It’s wot?
More on that Eagleton review. I have my doubts about other parts of it.
For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief.
Well, for one thing, that depends how you define mainstream Christianity (and I’m not too sure about that ‘always,’ either, in fact I think it’s wrong – for most of mainstream Christianity’s history, honest doubt has damn well not played an integral role, but led straight to the nice hot bonfire). For another thing, it could be seen as a contradiction to say that doubt plays an integral role in belief. For another thing, Eagleton doesn’t do a great job of modelling honest doubt himself.
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…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.
How does he know? Where is the honest doubt in all this?
And what does he mean? There’s a lot of it that I can’t make head or tail of. It scans, it makes grammatical sense, but I cannot figure out what it’s saying. Maybe I’m thick. Or maybe there’s no head or tail to be made.
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.
What does all that mean? Why is believing in God not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist? Why is God not a celestial super-object? And what on earth does it mean to say that theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe? And the bit about transcendence and invisibility? I’m lost. It all seems like pure blather – grand words that fail to refer to anything.
He asks how this chap [meaning God] can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms.
Eh?
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.
Except that ‘he’ (who is not a person, remember – yet ‘he’ does have a gender) is not the answer, because that’s not an answer. It’s just a lot of declaration, most of it incomprehensible.
After that he gets onto Jesus, and that part is much better. Jesus is compelling, and Eagleton puts the rhetoric to better use there. There’s one thing though –
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.
No, what’s really far more likely is that it will be both. It will be Islamists offing Musharref and taking over Pakistan – and bye bye misbelievers.
Still…
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.
But he overplayed his hand, Eagleton ends up. He’s clear enough once he leaves God behind.
I’m glad to hear that it’s incomprehensible. I thought it might just be slug-witted me. (Who is a what now? Octopus? Eh?)
‘After that he gets onto Jesus, and that part is much better. Jesus is compelling, and Eagleton puts the rhetoric to better use there. There’s one thing though -‘
I didn’t understand what you meant here. He finds Jesus compelling or you do?
I find him particularly annoying because it’s not that he’s even upholding faith as such a great virtue. He’s saying, “yes, we must doubt” and “yes, everything needs evidence” and then just undercuts it all by saying “except in the case of the god of the Christian bible.” Or does it come across differently in the complete article?
Ah, the evil scientists and technologists.
Balme the tools and not the users – again.
The man’s an idiot.
I once saw a man on a stage, dressed in a black cape, do this sort of thing, not with words but with coloured handkerchiefs and the odd dove. To better purpose, perhaps (than that of both the man on the stage and Eagleton), I’ve seen poets perform similar verbal prestidigitation. Escher did a good job of it with shapes on canvas (or whatever).
What the hell is the difference between arguing for or against Nessie and arguing for or against the existence – no matter how wrapped in obfuscatory stuff and nonsense – of a transcendent entity? There’s still an onus of proof in the equation, and, whether a transcentdent being or not, he, she or it still demands an ontological discussion.
What a prat!
Tingey, I have to echo that. Reading Eagleton would make an ignoramus sure that scientists bombed hiroshima.
Sorry, GH, that wasn’t very clear, was it. I meant – I find at least parts of the story of Jesus compelling, and Jesus as a literary character far more compelling than this amorphous god character that Eagleton describes so confidently yet vaguely.
“Or does it come across differently in the complete article?”
Not really. The rest of the article is better (a lot better), as I mentioned, but that’s because he talks about other things, not because he abandons the contradictory combination of claiming doubt while modeling certainty.
“he, she or it still demands an ontological discussion”
No because you see that sort of discussion is appropriate for octopi or Tony Blair or Nessy or your average transendental being, but not for God, on account of God is neither this nor that, but t’other, which can’t have an ontological discussion, because Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable. See?
“Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his life, which is the life of freedom.”
Wonderful stuff! Can we all have a go? Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his breakfast, which is salmon blinis with blueberries on the side. Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his second-best trousers, which are the trousers of moleskin. Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his death, which is the death of sense.
Acte gratuit my foot! Phrase vide are the mots justes.
Come on Ophelia, you can do better than that. In the second bit you quote (“he is what sustains …” etc) Eagleton is clearly glossing a theological view he doesn’t necessarily endorse – as is clear from the preceding sentence, which begins “For Judeo-Christianity …”
If he thinks it is significant enough to mention against Dawkins, surely he endorses it by default?
