Abstract

Review of Reviews

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 19 January 2007
Monday, 22 January 2007

Catholic Trotskyite

Terry Eagleton is a professor of nothing much and everything you like at Manchester and so has written a book telling us how we ought to read a poem. No doubt grateful to offset his donations to the Catholic platter and given the chance to write yet another review in the London Review of Books, he vented his religious spleen on Dawkins’ book. Eagleton gives the impression in his review of being incurably narky. Typically, he begins by implying that Dawkins is an amateur, even in his own field of speciality, biology. Then he calls him a card-carrying rationalist, suggesting his obsession with communism. Then he tells us, Dawkins is among the least well equipped to understand what he is castigating because he believes there is nothing worth understanding in it, and so presents a “vulgar caricature of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince”. Perhaps, it would do that, but would the theology student be wincing because he realised the criticism that theology was not worth understanding was the truth, or because the critic was ignorant of its wonders? And how much of something false do you need to know to be able to condemn it?

Doubtless a renaissance man like Eagleton will give everything the benefit of the doubt, after all, by doing so, he could write a lucrative two thousand words on it in some broadsheet newspaper, or lefty or intellectual journal, but the fact that Eagleton likes it is scarcely a reason for wanting to support it. Eagleton is a Catholic and a Marxist at the same time. He is also most other things, a veritable latter day Saint Paul. To be a Marxist Catholic sounds remarkable but his interest in Marxism was not as a communist but as an anti-communist, a Trotskyite. His Marxism and Catholicism run in parallel grooves. Maybe his seeming perpetual tetchiness in print is because neither the CIA nor the Vatican have rewarded him adequately for his services, rendered in the interest of anti-communism.

Even as a Marxist, he favours that group of weirdos, the disciples of Derrida and Foucault, who claim to be Marxists but cannot accept any author on face value, so can hardly be anything at all except communication nihilists—or explicators of poetry. Marxism is not scientific in the Popperian sense, though it professes to be based on economic and historical evidence. But evidence is a load of dyxlexic scribble to post-modernists because they do not believe anything written at all, so they can hardly be Marxists in any meaningful way. For them, that is the point—nothing has any meaning other than what you read into it, and so they can be as Marxist as the pope and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin at the same time. True to tradition, what Eagleton writes seems to be whatever comes to his head in the context of his current fad, and so basically is archetypal deconstruction. Even so, you can see his Catholic-Trotskyite mental fixations emerging in his sour soundbites.

Eagleton digresses from Dawkins to defend Derrida, with an anecdote about allegedly “right-wing Cambridge dons” whom it did not please to offer Derrida an honorary degree. He suspected that few of them had read Derrida, failing to comprehend that there can be no point in reading what someone writes who claims writing is meaningless. “Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a student who had not read his Treatise of Human Nature.” But Hume wrote his treatise to mean something, a fundamental difference, one would think. Not at all, it was gross prejudice, Professor Eagleton avers, and the same prejudice for militant rationalists is religion.

To establish his own dilettante credentials in the minutiae of theological obfuscation, he asks whether Dawkins ever heard of Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Eriugena, Rahner and Moltmann. It seems quite irrelevant whether he has heard of them or not. After all, Eagleton, we assume, has read them but can only find in whatever they wrote what he wants to find. It is one thing to read something simply to have your own prejudices confirmed, and another to read it to understand it because you imagine it means something. The latter is altogether harder, though the former will doubtless give you a reputation of being a polymath. A polymath, however, has knowledge in the many fields he studies. He is not simply a jack of all trades and master of none. Modern knowledge, once the postmodern nonsense is rejected, is so wide that all those who imagine themselves as Renaissance men are nothing but dilettantes because there is just too much to know. Dawkins has studied his own speciality in depth, and like most scientists has discovered in the course of it that blind faith is a scam. Eagleton’s Monte Carlo reading methods have rather confirmed the childhood fancies knocked into him by his clerical teachers rather than helping him to throw them off. He is more medieval than Renaissance.

Suicide Inducing Exposition

Finally he launches into a suicide-inducing exposition of a version of Christian belief, which he ends up accepting is unlikely to convince any reasoning person. Eagleton challenges that believers are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Even his own childhood oppressors did not do that, he tells us. Yet he continues to believe. It seems evident that he could not have had any such belief had he not been taught it, and, as the belief is based on no evidence at all, it seems that, had he been taught properly to question unfounded assertions by asking for the evidence for them, he could not have believed. Yet he continues to believe, even claiming that “reason, argument and honest doubt have always played a role” in Christian belief. John Cornwell, in another review in The Times notes that most religionists, and perhaps many agnostics and atheists, struggle, like Graham Greene, with their convictions throughout a lifetime. It illustrates the power of childhood Christian indoctrination, and the psychological cultivation of fear and guilt that is used to do it.

Such an intellectual as Eagleton must notice that there is here a contradiction—how can one truly doubt Christian faith? Faith can only be doubted as long as it is doubly reaffirmed through the doubt. Christian indoctrination has to recognize that intelligent people will inevitably doubt anything so unreasonable as faith, even if the less intelligent ones never do, and so it has to have a strategy to cope with it. They are assured that doubt is natural, and God does not object so long as the doubt is soon cast aside and irrational faith affirmed harder than it was. The clerical answer to doubt, in short, is not to allow it to be followed to its logical conclusion, but to affirm faith twice as hard. Or else! That, postmodern man, is a terrible psychological abuse of the intellect and the person. Clerics are using the bogeyman God to force people to return to belief, even when they doubt, so their and his claim that doubt has a role in Christian belief is true, but it is not honest. Doubt is not allowed to become denial.

