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Post by sandwiches on Apr 28, 2009 21:41:57 GMT
People are forming queues to mock Dawkins: Terry Eagleton (who did the most memorable review of The God Delusion) has a book out - "Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate" -reviewed here: www.salon.com/books/review/2009/04/28/terry_eagleton/index.htmlAs Eagleton ultimately admits, the discount-store atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens is something of a useful straw man, and his real differences with them are, in the main, not theological but political. Still, attacking them in broad and often hilarious strokes -- he depicts Dawkins as a tweedy, cloistered Oxford don sneering at the credulous nature of the common people, and Hitchens as a bootlicking neocon propagandist and secular jihadist -- lends his book considerable entertainment value.
Biologist Stephen Jay Gould's famous pronouncement that science and religion were "non-overlapping Magisteria" has sometimes been viewed as a cop-out, or as a polite attempt to say that the former is real and the latter imaginary. Whatever Gould's intentions, Eagleton agrees wholeheartedly, and finds this view entirely consonant with Christian theology. Dawkins is making an error of category, he says, in seeing Christian belief as a counter-scientific theory about the creation of the universe. That's like saying that novels are botched and hopelessly unscientific works of sociology, so there's no point in reading Proust.
Christian theology cannot explain the workings of the universe and was never meant to, Eagleton says. Aquinas, like most religious thinkers that came after him, was happy to encompass all sorts of theories about the creation, including the possibility that the universe was infinite and had always existed. Indeed, Aquinas would concur with Dawkins' view that religious faith is irrelevant to scientific inquiry. But there are questions science cannot properly ask, let alone answer, questions about "why there is anything in the first place, or why what we do have is actually intelligible to us." That is where theology begins.Not sure about Eagleton's view on Jesus:
He describes Jesus as a Jewish "lifestyle revolutionary" who urged his followers to love their enemies, give away their possessions, and leave their dead unburied, who expressed his love and solidarity for whores, criminals and other "nuts of the earth" (the phrase is Paul's), and was tortured and killed for it.And the journalist Melanie Phillips has laid into Dawkins for among other things quoting her words under the heading "Lying for Jesus" (she is Jewish) www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3571996/the-truth-delusion-of-richard-dawkins.thtml |
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Post by bernard on Apr 28, 2009 23:06:52 GMT
I found myself in the strange position of defending Dawkins against an atheist (with new-age leanings) friend of mine. He is a pre-eminent Zoologist and a good writer. Just a pity he has no more philosophical authority than my plumber.
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Post by merkavah12 on Apr 28, 2009 23:23:06 GMT
Ouch, looks like the old boy really put his foot in it this time.
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Post by unkleE on Apr 29, 2009 3:55:43 GMT
Terry Eagleton (who did the most memorable review of The God Delusion) has a book out - "Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate" -reviewed here: That was a very interesting review of what looks like a very interesting book. Eagleton may be a Marxist, and he is probably not a christian as I understand that word, but I think the gap between him and me is not all that great on many issues. I don't have such a problem, especially with this statement from the reviewer (presumably reflecting Eagleton): "contemporary Christianity has little to do with its eponymous founder". I think that's an overstatement, but I think it contains truth. Even the Apostles Creed falls into this a little - Jesus' life is summed up by his birth ( "born of the virgin Mary") and death ( "suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried"), with nothing about his teaching, the Kingdom of God, his miracles, his compassion for the downtrodden, etc. My faith has been greatly enriched by gaining a better understanding of Jesus in his historical context, and trying to incorporate that understanding into my life. |
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Post by James Hannam on Apr 29, 2009 16:18:00 GMT
Yale UP has kindly sent me the Eagleton book for a review. I’m about half way through (it is quite short) and hope to post something in the next few days.
On Eagleton’s own religious position, there is little doubt in my mind that he is a Christian and considers himself orthodox. In the introduction, he notes some things he does not believe in which include papal infallibility, the angel Gabriel and bodily ascension by levitation. He does not include the virgin birth or the resurrection.
His Marxist Christianity is similar to the liberation theology popular in South America before being stamped on by John Paul II so I doubt Eagleton is in communion with the Catholic Church he was brought up in. He is a big fan of Aquinas and medieval theology. I expect he feels some affinity for the spiritual Franciscans who went to the wall over the poverty of Christ.
Unlkee, I think you’d find his book both entertaining and challenging. It is a reminder that Christ’s message is neither comfortable nor easy to put into practice. For me though, his politics are too far from my own view of the world. It makes the book hard to accept. The oddest thing is that Christianity is so wide it has room for Eagleton and me.
Best wishes
James
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Post by sandwiches on Apr 29, 2009 20:01:16 GMT
Look forward to seeing your review.
I think the description of Jesus as a "Jewish lifestyle revolutionary" worried me a little as it made Jesus sound a little like Nigella Lawson. I am sure Nigella has her good points but all the same.....