As for “Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare”, that would be the mustard gas launched by German soldiers with ‘Gott mit uns’ on their belt-buckles, or against Iraqi tribesmen in the 1920s[?] by Winston Churchill, who was still taking about the survival of ‘Christian civilisation’ 20 years later…
Anyway, where is Eagleton at, head-wise, these days? Marxism gone, Derrida fading, is a conversion to Catholicism looming? How very 1930s…
Thanks, Nicholas! That’s the best laugh I’ve had in several hours (possibly since waking up this morning to realize I’d just dreamt that a dog [a particular dog] invented the Enlightenment).
Oh, the conversion to Catholicism is old news. I think that was included in After Theory…? It was somewhere recently, anyway.
To be fair – and to alter my answer to Stewart a little – he does later say ‘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.’ Then says critics should criticize ‘richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history’ at its most persuasive rather than just savaging it.
I’ve got a copy of ‘After Theory’ upstairs. It made little impression on me – except the understanding that just because you put big words in to a sentence it doesn’t follow that the sentence has any meaning at all. Perhaps I ought to re-read it sometime. I’d sell it online, but I wouldn’t want to subject anyone else to the odious task of actually reading Eagleton.
Literary theory does have some value, I must say. Although they talk bollocks, it’s at least slightly less dangerous bollocks than theology. Let’s hope that – in twenty years time – literary theory can be as well respected as a discipline as theology currently is.
It must be so easy to review books from a “theory” perspective. You just crap out words that are ill-defined, undefinable or have so many different meanings that it’s difficult to know what exactly the meaning you are referring to is, mix in some opinion, spend half an hour with a thesaurus and then send it off to the editor. Then, in five years time, you suddenly change your opinion to a position that is 180 degrees from your current position, and then book up interviews with the newspapers, magazines, TV and radio folks. They then fake surprise (“but weren’t you a feminist!? Why are you…?”), and you get to plug your book. Once everyone’s forgotten, you switch back. Case in point: Fay Weldon.
As I’ve written on my blog, this kind of repetitious contrarianism that so much of literary criticism and opinion journalism has become would be okay if it were actually funny. It’s just dull.
To be fair, though – Eagleton’s not always bad. There was one article a longish time ago…which I even managed to find, by doing a Search here (25 items come up – Eagleton is busy) and remembering correctly that it was in the Guardian. Here.
“Fundamentalists are those who believe that our linguistic currency is trustworthy only if it is backed by the gold standard of the Word of Words. They see God as copperfastening human meaning. Fundamentalism means sticking strictly to the script, which in turn means being deeply fearful of the improvised, ambiguous or indeterminate…Since writing is meaning that can be handled by anybody, any time, it is always profane and promiscuous. Meaning that has been written down is bound to be unhygienic. Words that could only ever mean one thing would not be words. Fundamentalism is the paranoid condition of those who do not see that roughness is not a defect of human existence, but what makes it work. For them, it is as though we have to measure Everest down to the last millimetre if we are not to be completely stumped about how high it is.”
That’s good stuff.
He wrote extremely well and extensively on Northern Ireland in the 80s, and one wonders to what extent his political and religious ‘certainties’ were forged by witnessing and reporting on the abysmal treatment of NI Catholics for decades under the British Govt… not even very smart people are impervious to that kind of brutality.
So Nick – lots of Muslims being killed at the moment. Should we all therefore take up the Islamic faith?
Or aren’t we smart enough?
Ha, not really my best argument, just trying to fathom how someone so clever and politically astute might end up in such a pickle. I’m an atheist and always have been, and I really do struggle with theism/deism when (otherwise) smart people proseltyse…
I’ve now been into the public library and read the whole thing. (Tomorrow, I will Get A Life.)
Eagleton’s core points are
I think that some theologians’ “there’s an ineffable Force which started it all (and, in some versions, sustains it)” may in practice be indistinguishable from cosmologists’ so-far-rather-elusive “Theory of Everything”, at least in my lifetime. It doesn’t follow that the theologians’ Force loves us, or cares who we mate with.
Eagleton further writes that “To claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world [meaning curious humans in he 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.”
Is there a gremlin in this? It only makes sense to me if, for example, I replace “suggest” by “deny”. That Jesus ascended bodily into heaven is a scientific claim, which popes are obliged to say they believe. If Jesus’s bones were discovered in Palestine (or for that matter the left luggage office at Victoria station, the Brighton line), and the pope was honest, he would be obliged to seek alternative employment. An alternative pope who had read the same sort of theologians as Eagleton, and believed that the resurrection story was a myth of great symbolic beauty unassailable by science, would have no worries.