Essentially, people like Greene can see the holes in the edifice but are too worried by their inculcated fears to give up belief. That is what is so monstrous about it. Why don’t they have confidence in the message that God is good and loving, and any such God could not possibly want to torture someone forever, and nor could He expect them to believe a load of incoherent claptrap to be able to escape the punishment. Then they should ask themselves, “If this is not God’s doing, then who benefits from it?”.

Dawkins is then blamed for not writing a book criticizing “science, objectivity, liberalism, atheism” and such like. It is another of those simplistic ploys that apologists are fond of. “It is all very well criticizing Christianity, but what about X, Y and Z”. Well, no liberal objects to anyone doing what Eagleton says. If he wants it done, and it has not been, there is a chance for him to pen a few more inconsequential pages, and boost his fading ego. The fact is, of course, that all of these things have been criticized often, most recently especially by right wing authoritarians, and postmodern dilettantes like himself, and it was not Dawkins’ aim to write such a book. He chose to write about the Christian scam. That is what Eagleton and his co-apologists do not like. Postmodern Marxist man and right wing authoritarian Christian man are suddenly found in the same bed. Curious that.

Apologetic canard follows apologetic canard in rapid succession in this frantic diatribe. “Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason.” We have the slug telling the thrush how to sing. Dawkins is an evolutionist. He, far better than any literary critic, knows the factors that have influenced our behaviour, and that we evolved many mechanisms to cope with the world before we invented reason. Quite plainly, in most of our lives we use the more basic instincts and abilities we have adopted over a billion years of evolution. Now why should that stop us from using the powerful and manifestly useful ability we have latterly evolved to save ourselves from errors like exploitation by rogues and leeches? The fact that Dawkins, in common with everyone, is a human being and reacts like one in everyday life does not stop him from aiming to be rational in what he does, nor does it stop him from recommending it, when he has good evidence that it works. Eagleton, as one who will not reject God as delusional but will reject meaning as delusional, can obviously only splutter inane complaints over this, but there are plenty of people, thankfully, who still accept meaning as being communicable, and accept it as intended.

Dawkins considers science and belief to be incompatible, the one depending only on evidence, and the other depending on the lack of it, but Eagleton thinks it reasonable that these two opposites are “not in competition”. The reason is that faith is not reducible to factual knowledge, though it depends on it. Love is the same, according to Eagleton, who wants to use it as an easier example. Explaining why you love someone will not convince others to love them too. Maybe not, but may we assume that the explanation was a rational and compelling one? If it were not, they would not be convinced anyway. So, what equivalent rational and compelling explanation of faith is there? That is the rub to Eagleton’s case, and the point of Dawkin’s. As faith is deeply irrational, no compelling argument exists for it, unlike love.

Arguments about God

Now, Eagleton does get to the point of the argument—the existence of God—but he gets no nearer to explaining it. Rather, he uses the tired old excuses that theologians have used for centuries. Christianity says believing in God “must be reasonable”, but the sense in which it is turns out to be is because people have believed it to be so on no evidence since the Old Testament. There can be no scientific proof of God because He is neither “inside nor outside the universe”. Dawkins thinks He is! Actually Dawkins thinks nothing of the kind, because he is attempting—with not much success in this case—to show why there are no grounds at all to think God is anywhere.

Here Eagleton shows the ineffectiveness of a wide but shallow reading experience over infantile indoctrination. Failed genius that he is, he does not say how he knows wonderful things about God, such as that He is outside the universe and simultaneously a part of it. Superpowers like these are believed by babies, but later in life people wonder about them. Not Eagleton. He is certain that the existence of God is quite different from the existence of the tooth fairy, but he does not say why. Rather he seems to think the tooth fairy is a type of alien from outer space, and we can be agnostic about aliens until we get more evidence. Not God, though. And not the tooth fairy! God and the tooth fairy are in the same category of imagined things. Imagined things can have any property you care to imagine. I imagine the tooth fairy to have created God to reveal herself, so plainly she is the mother superior of God, through whom she has revealed herself to all Christians that believe in God. God, of course, as the declining star tells us, revealed Himself through a man who was crucified for challenging the rule of the Roman emperor. Could it not be that he was a plain man who challenged the Roman emperor? Under Roman law, as today, it was treason and the Romans exacted the punishment for treason from him. What is the compelling argument that should make anyone reject this reasonable explanation in favour of the grossest fancies and impossibilities?

He continues explaining Christian belief to us, though it is quite unnecessary because it is familiar and no more convincing for being repeated even by such a human as Eagleton. Dawkins is scornful about the idea of a personal God, but Eagleton tells us God is not a person. So the idea of a personal God is rubbish? No, God is a kind of celestial octopus, with arms that touch everyone that lives. He does not exist but is an “existent”, which he explains as a condition for other things to exist. That might be a way of saving God, but it is hard to see:

• how a condition can seem like a person, for it is certain that people who believe in this personal God imagine Him to be a person, whatever novel excuses Eagleton and his ilk manage to contrive
• how he knows all these wonderful things.

It illustrates the way believers will devise anything that satisfies them for the time being as an excuse for their belief. That might be fine kept to themselves, but when, like Eagleton, they put it in print as “truth”, then they are just lying. It is something Christians do without a blush of compunction, and is another reason why it is so baneful. It makes liars of the most honest people, so has no trouble at all in corrupting the rest.

God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

How many objects then are Eagleton’s envy and his pride? How many objects are God the father and God the son? How many objects are God the condition, the personal God and and a flying pig? Theologians, professional and amateur simply hide behind the most absurd abstractions, which simply serve, for anyone with an active brain cell, to show that the whole edifice is purely imaginary.

