[MD] Terry Eagleton on Dawkin's God Delusion

[MarshaV]

Wow, the pile gets high when the power gets low!!!


At 06:42 PM 1/18/2007, you wrote:
>Hi MoQ'ers
>Couldn't resist forwarding this from FoW ...
>
>Take it away, Eagleton fans.
>
>Ian
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>From: Karl Rogers <>
>Date: Jan 18, 2007 3:44 PM
>Subject: Terry Eagleton on Dawkin's God Delusion
>To: FRIENDSOFWISDOM at jiscmail.ac.uk
>
>
>Some FoW members might be amused by this article:
>Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching
>Terry Eagleton
>London Review of Books, October 2006
>
>Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the
>subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of
>what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying
>rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional
>atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least
>well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don't
>believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything
>worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar
>caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology
>student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed
>their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment
>on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt
>bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to
>theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These
>days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august
>sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.
>Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who
>filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet
>Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one
>suspects, had read more than a few pages of his work, and even that
>judgment might be excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless
>have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a student who had
>not read his Treatise of Human Nature. There are always topics on
>which otherwise scrupulous minds will cave in with scarcely a struggle
>to the grossest prejudice. For a lot of academic psychologists, it is
>Jacques Lacan; for Oxbridge philosophers it is Heidegger; for former
>citizens of the Soviet bloc it is the writings of Marx; for militant
>rationalists it is religion.
>
>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? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you
>can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its
>toughest case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by
>theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge
>he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by,
>they are absolutely right. As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an
>enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV
>evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it's
>just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe
>grow fat on it.
>
>A molehill of instances out of a mountain of them will have to
>suffice. Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that
>Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe
>unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about
>at grammar school thought that. For mainstream Christianity, reason,
>argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in
>belief. (Where, given that he invites us at one point to question
>everything, is Dawkins's own critique of science, objectivity,
>liberalism, atheism and the like?) Reason, to be sure, doesn't go all
>the way down for believers, but it doesn't for most sensitive,
>civilised non-religious types either. Even Richard Dawkins lives more
>by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no
>unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable
>to entertain. Only positivists think that 'rational' means
>'scientific'. Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science
>and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates
>religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that
>science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to
>suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the
>pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It
>is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve
>factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you
>to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that
>justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed
>description of you without being in love with you himself.
>
>Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a
>scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration.
>Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be
>reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith.
>Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding
>that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial
>super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain
>agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that
>he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they
>do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which
>is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. This is not to say that
>religious people believe in a black hole, because they also consider
>that God has revealed himself: not, as Dawkins thinks, in the guise of
>a cosmic manufacturer even smarter than Dawkins himself (the New
>Testament has next to nothing to say about God as Creator), but for
>Christians at least, in the form of a reviled and murdered political
>criminal. The Jews of the so-called Old Testament had faith in God,
>but this does not mean that after debating the matter at a number of
>international conferences they decided to endorse the scientific
>hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the universe ­
>even though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion. They had
>faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may well have
>been mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken because their
>scientific hypothesis was unsound.
>
>Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were
>entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine
>God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of
>chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions
>of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony
>Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God
>is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a
>principle, an entity, or 'existent': in one sense of that word it
>would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does
>not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any
>entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there
>is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up
>to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of
>objects.
>This, not some super-manufacturing, is what is traditionally meant by
>the claim that God is Creator. He is what sustains all things in being
>by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had
>no beginning. To say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a
>measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of
>love rather than need. The world was not the consequence of an
>inexorable chain of cause and effect. Like a Modernist work of art,
>there is no necessity about it at all, and God might well have come to
>regret his handiwork some aeons ago. The Creation is the original acte
>gratuit. God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it,
>not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will
>impress his research grant body no end.
>
>Because the universe is God's, it shares in his life, which is the
>life of freedom. This is why it works all by itself, and why science
>and Richard Dawkins are therefore both possible. The same is true of
>human beings: God is not an obstacle to our autonomy and enjoyment
>but, as Aquinas argues, the power that allows us to be ourselves. Like
>the unconscious, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is
>the source of our self-determination, not the erasure of it. To be
>dependent on him, as to be dependent on our friends, is a matter of
>freedom and fulfilment. Indeed, friendship is the word Aquinas uses to
>characterise the relation between God and humanity.
>
>Dawkins, who is as obsessed with the mechanics of Creation as his
>Creationist opponents, understands nothing of these traditional
>doctrines. Nor does he understand that because God is transcendent of
>us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us
>about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be
>allowed to love us. Dawkins's God, by contrast, is Satanic. Satan
>('accuser' in Hebrew) is the misrecognition of God as Big Daddy and
>punitive judge, and Dawkins's God is precisely such a repulsive
>superego. This false consciousness is overthrown in the person of
>Jesus, who reveals the Father as friend and lover rather than judge.
