Defending the Common-Core/Diversity Dilemma: One Author’s Reply to Abram, Heim, Łukasiewicz, Moser, Oppy, Salamon, Senor, Taliaferro & Porot

Branden Thornhill-Miller and I feel tremendously grateful — and honoured — to have received so many interesting and thoughtful critical responses to our paper on “The Common-Core/Diversity Dilemma” (henceforth “CCDD”). In writing it, we hoped to provoke discussion and debate, but could not expect that it would provoke so much, and so quickly. As our critics have appreciated, the paper was also itself a product of discussion and debate, with the two of us trying to find a position, or range of positions, that we could agree fell within the “rational limits of supernatural belief ” (CCDD, 2). This involved significant compromise on both sides, and hence it would be a mistake for any reader to assume that all of the views expressed in the paper can be unequivocally attributed to either of us. At some points, indeed, we felt compelled to highlight that we were attracted towards significantly different paths (2, 5, 46–9), with my own tendency being towards scepticism and naturalism “in the spirit of David Hume” (2), and thus inclined “to ‘bite the bullet’ of cool, parsimonious reason and learn to live with a godless world” (46).