Again typical of apologists, Eagleton now starts reiterating the inventions of the divines, articles of dogma that appear, if at all, only ephemerally in the Divine Word. Eagleton openly reveals his inferiority complex—God is not a scientist, but an artist! Like any born again crackpot, he comforts himself as a member of God’s own club. Next, God did not create the world, He is the creator because He sustains it with His love, and might have done the same had there been no beginning at all. Again, we have to ask, how this amazingly erudite man knows such arcane matters, massively wise as he is. Such fantastic and utterly unfounded statements illustrate Dawkin’s thesis completely. Eagleton, frankly is deluded, because he, one has to assume, believes this incredible stuff. Why does he believe things that, even if it were possible they were true, he has no way of knowing? Is it the Akhnaten syndrome? Does he think he is God reincarnated? Or is his delusion on the lesser, George Bush, level of thinking that God is whispering cosmic truths in his brain when he is reading Aquinas or Derrida? Does he dress up in drag of a night and whisper sweet nothings into the ear of his mutt called Boney? He might as well, because whatever erudite words he comes up with to express his fantasies, that is all they remain.

These people think they are God, to all intents and purposes, because they know everything that God knows. He goes on and on in the same vein of divine certainty, utterly sure he knows what God knows, and that is one aspect of the delusion Dawkins warns against. It differs from schizophrenia in only degree, and is the defence of choice of every rogue that gets into a tight spot in court and faced with dire consequences. “It wasn’t me, m’lud, it was the voices!” Next, human beings do not have free will but the power of God lets us be ourselves! He is closer to us than we are ourselves. Being dependent on God is not being dependent, it is being free. This stream of pious moonshine signifies a man mentally salaaming to an eastern potentate in the hope of saving his head. It is pretty pathetic, but no doubt the Marxist Schoolman thinks it will be effective.

Creation

He now tells us that Dawkins is as obsessed with the mechanics of creation as his creationist opponents, but understands nothing of it. He does not accept “the scandal” that God loves us! It is another of the claims of the mind ridden with guilt that only they can understand their banal inventions. So, appreciate that God is not neurotic but wants to be allowed to love us. And if we do not love Him, we shall be incinerated for eternity? Well! Serves you right for being so ungrateful. Oh, sorry! God is not like that really. That is Satan. God does not punish us. He loves us! It is false consciousness to think that God is punitive. Jesus said so. Didn’t he also say we would die if we do not repent, and didn’t the angel in Revelation with an eternal gospel tell us we must fear God? Everyone that has ever perused the bible knows that it can justify anything, and Christians have used it to do just that. Not satisfied with that, Eagleton makes up a lot more from his scattered readings, and fervid imagination, but still sounds like a spoilt child crying for attention.

We get a bit more of Eagleton’s insecure psychology. He sneers at those who want to avert divine wrath by sacrificing animals, being choosy in their diet and being impeccably well behaved. It has always been a great joke that the Christians think their God wants to reward bad behaviour, but is quite distinct from Satan. God loves them just the way they are—as sinners—they hope. So all they need is faith. Let them read their bibles honestly and they will find it is not so. Even S Paul does not say it, and certainly not Jesus in the more reliable synoptic gospels, or his brother, James. It shows that the Christians even delude themselves about their own beliefs. What does not suit them they ignore. The current preference is that faith alone suffices, but Jeeus in their New Testament does not say that, though their divines and pastors encourage them to think he did. It requires no effort except to keep coming to church to prove they are still taking the holy medicine. Christianity is a psychological scam, and when someone like Dawkins points it out, all those who have deluded themselves into a sense of security suddenly feel insecure and start bleating for God once more. They will never be cured until they face up to their own problems and especially stop indoctrinating their children into becoming neurotic worshippers of the neurotic God like themselves.

It was the imperial Roman state, not God, that murdered Jesus.

What has Eagleton got against the Romans? Well, professing Marxism as well as Christianity, no doubt it is imperialism. Imperialists are as careful as any government to uphold their own law. Even Paul thought that Roman law should be upheld, and said so to the early Christians. Christ broke the law, and was punished. Besides that, didn’t God have a plan of salvation for the human race, or has Eagleton got a new take on that too? It sounds a bit like the old ploy of moving the goalposts. The critic criticises Christianity for what it professes to believe, so suddenly, the Christian does not believe that. The critic just does not understand. Well, the critic does understand, and if there is a God, then we at least recognize that He cannot be the fool Christians like Eagleton take Him to be. Indeed, one of the reasons no scientist could accept the Christian God is because they depict Him as a dolt. It is like the Pascal’s wager argument discussed above which assumes a supposedly almighty God cannot know He is being fooled by the three-card-trick believer. Pious liars like Eagleton would do more good for their personal psyche by facing up to God, whatever they imagine him as, and admitting that they have denigrated Him in thinking He needed their help at all, but especially by inventing a gamut of rhapsodical fabrications in His defence. The average atheist rejects a God of liars as not being worthy of worship.

We get more Christian moralizing, and no more addressing of important issues like the lying endemic in Christianity, and which he typifies. Why do Christians not look forward to death when they are meeting their maker in paradise? It is because Christians value life deeply. Curious, then, it is that Christians have been among the worst mass murderers in history. They value their own lives, and their doctrine of personal salvation proves it, but have little regard for anyone else’s. The Christian martyrs are different. They are noble, giving up their lives for “the ultimate well-being of others”. What then of the Moslem suicide bombers? They are doing the same thing, they say, sacrificing their lives for the good of their cause. And that they see as oppression by Jews and Christians.

Amateur Exegesis

Now we get more amateur exegesis, in other words Christian lies. Jesus in Gethsemane was scared of his fate. In fact, Jesus in Gethsemane was waiting for the host of heaven to come to cleanse the world, and Judah in particular, of sin. The fact that Christians have misinterpreted it for two millennia does not make their version right. Jesus might have been scared of the idea of a heavenly host appearing and the world being burnt up in a divine conflagation, but he believed the Day of God’s Vengeance had arrived. He was wrong. Eagleton, of course, thinks of Jesus as the first Christian, but he was not, he was a Jew, and despite Eagleton disparaging the Jewish law, it is evident that Jesus did not. He believed the myth of the Jews then, just as Eagleton believes the myths of Christianity now. Jesus was wrong about the Jewish myths. The angelic army did not come, God did not arrive, and Jesus was crucified as a bandit. Jesus was wrong. Jews knew he was wrong. But gentiles declared him a God, and altered the myth to be that Jesus would come with the host of heavenly angels. Eagleton the Trotskyite blames it on to the state, when the state just followed its own laws. Eagleton is sure he is right? He is no more right than his own God was!