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Post by unkleE on Apr 30, 2009 1:29:44 GMT
Yale UP has kindly sent me the Eagleton book for a review. I’m about half way through (it is quite short) and hope to post something in the next few days. How cool to be offered a review copy. Do you review books regularly? Where do the reviews appear? I look forward to your review here. That is very interesting, as when he reviewed The God Delusion (and made his famous comment about the British Book of Birds) he was quoted as a Marxist and (I thought, perhaps by implication) an atheist. Thanks. I was wondering about getting it, or at least seeing if it came into our local library. |
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Post by merkavah12 on Apr 30, 2009 2:27:40 GMT
Lo and behold! The Dawkinistas come to the defense of their patriarch in the Melanie Phillips debacle. The comments section has been lit up by by some of the funniest attempts at damage control that I have ever borne witness to.
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Post by Al Moritz on Apr 30, 2009 2:48:22 GMT
Lo and behold! The Dawkinistas come to the defense of their patriarch in the Melanie Phillips debacle. The comments section has been lit up by by some of the funniest attempts at damage control that I have ever borne witness to. Sorry, could you please explain what this is about, and provide a link? Thanks Al |
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Post by unkleE on Apr 30, 2009 3:17:39 GMT
Sorry, could you please explain what this is about, and provide a link? The bottom link in the original post. |
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Post by merkavah12 on Apr 30, 2009 3:19:04 GMT
www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephilli....d-dawkins.thtmlAllow me to summarize: Richard Dawkins, acting on a rather gross misconception said some rather unpleasant and untrue things about Melanie Phillips. Now if that wasn't funny enough the comment section is now full of Dawkinistas rushing to the defense of their hero in manner so blindly loyal and unquestioning, I nearly confused them for the Fundamentalists they seem to despise so much. Give it a read, it certainly made me laugh.
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Post by humphreyclarke on Apr 30, 2009 8:16:20 GMT
Ah excellent!, another Nu Atheist blooper! Francis Collins has a new site up called Biologos: biologos.org/Needless to say PZ and Jerry Coyne were not too impressed: scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/biologos.phpwhyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/shoot-me-now-francis-collinss-new-supernaturalist-website/However PZ and some other site then accused Francis Collins of making a 'creationist argument' regarding the second law of thermodynamics (the usual muck throwing) scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/another_disappointment_from_th.phpevaluatingchristianity.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/francis-collins-creationist/Collins had written: There is a law of physics called the Second Law of Thermodynamics that states an isolated system’s entropy can never decrease, it can only increase or stay the same. In other words, all changes in isolated systems lead to states of higher disorder. Therefore, the same must be true of our entire universe. However, it is also known that the formation of stars and galaxies, essential for the development of life on Earth, requires a high degree of order. This implies that the universe was once much more ordered than it is now, and therefore it began with a very low entropy. Evaluating Christianity saw this and wrote: No serious astrophysicist would write something that stupid. n his apologetics, Collins protests that he is neither an ID creationist or a Biblical creationist. Why, then, is Collins peddling a classic ID creationist argument; one that has been debunked for over a decade (including Penrose’s garbage probability calculations)?This was then parroted by PZ. The problem is of course, that is what a lot of serious astrophysicists believe, Including Sean Carroll who wrote in the comments: 'Collins isn’t using the typical dumb-creationist argument that evolution is incompatible with the Second Law. He’s just explaining that the universe near the Big Bang was in a very special state, one of extremely low entropy. Nobody knows why that is true. You can use it (as Collins does) as a “gap” that God should step in and explain, but that’s as likely to come out right as all the previous gaps have been. There’s no reason to make up bad arguments and attribute them to people who are perfectly willing to make bad arguments on their own.
www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-cosmic-origins-of-times-arrowBit embarrassing. Note how 'creationist' is now banded about and applied to anyone whose views depart from received dogma. |
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Post by humphreyclarke on Apr 30, 2009 8:37:03 GMT
Great comment on PZ's blog from Holbach
'To your religion soaked brain, anything that smacks of reason is false, and atheism represents this belittling of your pathetic unreason. Your god is not even false, it just does not exist. It is not your fault that there is no imaginary god, so why burden your insignificant mind with something that you will never cause to exist? Atheism is here to remind you with blatant reason that your existence is false and only possible because of evolution, not something that evolution knows anything about.'
Wow, that made a lot of sense.
So. Religion soaks the brain with unreason. God is not false, but also doesn't exist. Atheism soaks the brain with reason, reminds you that you don't exist, but also that you do exist because of evolution, which doesn't know you exist, because you don't exist.
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Post by James Hannam on Apr 30, 2009 8:56:40 GMT
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Post by Al Moritz on Apr 30, 2009 10:22:53 GMT
Bit embarrassing. Note how 'creationist' is now banded about and applied to anyone whose views depart from received dogma. Yup, intellectual fairness and nuance apparently is not the strong suit of atheists. Derailing a clear technical term for slandering purposes is just great. We want everybody to accept science including evolution. But listen, just unbelievable, there are some that accept all this and believe in God anyway. Hey, let's not have this about science -- that is secondary -- science promoters that we are, our real agenda is atheism. Yeah, those irrational idiots are all creationists! |
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