Many secular intellectuals, for instance, have claimed as Christian doctrine "the idea that God is some kind of superentity outside the universe, that he created the world rather as a carpenter might create a stool; that faith in this God means above all subscribing to the proposition that he exists; that there is a real me inside me called the soul, which a wrathful God may consign to hell if I am not egregiously well-behaved; that our utter dependency on this deity is what stops us thinking and acting for ourselves; that this God cares deeply about whether we are sinful or not, because if we are then he demands to be placated."
As Eagleton knows, some Christian believers, especially in the various strains of fundamentalism, would subscribe to most if not all of those propositions.
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But he's right that from the perspective of the past several centuries' worth of mainline Protestant and Catholic theology, none of those statements is true.
Are you familiar with the last several centuries' worth of mainline Protestant and Catholic theology? If not, what is your basis for claiming that the author is wrong?
Your statement:
Theat's why you hear them preached every week in mainline churches. The rest of the list the reviewer gave is accepted by quite a few as well (though "our utter dependency on this deity is what stops us thinking and acting for ourselves" is strangely worded; I'd say a typical view is more like "our utter dependency on this deity is what stops us deciding on our own morality, though we can choose to disobey God"). The reviewer, and, from the tone of his piece, Eagleton as well, have confused 'mainline' with 'controversial' or 'notorious'. does not constitute an argument, but rather an opinion. And given that you begin by what's
preached every week in mainline churches, an opinion that is a rather grandiose, unsupported generalization.
In those terms, they range from crude distortions to outright idolatry. Aquinas would tell you that God is not an entity of any classifiable or verifiable kind and most certainly is not a mega-manufacturer who plotted out the universe on some celestial computer screen.
What, the Aquinas that came up with several 'proofs' of the existence of God? In which he classified God as the 'first mover', the 'greatest being' and so on? Since Aquinas said God is the 'First Cause', then he did classify him as a 'mega-manufacturer'. None of what the reviewer listed (as, I presume, a quote from Eagleton) is anywhere near 'idolatry'. It's not associating God with any object in the physical world.
Wow. Well, Eagleton grew up an Irish Catholic but I'm not sure whether or not had a Catholic education. But if he did, he may well have gotten his distorted view of the Catholic theologian, Thomas Aquinas, from his Catholic teachers. Here's what the people at the
Catholic Education Resource Center think Aquinas wrote about the creation:
Aquinas saw no contradiction in the notion of an eternal created universe. He thought that it was a matter of biblical revelation that the world is not eternal. He also thought that reason alone could not conclude whether the world had a temporal beginning. But even if the universe were not to have had a temporal beginning, it still would depend upon God for its very being, its existence. The root sense of creation does not concern temporal origination; rather it affirms metaphysical dependence.(14) For Aquinas, there is no conflict between the doctrine of creation and any physical theory. Theories in the natural sciences account for change. Whether the changes described are cosmological or biological, unending or finite, they remain processes. Creation accounts for the existence of things, not for changes in things. An evolving universe, just like Aristotle's eternal universe, is still a created universe. No explanation of evolutionary change, no matter how radically random or contingent it claims to be, challenges the metaphysical account of creation, that is, of the dependence of the existence of all things upon God as cause. When some thinkers deny creation on the basis of theories of evolution, or reject evolution in defense of creation, they misunderstand creation or evolution, or both.
Perhaps you could write them a letter and tell them they have Aquinas all wrong. He didn't believe an eternal universe was possible. Aquinas thought of god as the 'mega-manufacturer' of the universe.
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.
Why are those questions science cannot properly ask? The second in particular - the question of consciousness - is highly investigatable. And the first doesn't belong to just 'theology', but to philosophy. Saying it is a theological question is answering it before it's been considered.
First of all, we only have a bit of Eagleton in this paragraph. For the sake of context, the complete paragraph reads:
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.
So, the paragraph itself is stating that some questions are best addressed by science and some by religion. We do not have the context of the actual 2 questions that appear to be Eagleton's, so my presumption is that if he asks them, he also gives more context; and since we are not privy to that context at this time, anything we say is merely speculation. But, I doubt Eagleton is trying to remove the question of consciousness from science. I think the question is metaphysical. A form of this question does appear under science as the question of the setting of universal constants at very specific values. Right now, science does not have a very good answer; nor even a good way of investigating it. But, again, we don't actually know the context in which Eagleton asks these questions.