Jesus was enormously popular with the poor, Eagleton believes, in his fantasy. Yet the poor were soon wanting him to be chosen for crucifixion before Barabbas the bandit, the Holy Word tells us. Pretty fickle bunch, these Jewish poor, were they not? Quite so, the Christian agrees and invents anti-Semitism. “Glory be to the God of anti-Semitism in the highest”, they all sing. It is obvious that Jesus was the bandit. Now, Eagleton, the Marxist anti-revolutionary admits that several of Jesus’s band were themselves revolutionaries, “Zealots, members of an anti-imperialist underground movement”. It does not suggest anything to this deeply armchair revolutionary. Perhaps he forgot that Jesus was crucified as a rebel. That, though was a calumny! This critic is about as critical of Christian myth as a bowl of corn flakes. Perhaps he should read Derrida more slowly.

Jesus apparently knew Rome would collapse “under its own hubris”, but, if it did, it took another 400 years to do it, and it only happened when Christainity had taken over as the state religion. Christians then as now were still waiting for the heavenly host, and so welcomed the maurauding Barbarians, Christians too, and refused to fight them on pacifist and religious grounds. The western classical world collapsed and we entered the Dark Ages. That is what Christianity meant for the world, and today, we have madmen who are happy to push the nuclear button because they have the same insane idea that the world will end, and they will have a grandstand seat for the holocaust in heaven. These are the crazies that Dawkins warns against, and that Eagleton defends in the same smug delusion of salvation.

God told people in the Old Testament that they ought not to give sacrifices, Eagleton tells us, smug that that was his new God’s message, but Yehouah, the Jewish God, laid down a complicated rota of sacrifices for His Chosen People, notably in Leviticus. Eagleton cherry picks the bible, as they all do, each of them right in the bits they pick. Besides being liars they are hypocrites, and their own messiah had something to say about that, but whatever it was, it could never apply to Christians, goodness me, no!

Jesus hung out with whores and social outcasts, was remarkably casual about sex, disapproved of the family (the suburban Dawkins is a trifle queasy about this), urged us to be laid-back about property and possessions, warned his followers that they too would die violently, and insisted that the truth kills and divides as well as liberates. He also cursed self-righteous prigs and deeply alarmed the ruling class.

Self-righteous prigs, indeed. Does Eagleton ever shave in the mornings? Perhaps not. As a revolutionary admirer of Christ, he will keep long hair and a straggly beard, but perhaps it would be a good idea if he did just take a look, with this sentence in mind. For the rest of this, again, none of it triggers any suspicions in the mind of this revolutionary person. Jesus was precisely what this hypocrite is not—a revolutionary. And he paid the price. Anyone with a brain cell can see the truth of the matter, and two millennia of Christian fancy and obfuscation can hardly hide it to anyone other than those whose lives have been sold into slavery to falsehood as children, whether to pederastic Christian Brothers or to homophobic Southern Baptist pastors.

Torture

“The traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body”, we now hear, and those who recognize it have the chance of a new life. You would never think that Chriatianity has been around for 2000 years, and in that time has tortured millions, some of them far more cruelly than their own God suffered. Frankly, pious rabbiting like Eagleton’s is just the sort of thing that makes liberals puke. They go on and on about their ludicrous doctrines, all based on a simple if unfortunate fact of history, but turned into a cosmic delusion. People lacking any critical faculty cannot be expected to realize the scam, but surely someone whose job is criticism should be able to. This man has lived on false pretences all his life. He is as critical as he is a revolutionary, and he has the gall to say that reformers are not radical enough. No you have to be an armchair Catholic Marxist Trotskyite literary critic with a penchant for every fad going to be radical enough. Eagleton is deluded in more ways than just his religion.

The sublime dishonesty of the man emerges acutely in his citing Marx as a defender of odious religious beliefs. He was not being judicious and dialectical at all in saying religion was the “heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions”. Religion was the opium of the people. How can opium be a heart and soul? It cannot, and it especially cannot when the world has no heart and soul. Marx was emphasising with heavy irony how empty and disgusting religion is as a solace. It is horrible and degrading, but is all they had. Eagleton in his slimey, Derridist, Trotsyite way turns it on its head, making Marx an admirer of what is heartless and soulless. He is right though when he says God is not a bastard. That is not what Dawkins is saying. The bastards are the ones who propagate false solace, especially those who do it for gain.

Now, speaking of the unspeakable as the “most enduring form of popular culture in human history”, Eagleton complains that Dawkins attacks the popular form of it, even though it is vulgar. He ought to be decent and have “a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive”, rather than taking an easy victory by “savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook”. Our amateur theologian admits here that Dawkins has won, and that it is possible to savage Christianity as garbage and gobbledook, but it is not the decent thing to do.

The mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever.

One of the main tricks that Christians have effected over the last few hundred years of enlightenment is to get people to “respect” it. It means you have to treat it with kid gloves because it is so delicate. Never mind that when it ruled the whole of Europe, it terrorized fifty million people into petrified submission and degradation for more than ten centuries. It is part of the special pleading that apologists are expert at. Historians, TV programme makers, film makers and everyone in any position of influence should balance out centuries of Christian falsehood and propaganda with a concerted revelation of its historic nature—frankly its wickedness.

