We continue, from part 1 and part 2, considering that the soft science of psychology includes heavy doses of evolutionary worldview philosophy interpretations of data and that there appears to be a correlation between stable families and socio-political conservatism and unstable families and socio-political liberalism.
Do liberals value intellectualism, logic, and scientific progress? This is an issue of definition of terms. Try, just try, doing something as outlandish as questioning Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and see what happens. All of a sudden intellectualism, logic scientific considerations give way to pure emotionalism (along with blacklisting, censorship, etc.). For example, according to Richard Dawkins, if you doubt, even doubt, that human being are related to “bananas and turnips” you are to be likened to a Holocaust denier.
Consider that which was written by G. K. Chesterton (chapter VIII: The Romance of Orthodoxy in his book Orthodoxy):
A confusion quite as unmeaning as this has arisen in connection with the word “liberal” as applied to religion and as applied to politics and society….
The thing is a mere accident of words. In actual modern Europe a freethinker does not mean a man who thinks for himself. It means a man who, having thought for himself, has come to one particular class of conclusions, the material origin of phenomena, the impossibility of miracles, the improbability of personal immortality and so on. And none of these ideas are particularly liberal. Nay, indeed almost all these ideas are definitely illiberal…
on every single one of the matters most strongly insisted on by liberalisers of theology their effect upon social practice would be definitely illiberal…
I take the most obvious instance first, the case of miracles. For some extraordinary reason, there is a fixed notion that it is more liberal to disbelieve in miracles than to believe in them. Why, I cannot imagine, nor can anybody tell me. For some inconceivable cause a “broad” or “liberal” clergyman always means a man who wishes at least to diminish the number of miracles; it never means a man who wishes to increase that number…
It is a lifeless verbal prejudice of which the original life and beginning was not in the freedom of thought, but simply in the dogma, of materialism. The man of the nineteenth century did not disbelieve in the Resurrection because his liberal Christianity allowed him to doubt it. He disbelieved in it because his very strict materialism did not allow him to believe it…In their doubt of miracles there was a faith in a fixed and godless fate; a deep and sincere faith in the incurable routine of the cosmos…
in so far as the liberal idea of freedom can be said to be on either side in the discussion about miracles, it is obviously on the side of miracles…If you wish to feed the people, you may think that feeding them miraculously in the wilderness is impossible — but you cannot think it illiberal…A holiday, like Liberalism, only means the liberty of man. A miracle only means the liberty of God. You may conscientiously deny either of them, but you cannot call your denial a triumph of the liberal idea….
Scientific materialism binds the Creator Himself; it chains up God as the Apocalypse chained the devil. It leaves nothing free in the universe. And those who assist this process are called the “liberal theologians”…
The assumption that there is something in the doubt of miracles akin to liberality or reform is literally the opposite of the truth. If a man cannot believe in miracles there is an end of the matter; he is not particularly liberal, but he is perfectly honourable and logical, which are much better things. But if he can believe in miracles, he is certainly the more liberal for doing so…
In our next and final segment we will bring it all together and see how such a sentiment identifies what is otherwise thought of as “liberalism.”
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