Terry Eagleton has a new book out, called Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate.
From this review, it sounds very interesting:
"Eagleton’s devastating critique focuses on Hitchens and Dawkins’ theological illiteracy, ignorance of how science works, and naive faith in rational progress. The crisis of Enlightenment reason, which was apparent to secular philosophers long before it became part of the popular Christian response to modernity, is little noted in Ditchkins."
(Ditchkins is his name for Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins).
"From Ditchkins, one would never know that there are forms of Christianity reducible neither to fundamentalism nor to effete Unitarianism. There has been a sustained Christian tradition of scriptural commentary that acknowledges the autonomy of science and is quite self-conscious about its own hermeneutics. Ditchkins reduces God to a sort of Loch Ness Monster for whose existence there is no convincing evidence. As Eagleton clarifies with help from Thomas Aquinas and contemporary interpreters such as Herb McCabe, God is not the big, bad daddy in the sky, “the largest and most powerful creature.” Neither is theology intended to explain the operations of nature. But it does respond to questions concerning “why there is anything in the first place, or why what we do have is actually intelligible to us.”"
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Me
- Mark
- I am writing a PhD at the University of Glasgow entitled "The Poetics of Time in Contemporary Literature". My writing has been published in Type Review, Dancehall, Puffin Review and TheState. I review books for Gutter and The List. I am also an editor and reviewer at the Glasgow Review of Books.
The bizarre dogma of Dworkins' at al. is fascinating.
ReplyDelete"Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless present an interesting subject for study" A.N. Whitehead.
I went to a talk once by a psychologist who was subtly scathing about Dworkins. He suggested that he'd like to break into Dwrokins' house and find all of the sentimental items there.