Despite this extended exhortation, Eagleton claims it is “the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism”. Even moderate religious views, he insists, “are to be ferociously contested, since they can always lead to fanaticism”. What then was the point of it? Having spent a good many paragraphs explaining what is quite uncomfirmable, what is merely an opinion, he complains that Dawkins offers a suggestion, a scientific speculation in answer to a rhetorical question. Holy Joe says a suggestion does not constitute a scientific rebuttal. The slug lectures the thrush again.

Horrors of Science

Now this “intellectual” gets really stupid:

On the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity, he is predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare.

He is like a worm wriggling on a hook. If we are to believe the Christian doctrine of the apocalypse, and, as we have seen, plenty of US Christians, if no others, cannot wait for it, it will be God Himself who is responsible for it. Since there is no God, who will be? It will be whoever launches the first battery of missiles, and that is likely to be one of the Christian leaders of the USA. What though of the horrors in general, attributed to science and technology, presumably weapons, particularly chemical and nuclear ones? Science and technology have developed vile weapons as well as a mass of beneficial things that we all of us expect to have nowadays, but they were not developed in the abstract. Someone with the financial resources have had to fund the development of these weapons, and in most cases they have persuaded the scientists doing it that it is the least of two evils open to them, and us. The people who did the funding, and the persuading, are considerably more likely to have been Christians than atheists. And now, the people who own these weapons and are willing to use them are more likely to be Christians or leaders of some other faith than they are likely to be atheists.

It is a typical fake reasoning that opposes science to Christianity in the matter of the horrors of war. Scientists and technologists developed the weapons, but many of them will have been Christians, and the ones with their fingers on the buttons are overwhelmingly likely to be Christians or believers in some other fraudulent system. Science is not a moral outlook as Christianity is supposed to be, and Dawkins points it out several times, so cannot fairly be compared with what does purport to be a moral outlook. Science is a method of working things out, a method of thinking and testing ideas. It is in these senses that it is opposed to mere belief.

Eagleton tells us that religious faith has given us some benefits just as science has. The benefits he means are those who have offered service to others in the name of religion. So, the religions take the credit for what most human beings would do anyway. Inasmuch as this notion of service springing from religious conviction is concerned, psychological studies have found evidence that contradicts it. The “Good Samaritan” who helps someone lying unconscious in a street was less likely to be one of a group of Christian students who were contrived to be in the situation of being able to help than any other passer by. Christians are keen to help each other not strangers, whatever the gospel message of their God, and that is plainer now in America than it ever was. Your neighbour, in modern Christian thought, is rarely any other human being. It is one of your church members.

On the role of religion in conflict, Eagleton as usual tries to argue religion off the hook. The conflict in Ireland is not one of Protestants against Catholics but one of Loyalists against Nationalists. Dawkins, of course, did not realize this! What was happening then when a few years ago, small children trying to go to school had to run the gauntlet of a line of jeering parents of the opposite faction? The children were Catholic and the parents were Protestant. Both sides were Christians! Is it just a curious accident of history that Nationalists are Catholics and Loyalists are Protestants, or could it be that a significant element of the hatred between these two factions is just what Dawkins said it was—their religious differences? Or is this a notion that treads on more than one of a Catholic Marxist’s toes?

No one would be inclined to criticize religions that do what they profess to do. Who criticizes Buddhism? If Christianity showed any significant consequences from being a religion of love, then there might indeed be less grounds, or none, for criticizing it. But the point is that it just is not true that Christians generally love anyone except themselves, and the doctrine that salvation is by faith, with no effort involved is plainly a useless way of improving public morals, if that is meant to be a function of Christian belief. Individual Christians have done good works, but what good is there in a lifetime locked in an anchorage. A lifetime of meditation and devotion to God is a wasted lifetime, and it does nothing except indulge ones own delusions.

Revelation

In desperation, he ends up sticking pins in his wax image of Dawkins, but it is as childish and immature as the rest of the wrangle. He also starts to throw a number of hypotheses about the origins of Dawkins view too, but they are just examples of Eagleton pretending to be a psychiatrist, a sociologist, a geographer, and a few more of the part-time interests he pretends to be expert in. An example of his utter emptiness is his attitude to Dawkins’ tentative suggestion of ten commandments that would offer a decent moral code for today. They are discarded as liberal platitudes. Is this great mind objecting to them being liberal or platitudes? A platitude might be obvious, but does Eagleton have any reason why a moral code should be out of the ordinary? Or is it the liberalism he objects to?

Dawkins quite rightly detests fundamentalists; but as far as I know his anti-religious diatribes have never been matched in his work by a critique of the global capitalism that generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of humiliation that breed fundamentalism.

Goodness, Eagleton agrees about something. But surely these fundamentalists are Christians, and moreover, the very brand of them that Dawkins is focussing on in his castigation. And, as already noted, Dawkins did not chose to write a different book—now one about global capitalism. In the absurd criticisms that apologists come up with, “It would have been much better if you had written something else”, is among the most common. Eagleton thinks he knows about everything so, he should be the one to write it. He is one of those academics in demand by editors for opinion columns because he has an opinion about everything and a valid thought about nothing. In any case, why does global capitalism concentrate all its effort on the midwest and southern states of the USA? The hatred generated in the name of Christ by Christian fundamentalism and its right wing authoritarian ideology is certainly used by the US neocon Republicans, but why are oppressed people not rebelling against their oppressors? Instead they provide them with what is called “core support”. Look, these are Christians. If Eagleton does not like them, what is it about them he does not like, and since they claim to be Christians, are we to take it they are not? Because, if they are not maybe he should be joining the critics, not defending Christian fascism.

