. Why did no one simply tell him about Insurance? After all, Social Security is merely a collective Insurance scheme.
Tooley: And so, in the next minute or two as we conclude, where are we today in terms of liberalism?
Being generous with other people's money does not require any deep theological belief.
Nelson: Well, I think we’re very confused, because it’s increasingly common, at least in my neck of the woods, for people who think of themselves as liberal and as egalitarian indeed to be most skeptical of the idea of merit, or desert or earning.
Which is why they share their income and wealth with the custodial staff- except they don't at all. Why not just sell all, give to the poor, and follow Christ or Gandhi or whoever?
So, we see all of these attacks on the idea of meritocracy.
But the attacks are made by weak and stupid people.
And one of the things I’m trying to point out is that’s a very strange view to find in an egalitarian theory, because the whole point is to say, I mean, what all these Pelagians were saying was look, if God is just and he’s going to judge us, then it means we all have to be not just capable, but equally capable, of autonomous choice, and shaping our moral lives, and making good decisions, and being disciplined, and being industrious, and cultivating virtues. We have to all have the ability to achieve and to be meritorious.
An omniscient God could assign us handicaps related to genetics, environment, and 'moral luck' of various sorts. Sadly, we can't do the same in any human society because we don't know what 'Capabilities' people possess or how to equalize welfare outcomes.
And the opposing view which says well no, all these facts about us, the facts that cause some people to be better at leading human life than others or to make better decisions than others, to be more moral than others, to be more productive than others, all of that is just as the cards were dealt, some combination of heredity and environment over which we have no control.
But God knows what weightages or handicaps to apply such that outcomes are equally just.
That looks like a very inegalitarian theory, right, because that’s a kind of natural caste system that says that there are some human beings who, instead of because of God’s favor, because this has now been secularized, we’ll call it just chance or the natural lottery, were just given better natural endowments, a better character, a better disposition.
If evolution is a true theory, then 'moral luck' is just 'fitness' relative to a stochastic fitness landscape.
And everyone who does less well couldn’t have but done less well, right. And so, you have sort of the elect and the reprobate, but just in this secularized form where they’re called the better endowed and the worst endowed.
From the point of view of an uncertain fitness landscape.
Or the fortunate or the naturally unfortunate. And that to me seems like a very odd view to find at the center of liberal egalitarian theory. So, that’s my thought.
In which case this type of liberalism- or the mathematical Welfare Econ associated with it- turns its back on not just Darwin but the mathematics of concurrency, complexity and computability all of which say that there is no rational, i.e. algorithmic, way to get to the 'reflective equilibriums' it assumes exist- at least not within the lifetime of the universe even if the entire universe were the computer.
Tooley: If I understand you correctly, in your book you’re suggesting that liberals to become better liberals tend to become better Pelagians?
Human perfectibility is all very well iff Darwin was wrong. There is no 'fitness landscape' or there is some inevitable 'Omega point' when Man will become a higher dimensional creature which creates its own Cosmos. But is it really true that Liberalism is incompatible with Science or else is committed to our hegira out of this Universe into one we manufactured for ourselves?
Nelson: Yeah, that’s about it in a nutshell.
Inside a nutshell, you will find only a nut. Liberalism is a nutty un-Scientific substitute for the mystery of Faith. America may have a lot of fringe cults but its people were right to reject the L-word.
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