A Pair of Defenses
Both of them elsewhere, though.
First of all, I’m honored to have been invited to contribute to the Commonweal blog, and my first post over there takes on Joe Carter’s recent criticisms of “theistic evolution”:
If God is omniscient, then his knowledge of the course of evolution is eternally perfect – and whether the evolutionary process was random or not has no bearing on this at all. Contra Carter, then, the randomness of evolution wouldn’t require God to tinker around with multiple universes any more than the reality of free will means that Gabriel had to be prepared to ask women other than Mary whether they’d bear the Christ child; in each instance, the fact that the universe’s prior state constrained but didn’t fully determine what was going to happen doesn’t mean that God had to have been ignorant about how things would go.
Whole thing here; it may that you have to register in order to comment, in which case I’m happy to discuss the argument over here as well.
Also, I’ve got a new post up at The American Scene, defending mandatory composting programs against the Reasonoids.
Filed under: environment, personal, religion, science/tech
Wow, how did that happen? You don’t quite fit in with the Obama-campaign crowd over there.
I have a good friend – an old roommate, actually – who’s an editor at Commonweal, and I’ve written book reviews for them a couple of times. He was the one who asked me to join the blog roster, and I said yes – but the short of it is that at the end of the day I’m a much better fit to blog there than at, say, First Things. Heck, Andrew Bacevich writes regularly for Commonweal, too, and any magazine that opposes abortion and has editorialized against every U.S. military conflict of the past half century is a-okay by me.
What’s the evidence that they “oppose[] abortion”? At least on the blog, 9 out of 10 mentions of abortion are 1) criticisms of pro-lifers, 2) criticisms of Catholic bishops for “politicizing” the abortion issue, or 3) a defense of voting pro-choice. Any opposition to abortion comes in the form of “of course I’m personally opposed to abortion, but oh how those pro-lifers are embarrassing,” etc.
Well the magazine’s editorial stance is solidly pro-life, and so I imagine are all of the bloggers; the abortion-related content on the blog is, I think, unduly influenced by one poster who’s especially inclined to go in for the sorts of things you complain about. But hey: pro-lifers are often worthy of criticism, the bishops and others have politicized abortion at the undue expense of other concerns, and it sometimes can be defensible to vote for a pro-choice candidate (I didn’t vote for Obama, but if his foreign policy stances had been better or if I’d had absolutely no choice outside of him and McCain I’d have picked Obama).
I take your point, though, and will be happy to try and rectify the imbalance.
David Gibson, Cathy Kaveny, and Grant Gallicho are three who fit into the categories I named. Most of the others never mention abortion at all. I’m not sure what your source is for the “editorial stance,” but the magazine’s articles that I’ve seen have been quite the mushy middle. E.g., this (making light of FOCA) or this. And even when the “editors” write an editorial (http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=2062&var_recherche=abortion) that has a sentence agreeing that abortion is wrong, it’s surrounded on both sides by moaning over the fact that the Catholic bishops might annoy someone by saying that abortion is “evil.”
Boudway’s post the other day taking an unembarrassed and affirmative pro-life stance was the first such post I’ve seen in a year of reading that blog. But, as you say, you’ll be able to rectify the situation. Interesting times ahead, then . . . .
Well I had someone else in mind, but anyway.
I agree that that second piece you cite by Cathy Caveny is pretty weak (it’s “balanced” in the very worst sense of that word), and that the editorial you link isn’t great, either – though as I’ve written a number of times I think that criticism of the way in which the bishops and others have made it seem as if voting for the Republicans, or at least never, ever voting for a pro-choice Democrat, is a duty for all American Catholics is entirely legitimate. As to Caveny’s piece on FOCA, I read it a while ago and found it pretty illuminating at the time; so long as there’s nothing factually wrong with it, I think there’s a lot to be said for setting the record straight.
Matthew’s post was indeed very good; he’s the friend I referred to, and while he’s far to the left on things like health care his views on how to approach the abortion issue are, I think, pretty close to mine. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t vote for Obama either.
The FOCA piece by itself wasn’t that bad, but it fits with the pattern of mentioning abortion (or abortion-related legislation) only in the context of saying, “Oh, don’t worry that the Democrats might actually do anything meaningful to protect abortion.”
Point taken; given the magazine’s stances I agree that their voice could be more prophetic, but then again I suppose I think it’s even worse to e.g. shill for war in Iraq even in the face of clear Vatican opposition. I don’t any longer subscribe to Commonweal or First Things, but given how badly I’ve been burned by the neocons I increasingly feel like trying to work with the serious Catholic left is the more prudent course of action.
Nicely done on theistic evolution. I think you and Stephen Barr made exactly the right set of arguments.
The curious thing, as Barr notes, is that Carter is a Calvinist and thus should not have made this kind of error. I guess we all have bad days.