In concluding, Eagleton drops a few more names, but essentially dismisses the idea of progress. As a phenomenon, it is impossible to dismiss, at least in the few centuries since the Christian yoke on humanity was smashed by the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. It is true that there is nothing certain about progress. After all, Christianity put an end to a thousand years of progress in the classical world, and gave us a thousand years of darkness instead, but that is the point. Religion dissolved every trace of classical civilization, and it has taken six hundred years of progress to do better. Religion can do the same again, especially with the growth of a separate irrationality in the ideas of the people that Eagleton admires. The fear of some liberals is that it is threatening to do it. Progress is certainly not automatic, and if it is to continue must be defended. The point is that Eagleton has no philosophy of defending such hard won benefits. He accepts they will go, and we shall have “to live with” it for “as long as we can foresee”, a symptom of the Trot’s nihilism.

It must be a sign of the very conditions Eagleton foresees, that such a weary willy as him can hold down a valuable chair in an important British university. Educators ought to be encouraging their students to seek ways of improving the world, and then progress is indeed likely, but with deadbeats and nomarks in charge of our youth, and science departments closing, Eagleton will quite probably become a prophet. But then it is easier to swim with the current than it is to swim against it. Eagleton prefers his armchair.

In parting, Eagleton tells us that religion and fundamentalism are quite different, and it is “grotesquely false” to treat them in the same way. Needless to say, the critic of Christianity can see there are differences among Christians, but there are differences among ecstatic dancers and op-ed writers. They can be explained by the distribution law. The difference that Eagleton sees is that fundamentalists are “rednecks who murder abortionists and malign homosexuals”. He is not one of those, so he represents the sophisticated, socially responsible sort of Christian. The point is how can Christians, whose God is love, murder and malign other humans? Further, has this anything to do with the fact that Christianity for centuries up until only a couple of them ago, habitually murdered and maligned people? The critic sees something horribly consistent in Christian history, and the middle class Anglo-Catholic tradition that came down to us from Victorian country vicars is not it, even though most modern Christian apologists want to pretend it is.

In his final paragraph, Eagleton suddenly starts to write as if he has had a revelation:

The two most deadly texts on the planet… are the Bible and the Koran.

He is right to repudiate the brand of mealy-mouthed liberalism which believes that one has to respect other people’s silly or obnoxious ideas just because they are other people’s.

The book is full of vivid vignettes of the sheer horrors of religion.

Nearly 50 per cent of Americans believe that a glorious Second Coming is imminent, and some of them are doing their damnedest to bring it about.

Peter Williams

The Christian “philosopher”, Peter Williams, in an online review focuses on the Anthropic Principle. In a nutshell, it is that the conditions of our universe seem to be designed for life to exist in it. For Christians, it is, therefore, part of the argument from design. For the evolutionist, it is an expression of the self-evident fact that life cannot arise where it is impossible. Williams concedes the point immediately:

Given our existence we obviously could not exist in a life-unfriendly place.

Instead, he wants to talk about the fact that a life-friendly place exists at all. It is, of course, God’s work. But, given the existence of an all powerful being called God, and Christians believe that God can do anything, nothing being impossible for God (Mk 10:27; Mt 19:26; Lk 18:27), why should life be written off as impossible “in a life-unfriendly place”? God being God, the being that Christians conceive Him to be, could make life anywhere He chooses. It is typical of Christian slipperiness. God is almighty when it suits them, and he is not almighty when it suits them. Here, it suits them that God is not Almighty, so even He is confined to making life only where life is possible.

The Anthropic Principle obviously means that the universe is suitable for life, otherwise we would not be able to observe it, but the Christian wants to know how this suitable universe arose at all. God is not the answer, if God could do anything, so, the Christian has no answer to it, unless it is that even God has conventions that He is not allowed to break, and so is not almighty. Scientists do what they in common with philosophers nomally do—think about the problem. They try to think of why it should be. It is rather harder than the theologian’s answer of saying everything is as it is just because of God, and it has proved itself with a lot of remarkable discoveries in the last few hundred years.

The present scientific hypothesis is that universes burst into existence spontaneously, rather like a decaying radioactive atom, quite randomly in metatime, each one being different, and with a different life history ahead of it, and eventually they die. Some of those universes prove suitable for life, and a proportion of those yield intelligent life able to speculate about what it all is, and what it means. That is where we are, as human beings. On this hypothesis, ours is one of countless universes, most of which do not produce life, but even so, there will have been untold numbers that did, of which we are one.

It is like the number on the dollar bill on your pocket. Billions of dollar bills have been printed, and yet you had that particular one. Isn’t it just amazing! Of course, it is not at all amazing. Given that you had a bona fide dollar, it had to be one of the millions printed. We had to have one of the many universes that happened, and we have the one that we find, that one necessarily having the conditions in it that allow us to recognize it. It is the dollar bill we have.

Of course, this would just be empty speculation unless there was more evidence for it, and there is in quantum theory. An hypothesis of many universes explains some aspects of quantum theory besides the Anthropic Principle, but we have only just stepped over the style into this field, and have a great deal more to explore. If God has had eternity in the Christian hypothesis, will they allow the scientists a little more time to see whether it is possible to know the mind of God, as Stephen Hawking put it?

Canards

Williams the apologist does what that type can only do, win spurious debating points by setting up straw versions of the Anthropic Principle to shoot down, to anticipated loud acclamation from the sheep. He cites some other Christian:

We are living on a planet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere, for the simple reason that we require oxygen to live.

Quite so, but previously, he had highlighted a claim that the Anthropic Principle is a tautology, though this is precisely the same sort of statement. To be persuaded of an Almighty, we would want to know, why is it necessary that life should require oxygen? God seems to survive on nothing at all, even living independently of time itself. He obviously knows how to do it, so He could have done it for us. Instead, He always chooses ways that can be explained with no need for God at all. Why?