Eagleton further asserts that “I love you” isn’t reducible. I can explain what I love about you (maybe), and my bank manager (eh? what planet is Eagleton on – they were abolished years ago!) can understand, but he doesn’t love you too. Er, no, but perhaps someone can also explain why your attributes appeal to me, not him; and maybe even why that starlight in your hair on some enchanted evening blinded me to your bad taste in jokes.
Yeah, that bones of Jesus one was another bit that I just could not make sense of.
Hey Nicholas I could have just forwarded the article to you! And as for getting a life – pfff – nerdily haunting the library is a life.
I would have thought that the lesson of the twentieth century was that chemical weapons don’t kill people, insane nationalistic fervor kills people.
I suspect we are going to have to re-learn the message in the twenty-first, only with religionists instead of nationalists.
Terry Eagleton is the Ben Elton of literary journalists – the same cocksure breeziness, the same cheery smart-arseness. The Jews, he says, “had faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you.” What? But I can see you and hear you – of course I have faith in your existence – in fact knowledge of your existence, as there you are. None of his theological explanations – ascribed to bright believers, not himself – make any sense except grammatically. As for his policital statements – “global capitalism. . . generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of humiliation that breed fundamentalism.” It’s that old fundamentalism-breeder again – which only incubates, it seems, Islamic fundamentalists. “The rednecks who murder abortionists and malign homosexuals” – American Christians one assumes – are they being bred by global capitalism as well? I thought many a fundamentalist Christian was doing pretty well out of global capitalism and say what you like about the US, its citizens have not much cause to feel humiliated.
Eagleton can’t explain God, but admires Jesus Chris as everything Che Guevara should have been, so is willing to conflate the two – God and Christ that is. It’s amazing how someone can be readable without making sense. It must be something to do with the rhythm of the sentences. Len Deighton has the same knack. You can finish one of his novels without having followed the narrative at all.
“None of his theological explanations…make any sense except grammatically.”
I noticed exactly the same thing. They’re grammatically lucid – yet still incomprehensible. It’s quite a trick – as you say.
Chris didnt you mean there are a lots of moslems killing?.
Moslems killing muslims ?
The Tony Blair/Octopus comment is pretty apt, and encapsulates the point DSquared has been making in past threads on the subject. The most widespread (Christian, but probably also Islamic, Hinduist etc.) concept of God is that it is omnipresent and (within varying domains) omniscient, omnipotent, etc. Which means that by definition, the question of how God is able to communicate simultaneously with billions of people and possibly trillions of aliens is irrelevant. There’s no limited processing capacity in an omniscient being, and there is technically no “communication” involved with an omnipresent being. An omnipresent God would know my questions and thoughts with the same intuitive and immediate certainty with which I know my own. An octopus has eight arms by definition. If Tony Blair has two arms, he is not an octopus. A limited being with limited cognitive capacities and limited spatiotemporal extension is likewise, by definition, not God.
It’s one thing to wonder whether it makes sense to talk about omnipresent and omniscient beings: I think it does – see below, but one could legitimately disagree. It’s another thing to raise a strawman and knock it down, which is what Dawkins seems to be doing by making the existence of God a scientific question. Which results from either a poor conception of science or a poor conception of theology (I presume the latter in this case). Science cannot, by definition, deal with transcendent categories – beings that transcend space and time, such as God. It must limit itself to entities limited in space and time. Science could imaginably deal with a hideously powerful, God-like, yet limited being such as Star Trek’s Q. But not with God. And what Dawkins seems to be doing is substitute Star Trek’s Q for God, and then arguing against its existence.
You, OB, seem to make both the wrong and the right argument in the same paragraph: on the one hand you wonder why the existence of God cannot be treated in the same way as the existence of the tooth fairy or that of a celestial super-object – and in the next sentence, you argue that the concept of transcendence is incoherent. But if the latter is correct, then everything stops there. If transcendence is nonsense or blather, it doesn’t follow that treating God like the tooth fairy or a celestial super-object is a relevant argument.
Incidentally, I don’t think transcendence is an incoherent concept for philosophy (for science it obviously is irrelevant). I suppose that one could succesfully argue that human consciousness is transcendent. That we are part of, yet a bit more than, the “internal worlds” we build up out of our sensory impressions and our thoughts. Arguing along the same lines, Haldane and Popper attempted to refute eliminative materialism (our capacity for logic, reason etc. necessary underlies or transcends our scientific knowledge of the world and therefore cannot be explained within that body of knowledge). In any event, for reasons such as these, I don’t think concepts such as transcendence, being neither “within” or “without” the universe, etc. cannot be simply brushed aside as meaningless.
