Tag Archives: Eagleton

A bit extra on McGrath’s response to Dawkins

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One common criticism of Dawkins, that is central to Eagleton’s critique and reprised by McGrath, is that he is ignorant of theology.

This seems to me to be the silliest argument. If you don’t believe in a basic premise of alchemy, that base metal can be transformed to gold, it doen’t matter if you’ve read every obscure alchemical treatise. It’s still not possible, or it certainly wasn’t before we could mess with the nuclear structure of the universe. So, it doesn’t matter that alchemy created much of our knowledge about chemistry. It was still mistaken.

In the same way, some theologians may have developed deep philosophical insights. Their beliefs may even serve as if they are metaphorically “true”, in providing structures within which we can develop our thoughts about our place in the universe. (As in Einstein’s “God doesn’t play dice with the universe” – if he ever said it – you don’t have to believe in god to understand what he was saying.)

However, most believers are, almost by definition, not very deep thinkers. Faith has an immediate emotional appeal to people. They generally don’t care about theology, which even its best friends would have to admit was pretty dry. Few people are converted to a religion by reading a convincing theological argument, except in the case of the more-or-less godless religions like Buddhism or Taoism.

So Dawkins’ argument that belief in the Abrahamic God is a founded on a delusion doesn’t depend for its validity on his having read Biblical quantities of theology. He’s supposed to earn his living as a biologist. How many hours are there in a day?

I am sure that there are very sophisticated theologians who conceive of their deity as some underlying principle of the universe. These probably aren’t very different from the average non-believer. Consciousness and life and the nature of matter and space and time are indeed fantastic and engaing mysteries. I personally feel that our human mental capacity will never allow us to comprehend them adequately Nevertheless, we only have our capacity for thinking and understanding to go on. There is noone alive with certain knowledge of the existence of the Abrahamic god. So it doesn’t matter what theologians say. They know no more than I do.

I can’t believe that there is a superhuman being who knows all the answers, who planned every event in the infinite universe but somehow decided we were its chosen species. And decided to let us mess everything up for its own amusement, because it gave us Free Will. But only to test whether we would follow its commands. Who responds to personal pleas according to the degree of sycophancy its creations can muster….. The whole idea is genuinely ludicrous.

My life is too short to read the stuff written by theologians who believe in such a being, however sophisticatedly they express this belief. I am sure that Dawkins has seen enough of their works to have reached the same conclusion.

Dawkins and Eagleton

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A few of the atheist and pro-religion blogs have referenced Terry Eagleton’s views on Dawkins. I can’t miss the opportunity to bore you to death with more on this.

Eagleton is not a bad writer. He uses quite an impressive turn of phrase when he’s insulting Dawkins. He is a cultural studies lecturer of a certain kind – was brought up as a Catholic, was a Marxist in the 1970s. He was in one of those rather sweet Trotskyite groups that appeal to idealistic students, The defining characteristics of these are usually that they direct their intellectual attention to ripping apart the views of other such groups, in “how many angels can fit on the head of a pin” debates. I.e. they appeal to people with a religious nature but no belief in God.

Sadly , Cultural Studies in the hands of a lot of university dons becomes stuff that you would rather pull your teeth out wiithout anaesthetic than read. The subject meanders away from the facsinating and illuminating work of people like Stuart Hall, Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco (I’m talking about the last two when they are writing for a popular audience 🙂 of course.) It becomes “an angels on the head of a pin” debate subject, with arcane rules and procedures that are neither art (because lots of the works are ugly) nor science (because they make endless unproven assertions). Unlike Hall or Barthes, they don’t care much whether their work has any relevance to human society. It often becomes a way of showing off to their fellow Cultural Studies intellectuals. The world outside the University is as alien to them as the world of the average worker is to Posh and Becks.

I suspect, maybe unfairly, that Eagleton may be one of those lecturers with little concept of “too dull”, witness his reverential mention of Derrida. OK, fair point, the piece was in the London Review of Books, hardly a mass market publication. Still this gives a flavour of it:

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them?

Well, nor have I. But I’m still going to mouth off about it.

Dawkins often seems to be a very traditional Enlightenment rationalist, with an optimistic belief that logic and reason have some sway over human actions. Dawkins is writing on the assumption that it is enough to draw attention to errors in their thinking and people will give them up. I wish that were true. Yes, the “God” concept that he attacks most often is the concept of a child, not of a theologian. Dawkins’ arguments are addressed to the general public. Who have usually been fed a lot of “God” nonsense that bears no relation to Eurigenia. And I would be very surprised if one in a million people had heard of the “epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus” etc.

I can’t begin to see what possible relevance these arguments could have to the point of whether God is a delusion. (The people banning evolution teaching in schools can probably barely read, for a start. I suspect Rahner’s words are as unknown to them as they are to me.) The abstract arguments of theologically sophisticated thinkers are not what get taught to kids in Sunday schools and Maddrassas. Imagine an infinitely complex and elegant argument about how Father Christmas could get round everyone’s house in the same night (by bending the space-time continuum, creating his own warp space, or merely amending our consciousness so we thought it was one night but it really takes years.) The debates would throw lots of light on our thoughts about the nature of space and time. But guess what? Father Christmas doesn’t really bring your presents. (Sorry to be the one to break that news.)

I am not a big Dawkins fan, I’m still miffed about the sociobiology…. I think he is utterly naive in terms of sociology and doesn’t understand how the power of religion is indeed rooted in power. He often writes as if ideas have an existence of their own outside of the material world. tA best, can influence the world, but don’t really grow out of social relations. I think this is called “Idealism”, as a Philosophical concept, or it should be. He is not a social scientist. Unlike Eagleton, I don’t this disqualifies him from having views about society though. It just shows that he isn’t the infallible authority on atheism, (thank Void.) There is a lot more to be understood about the role of belief in social relations, and to do it effectively does need a grounding in social science rather than biology.

However, Dawkins isn’t talking about sociology. Nor is he discussing theology, Eagleton. He is talking about whether there is a personal God who made the universe and performs miracles. He is absolutely right about the illogicality of Faith. Dawkins expresses views that you would imagine would be all-but universal in the 21st century and is attacked from all sides.

Hence, he makes us realise we live in a time when human intellectual progress is in reverse and he’s prepared to challenge this state of affairs. In the popular media. Repeatedly. Lucidly. And his influence has encouraged lots of people to actively assert their rationality in a world which is abandoning the whole awkard rationality thing at a rate of knots.

What’s Eagleton doing? He’s turning to the Church he was brought up in, like many lapsed Catholics in their later years. He’s looking only at a Church that appeals to socially-unengaged and pampered intellectuals. He doesn’t seem aware that the world is becoming a battleground and religion is being used to stir up the fighters on every side. For at least a thousand years, religion has been the excuse for committing atrocities, obscuring the battles over land and property that were really taking place. It does matter that people speak the truth about it and question what they are told.

Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly

Of course, all ordinary believers don’t seek to brainwash their chilldren. (Although the faith schools and vicars and pastors and priests and Imams all have a good stab at it.) In fact, many people feel compelled to make their children observe religious tradtions that they don’t really believe themselves. That’s why children are brought into territory of the Church or Mosque or synagogue before they can speak, let alone reason. And the old Jesuit saying of “Give me a child before the age of seven and he’s mine for life” (or words to that effect) seem to be proved by Eagleton’s own leanings.

In any case, I think by definition, faith in the unknowable is blind faith.