Williams goes on being amazed that we live despite what seem to be an amazing set of coincidences, yet the explanation is quite simply that many worlds never produced any life, and there is no way we can know about them. Another Christian philosopher, Richard Swinburne, offers the refutation by analogy that it is like someone watching a card dealing machine, knowing that only a rare combination of cards will allow her to live. The cards are dealt and they are the right ones, so she lives to see them. Amazing! “There is a God”, she thought. And surely there must be, in a case like that. In our universe that is astonishingly good luck, so good that you have to conclude, either there is a God or someone rigged the apparatus to allow her to live. Any other explanation is simply too unlikely. Swinburne did not tell us the apparatus was rigged, so there must be a God. The same, then, with the Anthropic Principle. God must account for it. QED.

Er, not quite! The story would be amazing, if it were not made up. But that is what it was. The impossible case was picked by the story-teller as happening. The heroine was saved by design! The story has an invisible god. It is the story-teller, Swinburne, and he saves his heroine. It is certain he would not volunteer to be in her place, in reality, when the odds are so stacked against survival that no one would want to test it. The apologists who relate the story expect the sheep to forget that it is not a real case, it is a hypothetical one in which Swinburne is acting the part of God for his imaginary heroine, whom he has ordained shall live in his tale against the odds. It is typical of Christian dishonesty.

In any case, God can do many amazing things—in stories. In reality, some proper explanation has to be found for them. In the proper many worlds case, the girl is killed over an over again in the separate worlds she lives in, but in one at least she opened her eyes and saw the usually fatal cards. “There is a God”, she thought, but she was unaware of the many times she had died!

Williams rejects the multiverse hypothesis on the grounds that it is itself too unlikely. He cites the old canard about how long it would take monkeys to type the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare, the human designer in his analogy, is a preferable hypothesis to the array of primates typing at random. Indeed it is, but this is another false analogy. The monkeys are defined, every one of them, as being unable to produce the outcome, and so the outcome is amazing, indeed impossible, unless the time is infinite—as the metatime in which the universes occur probably is—in which case even this analogy would work. But when Shakespeare himself is classed as one of the primates, then the analogy can yield the amazing result. In the case of universes, we know that the one we live in produced intelligent life, so in the monkey analogy, one of the monkeys at least must be capable of the desired end. One of them must be Shakespeare. And, in actuality, Shakespeare is indeed a primate—a monkey, if you like. So, from the theory of evolution, a monkey actually did what was supposed to have been impossible!

The many universes idea does not seem to be parsimonious, William of Ockham telling us that we ought not to mutiply entities. Of course, in science, an entity might have an infinite number of members such as an integral or an infinite series, so we are not merely talking numbers here, but rather sets, axioms or parameters. In principle, a universe can be described by an equation, and that is indeed what quantum cosmology tries to do. So, the production of endless universes is not producing different entities as long as they can be described in a standard form, and the difference represented by different initial or boundary conditions. S Hawking said, at the end of A Brief History of Time, we would know the mind of God once the quantum cosmologists had the equation for the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe. We would not have the resources to make a universe, but we would know how it was done, and, if God did it, how He did it.

The Existence of God

To be able to design and make everything, God had to be able to comprehend it, and so had all of that information in the equivalent of His brain. Not only that, of course, He must also have had access to all the information that we could never know, including the transcendental environment He lives in, and the conditions in all of the universes that God is presumed to be able to make when it takes His fancy—the many universes that we can postulate, and doubtless many we cannot. God must have access to a vast amount of information—something Christians will not deny—and that means He is an extremely unlikely entity. Dawkins explains it from evolution, where we can see in the record of rock sediments life taking a billion years to get to its most complex. God must be far more complex than the most complex creature there is, and so must have taken far longer to evolve. But Christians say He just is. A vast amount of information and power just is. It is impossible except in fancy, where everything is possible. And that is the point. God is only possible in the imagination. He is a figment.

Certainly, it emphasizes that God is far less parsimonious than the many worlds idea, because He must encompass it, and everything imaginable, according to Christians, yet does not serve to explain anything, everything requring its own separate practical explanation. Yet, Christians say God really exists and, acting like Richard Swinburne, has picked one universe, ours, out of every universe we can conceive of, and more. God is a mental stomach to consume all possible information, mentally digest it all, and regurgitate only the right one for us, yet he just exists and just has all this information from nowhere because He is supernatural. It is unparsimonious and incredible. Moreover, science has another criterion—fruitfulness. Good hypotheses lead us on to discoveries, and other hypotheses that take us further. Unless we ignore it, the hypothesis of God stops inquiry dead. It is not fruitful. In practice, we all ignore it, even Christians if they really want to make discoveries in the world.

If God did not evolve in some sort of metatime and metaspace, then, as noted here, he just is, an extremely unsatisfactory property to add to an hypothetical entity. The whole point of postulating God is to explain why the universe is, so, if God just is, then what is wrong with the simpler hypothesis that the universe just is. You can reply that the universe started with the Big Bang, something science, not Christianity revealed to us, but even that is not the end of the matter, because the Big Bang might end in a Big Crunch then oscillate forever, or time might not be what it seems at different levels of energy, or black holes might spawn universes, or universes might exist simultaneously in a multiverse, or whatever else. All of these interesting speculations can be written off and God invoked instead, but that is doing what Christianity has traditionally done—suppress enquiry. God is not a fruitful hypothesis. So, Big Bang or not, the universe, or metaverse might still just exist without the assistance of God, and itself does not have to be thought of as being supernatural.

The alternative to God just being, if that is philosophically unsatisfactory, and His evolving, if that is thought impossible, or theologically undesirable (not that that should count) is that God was Himself created, but that requires a metaGod! Williams here has the silly argument against it that:

If someone explains some buried earthenware as the result of artisans from the second century bc, no one complains, “Yeah, but who made the artisans?”