The creedal declaration "I believe in God" is a statement of action and will; it is performative rather than assertive. It is not equivalent to the claim that God exists (although Christians believe that too). It possesses the kind of certainty that belongs to such wistful sentences as "I love you" or "I believe the Mets are the best team in baseball." It clearly lacks the empirical certainty of the sentence "I believe this maple tree will turn red in October."
How can you 'believe' in something, with any definition of 'believe', unless you think it exists? When you say "I love you", you have to think that the 'you' exists. And the same goes for the Mets. At least he's admitted that Christians believe God exists now, thus contradicting his claim that that is a 'crude distortion' of mainline Christian belief.
Well, the parentetical statement cleary says that Christians believe that god exists; so I'm not sure what the basis of your first question is. As to the citation of the "wistful" statement, "I love you," I don't think it's a question about the existence of the
you, but of the belief in the full statement, being in
love being a somewhat ambiguous state. Similarly, the question about the Mets is not questioning the existence of the Mets but rather the belief that they are the"best team in baseball." It really seems pretty elementary.
You can almost hear the steel chairs creaking as the last secular liberals rise to depart when Eagleton declares where his true disagreement with Richard Dawkins lies, which does not directly concern the existence of God or the role of science. "The difference between Ditchkins and radicals like myself," he writes, "hinges on whether it is true that the ultimate signifier of the human condition is the tortured and murdered body of a political criminal, and what the implications of this are for living."
Hmm, what was that word earlier? Ah yes, 'idolatry'. Eagleton thinks that the ultimate signifier for humanity is the story of one man? That's loading so much on to that one person, Eagleton better think he's a god. And it's a pisser for all the humans who lived before Jesus, whom Eagleton condemns to an existence without proper meaning. I'm not surprised that secular liberals give up on Eagleton at that point. It seems rather fundamentalist - that the story of Jesus has to be more important than any known history, any other story, or anyone's personal experience.
Once again, wow. I think you are misreading this. The context:
What the rationalist myth sees in the modern age are the tremendous advances made in curing disease and in increasing agricultural yield, which neither believer nor atheist wants to do without. It views Zyklon-B and the hydrogen bomb as momentary setbacks, if it notices them at all, and it generally avoids comment about the contradictory and confused economic system our allegedly liberal-humanist age has produced. It's a system, as Eagleton sees it, that pretends to be entirely logical but produces a cruel and irrational result: the poor made poorer and the rich much richer. And what are the greenhouse effect and the melting of the glaciers, if not artifacts of the Enlightenment?
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You can almost hear the steel chairs creaking as the last secular liberals rise to depart when Eagleton declares where his true disagreement with Richard Dawkins lies, which does not directly concern the existence of God or the role of science. "The difference between Ditchkins and radicals like myself," he writes, "hinges on whether it is true that the ultimate signifier of the human condition is the tortured and murdered body of a political criminal, and what the implications of this are for living."
It's not the
ultimate signifier for humanity. It is rather
ultimate signifier of the human condition. And, again, in the context of the modern age, this is not about
the story of one man. Rather it is about
the contradictory and confused economic system our allegedly liberal-humanist age has produced. It's a system, as Eagleton sees it, that pretends to be entirely logical but produces a cruel and irrational result: the poor made poorer and the rich much richer. It is about the common occurence in our post enlightenment world of
the tortured and murdered body of a political criminal, and what the implications of this are for living. The context is much broader than you are recognizing.
And after that, the review seems to degenerate into a moan that Dawkins and Hitchens are too optimistic about humans (weird, I always saw Hitchens as a cynical bastard), and that humanism is acceptable if it acknowledges that humans will always have major flaws and behave badly to each other. Oh well, so much for "God is what sustains all things in being by his love". Looks like God doesn't have that much influence after all.Yes, many people today call for the recognition that advances in science do not lead to changes in human nature. Failure to recognize this will quite likely lead to the extinction of humanity. It's really not a joke.