>Dawkins's Supreme Being is the God of those who seek to avert divine
>wrath by sacrificing animals, being choosy in their diet and being
>impeccably well behaved. They cannot accept the scandal that God loves
>them just as they are, in all their moral shabbiness. This is one
>reason St Paul remarks that the law is cursed. Dawkins sees
>Christianity in terms of a narrowly legalistic notion of atonement ­
>of a brutally vindictive God sacrificing his own child in recompense
>for being offended ­ and describes the belief as vicious and
>obnoxious. It's a safe bet that the Archbishop of Canterbury couldn't
>agree more. It was the imperial Roman state, not God, that murdered
>Jesus.
>Dawkins thinks it odd that Christians don't look eagerly forward to
>death, given that they will thereby be ushered into paradise. He does
>not see that Christianity, like most religious faiths, values human
>life deeply, which is why the martyr differs from the suicide. The
>suicide abandons life because it has become worthless; the martyr
>surrenders his or her most precious possession for the ultimate
>well-being of others. This act of self-giving is generally known as
>sacrifice, a word that has unjustly accrued all sorts of politically
>incorrect implications. Jesus, Dawkins speculates, might have desired
>his own betrayal and death, a case the New Testament writers
>deliberately seek to rebuff by including the Gethsemane scene, in
>which Jesus is clearly panicking at the prospect of his impending
>execution. They also put words into his mouth when he is on the cross
>to make much the same point. Jesus did not die because he was mad or
>masochistic, but because the Roman state and its assorted local
>lackeys and running dogs took fright at his message of love, mercy and
>justice, as well as at his enormous popularity with the poor, and did
>away with him to forestall a mass uprising in a highly volatile
>political situation. Several of Jesus' close comrades were probably
>Zealots, members of an anti-imperialist underground movement. Judas'
>surname suggests that he may have been one of them, which makes his
>treachery rather more intelligible: perhaps he sold out his leader in
>bitter disenchantment, recognising that he was not, after all, the
>Messiah. Messiahs are not born in poverty; they do not spurn weapons
>of destruction; and they tend to ride into the national capital in
>bullet-proof limousines with police outriders, not on a donkey.
>
>Jesus, who pace Dawkins did indeed 'derive his ethics from the
>Scriptures' (he was a devout Jew, not the founder of a fancy new
>set-up), was a joke of a Messiah. He was a carnivalesque parody of a
>leader who understood, so it would appear, that any regime not founded
>on solidarity with frailty and failure is bound to collapse under its
>own hubris. The symbol of that failure was his crucifixion. In this
>faith, he was true to the source of life he enigmatically called his
>Father, who in the guise of the Old Testament Yahweh tells the Hebrews
>that he hates their burnt offerings and that their incense stinks in
>his nostrils. They will know him for what he is, he reminds them, when
>they see the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being
>sent empty away. You are not allowed to make a fetish or graven image
>of this God, since the only image of him is human flesh and blood.
>Salvation for Christianity has to do with caring for the sick and
>welcoming the immigrant, protecting the poor from the violence of the
>rich. It is not a 'religious' affair at all, and demands no special
>clothing, ritual behaviour or fussiness about diet. (The Catholic
>prohibition on meat on Fridays is an unscriptural church regulation.)
>
>Jesus hung out with whores and social outcasts, was remarkably casual
>about sex, disapproved of the family (the suburban Dawkins is a trifle
>queasy about this), urged us to be laid-back about property and
>possessions, warned his followers that they too would die violently,
>and insisted that the truth kills and divides as well as liberates. He
>also cursed self-righteous prigs and deeply alarmed the ruling class.
>
>The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the
>crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human
>history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life ­ but
>only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire
>condition. This is known as the resurrection. Those who don't see this
>dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are
>likely to be devotees of that bright-eyed superstition known as
>infinite human progress, for which Dawkins is a full-blooded
>apologist. Or they might be well-intentioned reformers or social
>democrats, which from a Christian standpoint simply isn't radical
>enough.
>
>The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a
>bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert
>McCabe, that if you don't love you're dead, and if you do, they'll
>kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky and opium of the people.
>It was, of course, Marx who coined that last phrase; but Marx, who in
>the same passage describes religion as the 'heart of a heartless
>world, the soul of soulless conditions', was rather more judicious and
>dialectical in his judgment on it than the lunging, flailing,
>mispunching Dawkins.
>
>Now it may well be that all this is no more plausible than the tooth
>fairy. Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to
>reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular
>culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case
>at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on
>the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook. The
>mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but
>anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins
>considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of
>any respect whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man
>deeply averse to dogmatism. Even moderate religious views, he insists,
>are to be ferociously contested, since they can always lead to
>fanaticism.