But even if one does brush them aside as meaningless, the tooth fairy argument is still a strawman argument.
Sorry! I know you’re not trying to shut me up. On the contrary. But I took the argument to be a more general admonition to science to shut up. But I see what you’re saying now.
Okay…but how can transcendent categories be dealt with within a much wider epistemic field? I’m probably just being dense, but I don’t quite get it. What do you mean by ‘dealt with’? You mean inquired into? Or speculated about? I can see how they can be speculated about, but not quite how they can be inquired into.
True, we don’t know we’re spatiotemporally limited. And it’s interesting to ponder the possibility that we’re not. But…the religion I bump up against every day is the opposite of that: it’s all too mundane, and full of dull flat small limiting truth claims, not pondered or maybe’d but slapped out like a summons.
Bullies; sure. (JS says the same thing: polemics about religion are too easy.) But I just am more interested in the stuff that’s in our face every day, talking nonsense about science and morality and reason. Sure, it’s an easy target, but it remains out there. So – I keep on arguing with it.
I think I would take a slightly wider view of “inquiry” as including, to a certain extent, “speculation”. Because speculation is also subject to some commonly shared norms of rationality, coherence, etc. A lot of philosophy seems to be quite speculative to me, but nonetheless very worthwhile. “Worldviews” on Life, the Universe and Everything are necessarily speculative, but I don’t think it’s right to dismiss them for that reason. And we would probably agree that an internally coherent, non-contradictory “worldview” is preferable to a self-refuting or incoherent one.
I’d say some of practical religion is depressingly mundane. The imbecilicly cheerful “Jesus is my bestest fwiend” evangelism for instance. But not all of it. The existential questions and fears that have been pondered in religion and religious art are anything but mundane. And of course, this is perhaps more due to the fact that for more than a millenium religion was the only framework for people to think about these issues than anything else – but that’s what practical religion is, for a lot of people.
I was never a baptized Catholic, but went to Catholic school and often to Catholic mass when I was a kid. This was at the time my father went through his conversion process. And for a kid from a somewhat drab paper-mill town, the inside of the Catholic Church was the opposite of mundane. The stern-faced saints, the Stations of the Cross, the sullen demonic gargoyles and all that gave eight-year old me the idea that there was a very frightening and very beautiful world out there, which I had to find out more about. In that sense, it contributed quite a lot to my own intellectual development.
(I guess my primary school teacher, a nun, understood this better than the priest, whose stories about being nice and cuddly to one another I found a bit on the soft side even then. The teacher instead went into glorious detail about the crucifixion. Much more interesting. The journalist John Dolan wrote somewhere that as a kid, the priest used to tell him Hell was the absence from God. He immediately dismissed such nonsense, knowing all too well that Hell is like sticking your hand in a candle for too long, except it’s all over your body, and lasts forever. I agree with the sentiment).
What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that at best, religious language, religious semiotic, has transmitted a picture of the world, and of God, as stern and frightening and way too immense for us as well as fatherly/motherly and loving. I think that God may well exist, but that religious claims about God are by necessity metaphoric – and reflect our own hopes and fears more than anything else. And these need not be platitudinous or mundane.
As for “picking on the easy targets” – some of these (Madeleine Bunting anyone?) should probably be picked on despite the intellectual ease of the exercise. Because they’re influential. Others should be because they have guns. I’m not faulting you for doing so, on the contrary.
Hmm. I’m not sure about inquiry. It seems to me to be an empirical activity. I could be wrong about that, I could just be working with a wrong definition – but I think that’s what it means. I can see it as being linked to speculation, but as including it? Mmmmm – not sure. But it’s a small point! About this though – “Because speculation is also subject to some commonly shared norms of rationality, coherence, etc.” Not necessarily. Speculation that is, is, but not all of it is. There’s no law that says speculation can’t be just pure – speculation.
Agreed about the existential questions, but also about the implication that there are other (and better) ways to think about them now.
On the other hand, your eight year old experience of the church is another matter – I do entirely see what you mean.
That’s pretty much my thinking: that influential targets should be picked on even though they’re easy. In fact their easiness is one reason to pick on them – if their arguments were better, they wouldn’t be so damn irritating, because they wouldn’t be influencing people by saying silly things all the time!
In any case of course I’m not clever enought to take on hard targets. It’s easy ones or nothing.