{"id":197,"date":"2004-12-09T11:13:32","date_gmt":"2004-12-09T16:13:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/server97.snhdns.com\/~ravik\/wp\/?p=197"},"modified":"2004-12-09T11:13:32","modified_gmt":"2004-12-09T16:13:32","slug":"liberal-creationism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200412\/liberal-creationism\/","title":{"rendered":"Liberal Creationism"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this<\/a> post at Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux comments that a belief in the requirement of a central govt for prosperity is equivalent to “sovereign creationism”. Creationism is the ideology that this extremely complex world and universe necessarily has an intelligent designer behind it. This is supposed to be an “alternative theory” to evolution. What Don says is that when people believe that a prosperous society can only be achieved by intelligent design (on part of a sovereign govt) as opposed to a spontaneous order (free markets et al) one is “guilty” of sovereign creationism.<\/p>\n

This gels in with our earlier discussion about the differences between conservatives and liberals. Boudreaux argues that liberal atheists are being hypocritical<\/i> when they ridicule creationism, but advocate social\/sovereign creationism. This is a fallacious argument.
\n
\nAs he says, liberal atheists do accept the fact that spontaneous order has created the entire complex universe. But why should that entail that they believe in spontaneous order as the best<\/i> way to achieve societal prosperity? <\/p>\n

The correct universe-analogy of the question that faces a liberal vis-a-vis societal prosperity is:
\nConsider that there DOES exist a powerful alien\/God\/being. Would you prefer such a being to create the universe or would you prefer “natural evolution”?
\nYes, in THAT case, a liberal should choose God. And in fact, anybody<\/i> would and there is no argument about that.<\/p>\n

The argument is whether there IS such a powerful alien\/God. The liberal-atheist’s case is that there ISN’T. But that there do exist virtuous, able humans to don the role of central planners. The Societal Gods as it were. And it would be a long stretch to demand that belief in virtuous able humans should entail belief in a super-being.<\/p>\n

Even setting aside the logical fallacy, readers of this<\/a> earlier post and its comments would see no contradiction or hypocrisy in either the liberal or conservative position. As that post argued, liberals and conservatives differed in their view of fallibility of humanity.
\nIf anything, the view that humans are “created” by some being, and thus are inevitably constrained by design, would be quite bleak to an optimistic-about-humanity liberal.
\nSimilarly, conservatives who are very cynical of what humanity can achieve and of its fallibility, would have every reason to believe that a super-human “creator” designed us, that we are sinful and weak, yada yada.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this post at Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux comments that a belief in the requirement of a central govt for prosperity is equivalent to “sovereign creationism”. Creationism is the ideology that this extremely complex world and universe necessarily has an intelligent designer behind it. This is supposed to be an “alternative theory” to evolution. What […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}