The Limits of Blogging

You do what you can:

So when the Big Issues come up here on the Scene, when I pitch in what I try to do (inconsistently, I know) is to clarify terms, to achieve a better sense of what issues are actually at stake. Back in the fall this meant not defending or attacking Sarah Palin, but trying to explain why even people who didn't agree with her policies might feel sympathy for her. Now, in response to Jerry Coyne — whose TNR piece, by the way, was not a blog post but a several-thousand-word essay — the last thing in the world I would try to do is defend Christianity or theism, even though most of the people reading these words know that I’m a Christian. (I've published seven books and a couple of hundred articles, so my thoughts on way too many topics are out there for public scrutiny.) As the E-Trade baby says in a recent ad, this is not the venue. What I think I might be able to do, though, is show where I think Coyne has created some straw men and false dichotomies — not in order to defend theism, but in order to clarify what I think the real arguments are. I do this because I often think that people are at each other’s throats unnecessarily, and that the differences that separate, say, theists from atheists — while real and substantive and incapable of being erased — are not quite as great as often assumed, and do not require the vitriol that we commonly see from both sides.