Why Are Liberals Liberals?

[Autolykos]

Mr. Roemer, I hope you don’t mind if I respond to several posts of yours within one post of mine.

@David Roemer

Since humans have free will and conscious knowledge, they are embodied spirits.

I fail to see how embodiment of spirit follows from having free will and conscious knowledge. Can you provide your reasoning for this?

@David Roemer

1. We know we have free will because we can make ourselves the subject of our own knowledge. We can comprehend free will, but we can’t define it.

How can one comprehend something without defining it, at least implicitly?

@David Roemer

2. Conscious knowledge: Consider knowing that this page is white and black. This means more than that light is entering the eye and a signal is going to the brain. It means an awareness of this. What is it? There is the conscious knowledge of humans and the sense knowledge of animals. There is no such thing as unconscious knowledge.

How do you know whether animals have awareness of things like “whiteness” and “blackness”? If there’s no such thing as unconscious knowledge, why not simply use “knowledge” and define it as implicitly requiring consciousness?

@David Roemer

3. Another way of saying humans are embodied spirits is that they are indefinabilities that become conscious of their own existence.

Would you say that becoming conscious of something is the same as comprehending it?

@David Roemer

4. The soul is the metaphysical principle that makes humans members of the same category of being. The body is the principle that makes humans different from one another. Biologists need the concepts of body and soul to put the study of humans (embodied spirits) on a rational basis.

Once again, can you please explain what you mean by “rational”?

@David Roemer

The reference to “intuitive creeds for which no logically sufficient proof can be provided” is a derogatory reference to revealed religion. The author of this screed thinks people who believe in the Bible are his intellectual inferiors. Such people are immature and prone to political extremism.

How does one determine whether his religious revelations are true? Or are they all true by definition, according to you?

What is it that leads from believing religious revelations are irrational to immaturity and political extremism, in your view? Or again, are you simply defining “immaturity” as “believing religious revelations are irrational” and “political extremism” as “political movements founded upon such belief”?

@David Roemer

It is absurd for a biologist to say, “free will evolved” because free will is not a scientific concept. We can comprehend free will because we have it. However, we can not explain, explicate, or define free will. But it is because humans have free will and animals don’t that slavery is wrong, but it is okay to own animals and use them for food. Humans are a separate class or category of being.

Why can’t “free will” be a scientific concept? How are you defining “scientific concept”? Why can’t we define “free will”?

@David Roemer

While many liberals say, “free will is an illusion,” they live their lives as if they have free will. They feel guilty when they do something wrong, apologize, and promise not to do it again. In any case, an honest scientist has to leave questions about human rationality aside and deal only with observable and measurable concepts. A biologist can do this with the metaphysical categories of form (soul) and matter (body), as I explained above. Biology is the study of the human body, not the human spiritual soul.

That presumes there is such a thing as what you call “the human spiritual soul”. Is it possible for free will to be an illusion, but also be a useful illusion when it comes to human behavior?

@David Roemer

Only a liberal would have pretend that they did not understand the concept of free will. Free will leads logically to God’s existence, which means we may have to pay for our sins. Free will means we possess a center of action that makes us unified with respect to ourselves and different from other beings. It is because of free will that humans are finite beings. God is an infinite being.

Please explain how free will leads logically to God’s existence. As far as I can tell, you haven’t done this yet.

@David Roemer

The trouble with defining liberalism as a political philosophy is that you have to spell out what that philosophy is. If the philosophy makes no sense and is irrational, you can’t spell it out. The statement “human beings have rights” is nonsense. The only rights humans have are given to them by governments. (We can say U.S. citizens have more rights than Cuban citizens. ) Liberalism as a movement , however, can be defined as being made up of people who say “human beings have rights.”

Where do you think governments get the ability to give people rights?