IRF

Thanks!

Oh, Don B.; I'm sorry I haven't yet replied to your reply to my rather shoddy reply.  I am thinking on it.

I find that review by Eagleton quite irritating (acknowledging this to be a rather subjective reaction), largely due to the tone.  I'm not sure how much I'll be able to say constructively on it, but I'll try (after-note: writing the following was particularly difficult for me; I have *tried* to be careful though).

I did find most of his final paragraph to be quite welcome (Oh how welcome indeed!).  But, for the rest:

"This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince."

Need it be said that the vast majority of all religious believers do not have such training?  Many, many people *do* hold beliefs that could easily be framed in terms amenable to his lines of argument. These are the people his book is marketed at, I think. Also he has said (something to the effect)  that he does respect some leaders of the more progressive/liberal religions in Britain (up to a point, of course).

"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."

As was said in a commentary of this review elsewhere (pharyngula), it might be relevant that South Asia has a verifiable physical existence... .

"A molehill of instances out of a mountain of them will have to suffice. Dawkins considers that ... Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that."

They are not necessarily brought up to believe unquestioningly, but many are brought up to believe.  Witness the trouble that ex-Muslims have in Britain (I recall that only recently have some members of the ex-Muslim whatever group publicly gave their names).

Many parts (though not by any means the majority) of the review seem either insubstantiable or vacuous:  his objectively-toned characterizations of God (and some gross mischaracterizations of R.D.), and the characterizations of things in terms of God.  I doubt there's much productive debate to be had on those topics, so unless I receive an invitation I will not say anything about them.

"His polemic would come rather more convincingly from a man who was a little less arrogantly triumphalistic about science (there are a mere one or two gestures in the book to its fallibility)"

This is interesting to me (though probably old-hat to some others).  Could all enthusiasm about scientific issues be framed in such a way?  I am rather uncomfortable at the thought, honestly.  It is an important thing to think about and research; it seems to me insofar as people want to talk about things, that the scientific method is an invaluable and trustworthy tool.

On a more personal note (personal doesn't mean that I don't think it's up for debate) for me, as a nonreligious person, religion is a purely rhetorical thing; if someone talks to me about something making reference to religious things, I generally extract what emotional and social expression I can from it, dismiss what can be reasonably dismissed (sometimes tacitly, sometimes not), and then try to get on with responding as best as I can on my own terms. This is to my mind the most reasonable approach to make.

Do you think maybe he owns a house as well? (sound of scales falling from eyes)

'Guilt can be just as disabling as arrogance, however. The political good which Spivak has done far outweighs the fact that she leads a well-heeled life in the States. If complicity means living in capitalist society, then just about everyone but Fidel Castro stands accused of it; if it means 'buying in' (as the Americans revealingly phrase it) to something called Western Reason, then only those racist or non-dialectical thinkers for whom such reason is uniformly oppressive need worry about it. The word 'complicit' has an ominous ring to it, but there is nothing ominous about being 'complicit' with the Child Poverty Action Group or the writings of the suffragettes. In any case, Spivak is logically mistaken to suppose that imagining some overall alternative to the current system means claiming to be unblemished by it. To imagine that it would be nice to be in Siena is not necessarily to disavow the fact that I am in S****horpe.'

From http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n10/eagl01_.html

I have just watched the Ch 4 Richard Dawkins programme. He was at all times courteous and clear. He allows the pseudo-science purveyors to have their say and does not ridicule them but the falseness of their stories is self-evident. He makes the scientific points with precision afterwards.
Very good - I shall watch next week's with similar interest.

Posters on the BBC Religious MBs have been sneering at the programmes in advance - it will be interesting to read their comments tomorrow!

I caught the end, when he complained about the rumours that surround vaccinations for measles, etc. What he didn't acknowledge, or understand, it seemed to me, was that the reason people were ignoring the scientific mainstream was not because of superstition and ignorance but because they know that science has got it wrong in the past.

Look at BSE and the mad cows. First it was all right to eat beef, then it wasn't. Some children were given injections in the 1970s to make them grow taller. It was based on good, hard science but it had tragic consequences. And no one talks about the impending ice age any more.

Well, he does say that 'But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive', and is all with Dawkins on attacking fundamentalism. But Dawkins seems to want to extend this to attack every single manifestation of religion (I haven't read his book (though I have heard him holding forth on religion on various occasions) - if that's not doing justice to his argument, and he is more tolerant of some varieties of religion, then I take that back). And he does claim to say something about theology, I gather, for which one, well, ought to know something about theology!

The continent does, but the politics are an idea rather than a physical object.

It's too easy to generalise here. Many are brought up to believe, yes, but also to read the sacred texts, which is rather more effort than simple faith by default. After all, isn't that what religious education is about?

Well, I for one would be interested to read if you'd be interested in elaborating on that.

Well, some might raise questions about how 'trustworthy' the scientific method (can such a thing be defined so broadly?) is; but more to the point, Dawkins is making much bigger claims than that, it seems, to do with the superiority of scientific knowledge of all other types, and almost advocating belief in science as a new religion. Or, again, correct me if I'm wrong on that.