Of course they do not because there is no question that people exist on this earth capable of making pots. Let us suppose the pots we found were on lifeless Mars. No problem, the pots were made by robot potmakers. “Who made the robots?” would then be a perfectly natural question. And why? It is more amazing to imagine mechanical potmakers on Mars than the pots themselves. They are more complex and require an even higher intelligence to explain them. To wonder who made them is not at all peculiar. It is the beginning of testing the hypothesis, and might quickly lead to its rejection, and the formulation of a more feasible alternative—the pots are a natural formation carved by wind and sun.

Equally, if Nature has been designed, it is natural to want to know who made the designer. It is harder to believe that God exists than that Nature does, just as it is more remarkable that the robot should exist than that the pots do. Christians are explaining something, the appearance of design in Nature, with something that is even more remarkable, when it is easier and more parsimonious to let Nature exist in her own right. If Nature needs a designer, then the designer cannot be assumed not to need one, but then an infinite regress arises. An infinite regress is often the result of false concepts, and here it suggests the assumption of a designer of Nature is false. Williams admits not all designers need a designer, removing the need for God as the designer of Nature. Nature designs herself. That is the theory of evolution.

Next Williams cites someone called William Lane Craig that we do not need to say who made the designer if the designer is the best hypothesis. That is highly dubious. What is the criterion of the best hypothesis? The prime one is that it actually explains. To leave an explanation depending on something that itself is not explained means it is not an explanation, and therefore it is not a good hypothesis. Indeed, if there were an alternative hypothesis that did not depend upon something still unexplained, then that is the better one.

Typically, the Christian apologist, unable to do what the best minds in 3000 years have not been able to do—prove the existence of God—keeps bringing in new assumptions. It is not enough that there be a designer of Nature, something that can be imagined but is not needed, so Williams begins to add new conditions. From the ontological argument, he explains the existence of God cannot be contingent, but is either impossible or necessary. So, being a Christian, he declares the designer necessary. He begs the question, because God is necessary for his belief. The scientist chooses “impossible” because science offers up explanations for things that show that God is not necessary. Whose argument is more sensible?

As a final throw of the dice, Williams tries to show that God need not be complicated. Mind is conceptually simple, being immaterial and not made of separate parts. God is the same. Quite so! God is imaginary!

Social Arguments

Alister McGrath is professor of historical theology at Oxford University, and popular with Christians because he is willing to engage the godless from the view point of an allegedly reformed atheist. He begins a short review online complaining that Dawkins’ thesis is “attractive because it is simplistic”, and writing attractively and simply is not being fair. Theology has spent 800 years trying not to be simple to keep the lambs befuddled, but he cannot, of course, say this, so he has to be euphemistic, saying the issues “demand careful reflection and painstaking analysis, based on the best evidence available”, quite a tall order for Christianity since it has no confirmable evidence. Dawkins’ message that we would all be better off without religion, and instead a bit more genuine reflection and analysis is “a familiar theme”.

As we would expect from a theologian, McGrath demurs from Dawkins’ thesis. He argues that, if society does not have a God then other abstract notions, like liberty or equality, will become God, and that will be awful because, instead of being burnt at the stake for blasphemy or heresy, people will be guillotined for opposing liberty or equality. “Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name?” he quotes. There you have it. If there were no God we would all be killing people who want to stop us from being democrats.

In case that does not scare you into prayer, McGrath has an alternative theory. Social groups need to divide and define themselves into binary opposites like male-female, black-white, Protestant-Catholic, believer-infidel, and so on. There is an in-group and an out-group. These groups look quite clear, but they are “determined by complex social forces”. So, it is “sociologically naïve” to think that getting rid of religions will stop social division. Other “social demarcators” would take their place.

No doubt, McGrath thinks this is a scientific analysis, but it sounds much like his “do-nothing to harm us” justification of religious division. People are weened off such socially divisive divisions as sexism and racialism by educating them that the bases of their antagonisms are just not justified, but rather are illusory distinctions that only foment trouble. Women are in no way inferior to men despite their physical differences, and both sexes seem to be equally important in the continuation of the species. Whites are not superior to other races, as history shows, because there have been long epochs when whites were savages, though advanced civilizations existed among people of other races.

The argument is rather stronger in the case of religion because, though there are perceivable differences between men and women and between different races, religious differences are entirely illusory. Getting exercised about religion was exemplified by Dean Jonathan Swift. It is getting exercised about whether you should break your breakfast egg at the big end or at the little end. Protestants and Catholics are both supposed to be Christians living their lives to please a God of love, so ought to be incapable of division. McGrath and his bishops ought to be teaching their lambs a bit more about the requirements of their own religion rather than telling non-believers they are wrong. They will not, of course, because they depend upon the lambs being passionate about the imagined significance in their egg cracking habits.

Instead, McGrath calls for us “to deal with the ultimate causes of social division and exclusion”. It is a fine objective, but, you know, it is a much more comprehensive and so less possible task than getting rid of one of its causes. As he says, religion is one of the factors involved and he admits it can cause problems. If there is some basic human tendency to divide ourselves into in-groups and out-groups, then the objective of dealing with it at root is a taller order than educating people about the futility of religions and the divisions they cause, alone. It is easier to resolve one problem than all of them at once.

These pleas are all sand in your eyes, because he ends up praising religion as having “the capacity to transform, creating a deep sense of personal identity and value, and bringing social cohesion”, as if nothing else has. It is like praising a Mafia gangleader as being a good family man. In the odium that is Christian history, there have been many family men, many people who have individually done good, but to counter personal goodness against the wickedness of Christianity as a social phenomenon is absurd. Individuals are free to be good without religion, and it is unlikely that any would have been wicked if they had been free of religious constraints. As Dawkins says, the evidence is the opposite—that Christianity makes good people do things they would never dream of by themselves.

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