>
>Some currents of the liberalism that Dawkins espouses have nowadays
>degenerated into a rather nasty brand of neo-liberalism, but in my
>view this is no reason not to champion liberalism. In some obscure
>way, Dawkins manages to imply that the Bishop of Oxford is responsible
>for Osama bin Laden. His polemic would come rather more convincingly
>from a man who was a little less arrogantly triumphalistic about
>science (there are a mere one or two gestures in the book to its
>fallibility), and who could refrain from writing sentences like 'this
>objection [to a particular scientific view] can be answered by the
>suggestion . . . that there are many universes,' as though a
>suggestion constituted a scientific rebuttal. On the horrors that
>science and technology have wreaked on humanity, he is predictably
>silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of
>them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical
>warfare.
>
>Such is Dawkins's unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of
>almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede
>that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view
>which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The
>countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the
>service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped
>from human history ­ and this by a self-appointed crusader against
>bigotry. He is like a man who equates socialism with the Gulag. Like
>the puritan and sex, Dawkins sees God everywhere, even where he is
>self-evidently absent. He thinks, for example, that the
>ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland would evaporate if
>religion did, which to someone like me, who lives there part of the
>time, betrays just how little he knows about it. He also thinks rather
>strangely that the terms Loyalist and Nationalist are 'euphemisms' for
>Protestant and Catholic, and clearly doesn't know the difference
>between a Loyalist and a Unionist or a Nationalist and a Republican.
>He also holds, against a good deal of the available evidence, that
>Islamic terrorism is inspired by religion rather than politics.
>These are not just the views of an enraged atheist. They are the
>opinions of a readily identifiable kind of English middle-class
>liberal rationalist. Reading Dawkins, who occasionally writes as
>though 'Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness' is a mighty funny
>way to describe a Grecian urn, one can be reasonably certain that he
>would not be Europe's greatest enthusiast for Foucault,
>psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism, anarchism or separatist feminism.
>All of these phenomena, one imagines, would be as distasteful to his
>brisk, bloodless rationality as the virgin birth. Yet one can of
>course be an atheist and a fervent fan of them all. His God-hating,
>then, is by no means simply the view of a scientist admirably cleansed
>of prejudice. It belongs to a specific cultural context. One would not
>expect to muster many votes for either anarchism or the virgin birth
>in North Oxford. (I should point out that I use the term North Oxford
>in an ideological rather than geographical sense. Dawkins may be
>relieved to know that I don't actually know where he lives.)
>There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in
>what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from,
>among other places, that particular stable. At its most philistine and
>provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann. The secular
>Ten Commandments that Dawkins commends to us, one of which advises us
>to enjoy our sex lives so long as they don't damage others, are for
>the most part liberal platitudes. Dawkins quite rightly detests
>fundamentalists; but as far as I know his anti-religious diatribes
>have never been matched in his work by a critique of the global
>capitalism that generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of
>humiliation that breed fundamentalism. Instead, as the obtuse media
>chatter has it, it's all down to religion.
>It thus comes as no surprise that Dawkins turns out to be an
>old-fashioned Hegelian when it comes to global politics, believing in
>a zeitgeist (his own term) involving ever increasing progress, with
>just the occasional 'reversal'. 'The whole wave,' he rhapsodises in
>the finest Whiggish manner, 'keeps moving.' There are, he generously
>concedes, 'local and temporary setbacks' like the present US
>government ­ as though that regime were an electoral aberration,
>rather than the harbinger of a drastic transformation of the world
>order that we will probably have to live with for as long as we can
>foresee. Dawkins, by contrast, believes, in his Herbert Spencerish
>way, that 'the progressive trend is unmistakable and it will
>continue.' So there we are, then: we have it from the mouth of Mr
>Public Science himself that aside from a few local, temporary hiccups
>like ecological disasters, famine, ethnic wars and nuclear wastelands,
>History is perpetually on the up.
>
>Apart from the occasional perfunctory gesture to 'sophisticated'
>religious believers, Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist
>religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it
>is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by
>implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass. The huge
>numbers of believers who hold something like the theology I outlined
>above can thus be conveniently lumped with rednecks who murder
>abortionists and malign homosexuals. As far as such outrages go,
>however, The God Delusion does a very fine job indeed. The two most
>deadly texts on the planet, apart perhaps from Donald Rumsfeld's
>emails, are the Bible and the Koran; and Dawkins, as one the best of
>liberals as well as one of the worst, has done a magnificent job over
>the years of speaking out against that particular strain of
>psychopathology known as fundamentalism, whether Texan or Taliban. He
>is right to repudiate the brand of mealy-mouthed liberalism which
>believes that one has to respect other people's silly or obnoxious
>ideas just because they are other people's. In its admirably angry
>way, The God Delusion argues that the status of atheists in the US is
>nowadays about the same as that of gays fifty years ago. The book is
>full of vivid vignettes of the sheer horrors of religion,
>fundamentalist or otherwise. Nearly 50 per cent of Americans believe
>that a glorious Second Coming is imminent, and some of them are doing
>their damnedest to bring it about. But Dawkins could have told us all
>this without being so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific
>colleagues who disagree with him, and without being so theologically
>illiterate. He might also have avoided being the second most
>frequently mentioned individual in his book ­ if you count God as an
>individual.
>
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