Good Takedown of Dawkins:

Jonathan Rowe on Oct 22nd 2006

By Terry Eagleton.

Will the atheist half of Positive Liberty defend dear old Richard?

Filed in The Basement

9 Responses to “Good Takedown of Dawkins:”

  1. # Ed Braytonon 22 Oct 2006 at 6:40 pm

    I’m certainly no defender of Dawkins, but I thought the Eagleton essay was flat out terrible, full of weasel words and vague, subjective language. If that is the alternative to Dawkins, I’m afraid that he has a much easier time of it than one would hope. This one paragraph I think demonstrates my point perfectly:

    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.

    This is pretty much all nonsense. If one is criticizing the Bible, then those things he claims are part of “Dawkins’ God” are very much a part of the Biblical God as well. Eagleton seems to be arguing that orthodox Christianity is not to be taken seriously, but that some unorthodox but entirely undefined spirituality is far more worthy of serious belief. This is nothing but a puff piece filled with empty rhetoric.

  2. # Ian H Speddingon 22 Oct 2006 at 7:52 pm

    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.

    Much the same as reading a literary theorist criticising an ethologist for his views on theology, I should think.

    Is this really supposed to be a “good takedown of Dawkins”, whatever that is supposed to mean?

    To take one example, Eagleton writes:

    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?

    I have no idea whether or not Dawkins has heard of them but if there is no evidence for the existence of the God about they are writing then so what? In what way is their scholarship any different from studies of the culture of Tolkien’s Middle Earth or the universes of Star Trek and Babylon 5?

    This is not to demean literary criticism. Speaking as one who has been a Treekie for longer than I care to remember, I admit to having studied the world of Captain Kirk in greater detail than was perhaps good for my social development. But I never, at any time, believed that it was anything other than fiction, neither did I ‘worship’ Mr Spock.

    Of course, as has been pointed out so many times before, at root this all depends on what is meant by the word “God”, and here Eagleton is more helpful. For example, he starts by telling us what God is not:

    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 … 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.

    So far, so good, but if that is what God is not what can we say it is?

    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.

    Oh, well, that makes it much clearer. Or maybe not.

    Richard Feynman argued that if you can’t explain your research to your grandmother then you probably don’t understand it yourself. The fact that intelligent and well-educated people must indulge in these sorts of intellectual contortions in an attempt to describe a concept so fundamental to their faith is a measure of how little they understand of what they claim is so clear to them as to be beyond question.

    Until theists are able to construct a firmer foundation for their theologies and purge them of all inconsistency and contradiction it is they who stand vulnerable to being ‘taken down’ in any properly-moderated debate.

  3. # treyon 23 Oct 2006 at 12:42 am

    I need to read the whole thing more closely before I make a full coherent comment,

    but I got the impression that that Eagleton is criticizing Dawkin’s characterization of the Christian “biblical” theology of God (Dawkin’s God) as simplistic (which it damn well is, as someone who as studied theology (amatuer) and evolutionary biology (professional), I have always found Dawkin’s criticisms of Christianity (and religion) straw man arguments. He puts for a theology of God as _the_ Christian theology of God (which is simplistic and utterly inaccurate) and then attacks his straw man God.

    Your criticism doesn’t make sense if that is the case.

    And frankly, I find his view of evolutioan quite amazingly simplistic.

  4. # Telic Thoughts » Ouch!on 23 Oct 2006 at 2:02 pm

    [...] Terry Eagleton, “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching” (HT: Positive Liberty): 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. [...]

  5. # Ed Braytonon 23 Oct 2006 at 3:59 pm

    I would say that the version of Christianity that Dawkins criticizes may not be the most sophisticated possible version, but it’s easily the most common one. I certainly agree that there are far more reasonable versions out there, but they aren’t found in Eagleton’s downright silly and meaningless drivel on the subject (much of it quoted by Ian above). There are good criticisms of Dawkins (coming from someone who has criticized him often), but they aren’t offered by Eagleton.

  6. # Positive Liberty » Blog Archive » No Defense of Dawkins, but…on 23 Oct 2006 at 6:57 pm

    [...] Rowe, downblog, asks the atheist half of Positive Liberty (i.e., Sandefur and Kuznicki) if we care to defend Richard Dawkins’ latest work, The God Delusion. [...]

  7. # The Gay Specieson 23 Oct 2006 at 7:39 pm

    Of course, Eagleton is going to “defend” religious thought, else his Marxist “faith” would also be called into question. Admittedly, Dawkins is no theologian, because his scientific and empirical bents don’t allow superstitions. What would he know of angels dancing on the heads of pins? The point is: He doesn’t care. It’s futile inquiry into futile mythologies that “arrests” intellectual capital development. That Eagleton misses this point only illustrates his own blindspot.

  8. # Chuckon 24 Oct 2006 at 8:53 am

    Eagleton doesn’t refute any rational argument against the existence of God; instead, he defends a certain wishy-washy kind of New Age Christian sensibility. I doubt many freethinkers and rationalists will be impressed (being a Spinozist/weak deist myself, I certainly wasn’t). The article was also thick with pious socialist platitudes one expects from any fashionably right-thinking London literary critic.

  9. # Soren Juneauon 17 Nov 2006 at 12:00 pm

    Wow–a bunch of folks who don’t understand Eagleton’s subtle argument or Dawkins’ bombast.

    There is nothing new-agey about Eagleton’s recently recovered Catholic theological stance. Take the name Eagleton off and put C S Lewis, and many Christians would not know the difference. His defense of the historic incarnation of Christ has othing to do with his waning Marxism.

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