Throwing Down the Gauntlet
By Will WilsonFreddie DeBoer, PoMoCon commenter extraordinaire, has fired a broadside in our direction. James is working on a response. I’m getting ready to do the same. Nicola has penned a snarky rebuttal. Eve rebutted this long ago. Here’s hoping that this heats up.
October 9th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
HeHe… More info here.
October 9th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Truly and genuinely and incontestably amusing.
October 9th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
I guess this whole project kind of leaves me at a loss. I think Eve is largely right: we don’t need to be Cartesian about this, and it can make just as much sense to start from ethics as from anywhere else. Hell, I know people who start from aesthetics for crying out loud. Those people are pretty messed up, but they aren’t irrational.
But I don’t think that is anything like an effective rebuttal to Freddie. My beef here, as discussed in Ivan’s thread earlier today, is far more eloquently and thoroughly set forth by Freddie: you guys all seem to want to get somewhere in particular. As far as I can tell, that somewhere seems to be a system that looks very much like traditional foundational conservatism without being traditional or foundational. Regardless, I, like Freddie, am pretty convinced that you really can’t get there without God doing a lot of heavy lifting on the way.
Yet somehow no one seems to be willing for that to happen. If you were all atheists, I wouldn’t care. But I know that many if not most of the contributors to this blog claim to be Christians, or at the very least theists of some stripe. So the fact that you’re taking on a fairly ambitious intellectual project, one which in my view requires a very fundamental and anterior belief in God, yet are seemingly unwilling to allow God to play a serious role completely baffles me. Why is this? Why not just say “We believe in God, and that means x, y, and z.”? I just can’t understand the motivation.
October 9th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
I kind of second what Ryan said. Freddie looks a lot like what Francis Schaeffer describes in “The God Who Is There”. And he has the integrity to recognize where he is without God, and that it is being without God that has put him there. The only help for him is God. And, to help Freddie, it has to be a real God who really is there. Theories and ideas and logic aren’t going to cut it.
October 10th, 2008 at 1:02 am
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