Remember Terry Eagleton?

[charlie]

The preeminent literary critic who lambasted Hitchens and Dawkins, especially Dawkins, a couple of years ago, famously collapsing the two into a composite fool -- Dawkins + Hitchens = Ditchkins?

His main beef was that Dawkins was callow, unfamiliar with the vast scholarship of Christianity, too ignorant to understand the rarified thinking of a Thomas Aquinas. He made much of Dawkins' stupid notion of God as creator, the supreme "manufacturer."

Well, he's written a book, which occasioned an interview with New Humanist magazine. He revisits the spat and expands on the proper regard for certain religious ideas that Dawkins misunderstands.

Such as God the creator. God is not the creator. He touched on this earlier, but here he states it baldly:

You say that God made the world simply for the love and delight of it. But you don't mean 'made' in the usual sense of the word as you've already insisted that God did not create the world.

"That's right. Aquinas is saying that the relationship between God and the world is about the fact that the world is in some ways His. Not in the sense that my shoes are mine because I manufactured them but because at the centre of the world lies his love and freedom. God didn't create the world. He loved it into being. Now what that means, God knows, but that's exactly what Aquinas was saying. The concept of God is what will not let you go. He will not let you slip through his fingers. It's that kind of unconditional love. If you like, that's impossible. We can only know conditional love, but if you are to have some kind of authentic idea of God that's the place from which you have to start, not seeing God as some kind of manufacturer."

http://newhumanist.org.uk/2085

So, it turns out the disagreement was over method? Maybe something else, I can't tell. God didn't create. He "loved" everything into being. Eagleton doesn't know what that means, but he's confidant it's the only stance a sophisticate would take. And Dawkins is stupid.

For a while postmodernism was the fast track if you wanted to preen with obfuscatory bullshit. Looks like apologetics is coming back with a bullet.

[moggie]

1. Bullshit slips through your fingers

That's why Eagleton and his ilk like it, of course. He's fashioned his god into an insubstantial wraith who can slip into any gap and evaporate when you try to examine him. And yet, this still misses the point. When you boil it down, all atheists ask is "show us your evidence, and then we'll talk": and there's no more evidence for Eagleton's lurve-machine god than for the traditional beardy on a golden throne. In any case, Eagleton's god would seem thin gruel, and probably blasphemous, to the majority of Christians for the majority of the religion's history. When Christians deny human rights to gay people, or shut down the reproductive rights of women, or sabotage education because "I ain't kin to no monkey", or fill the coffers of an organised paedophile ring, most of them believe in a far more muscular and interventionist god than Eagleton's. One wonders why Eagleton doesn't direct his erudite scorn at them, rather than his "Ditchkins" straw-atheist.

[charlie]

2. Wholly agree

In this one instance though, because he was so merciless with Dawkins, I expected he might have something more than airy handwaving. I'll certainly allow an idea might not be fully appreciated without some deep pondering, but "loved into being" corrects Dawkins "create"? Really? If the subject was anything other than religion, Eagleton would slap himself for evasive posturing.

I stupidly expected something more than just another pretentious signifier for believers who want to nod their heads sagely to indicate they "get it".

As for your thoughts -- well said! I agree that Eagleton's ephemeral God would be blasphemous to most. DU Christians rightly bristle when lumped with more literal believers, but pinning coarse theology solely on fundamentalists is wearing thin. Like it or not, various degrees of stern sky-daddy IS the popular conception of God, certainly so in the US.

[stopbush]

3. Aquinas seems to be the favoritre mental midget cited by these types.

[onager]

4. Aquinas! Augustine! Philo! Plato! Zzzzz......

Yep, those types can never answer a direct question about the embarassing lack of evidence. But they can sidestep the issue until you're comatose with long-winded appeals to ancient experts (and quotes from them).

And IMO, most of the erudite ancients were nothing but a bunch of bullshitters as well. Philo of Alexandria and his "mediating logos?" WTF is THAT? Well, not much, when you take a close look at it.

Not long ago in R&T, some bright spark decided to settle the question of the historical Jesus. He settled it by saying, "We don't know much about Socrates either, but his ideas are still with us. Maybe Socrates didn't exist..." Etc. etc.

We actually know quite a bit about Socrates. e.g., before he got into the Philosophy Racket, he was very nearly killed at the battle of Delium. (In one of those countless and pointless Greek civil wars.)

If Socrates had been killed, his student Plato would have moved right on to his second career choice, where a good line of bullshit is even more useful that it is in philosophy: politics. Considering his writings, it's easy to imagine Plato as a minor tyrant who finally gets run out of town or executed after putting his anti-democratic ideas into practice. He would be a footnote in history, and even better, the Xians would have never heard of him and grafted his incomprehensible bullshit onto their own nonsense.

I'm cranky today.

[charlie]

5. It doesn't need to be said

But I'll say it anyway. That "neener-neener you can't prove Socrates existed" stuff is always such disingenous crap. Who cares? No historic figure HAD to exist, save one. Anyone from Zeno to Elvis can turn out to be fiction, and apart from bumfuzzled history depts and "I'll be damned" headscratching from the rest of us, it wouldn't make much difference. But proof Jesus never lived would blow a hole in a couple billion psyches, turn a ginormous religious infrastructure into something like Woolworth's before liquidation, and make God look like an idiot. Nobody's indispensible, except for The One Person For Whom This Whole Sodding Universe Was Created.