Terry Eagleton, Reason, Fatih, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
Yale University Press, 2009
As for science, my knowledge of it is largely confined to the fact that it is greeted with dark suspicion by most postmodernists —a sound enough reason in my view for enthusiastically endorsing almost anything it cares to say.
p.3
It is of course always easier to buy one’s rejection of a belief system on the cheap, by (for example) triumphantly dismissing out of hand a version of Christianity that only seriously weird types, some of them lurking sheepishly in caves too ashamed to come out and confront the rest of us, would espouse in the first place. This applies to more than religion. It is easier to believe that Nietzsche was a budding Nazi than to grasp that he was a precursor of Foucault. To save yourself too laborious an attention to Marxism, you can dismiss it on the grounds that it dreams of a world of equality in which men and women will all be spiritiually wretched and materially miserable in exactly the same way.
p.5
Like the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett in ‘Breaking the Spell’, he [Dawkins —F.] thinks it [religion —F.] is a kind of bogus theory or pseudo-explanation of the world. In this sense, he is rather like someone who thinks that a novel is a botched piece of sociology, and who therefore can’t see the point of it at all. Why bother with Robert Musil when you can read Max Weber?
p.6
There is a document that records God’s endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion, known as the Bible. God the Creator is not a celestial engineer at work on a superbly rational design that will impress his research grant body to no end, but an artist, and an asthete to boot, who made the world with no functional end in view but simply for the love and delight of it.
p.8
John C. Lennox writes in God’s Undertaker that some scientists and philosophers think we should not ask after the reason for the universe because, according to them, there isn’t one. In this, however, they are unwittingly at one with theologians.
p.10
There is a sense in which replacing a transcendent God with an omnipotent humanity alters surprisingly little, as Nietzsche scornfully pointed out. There is still a stable metaphysical center to the world; it is just that it is now us, rather than a deity. And since we are sovereign, bound by no constraints which we do not legislate for ourselves, we can exercise our newfound divinity by indulging among other things in that form of ecstatically creative jouissance known as destruction. In Nietzsche’s view, the death of God must also spell the death of Man — that is to say, the end of a certain lordly, overweening humanism — if absolute power is not simply to be transplanted from the one to the other. Otherwise humanism will always be secretly theological. It will be a continuation of God by other means. God will simply live a shadowy afterlife in the form of respectable suburban morality, as indeed he does today. The infinity of Man would simply end up doing service for the eternity of God. In Faustian spirit, Man would fall in love with his own apparently boundless powers, forgetful that God in the doctrine of the Incarnation is shown to be in love with the fleshly, frail and finite. Besotted by his own infinity, Man would find himself in perpetual danger of developing too fast, overreaching himself and bringing himself to nothing, as in the myth of the Fall.
p.15-16
Self-authorship is the bourgeois fantasy par excellence. Denying that our freedom thrives only within the context of a more fundamental dependency lies at the root of a good deal of historical disaster. It is certainly one of the driving forces of Western neo-imperialism today.
For orthodox Christian doctrine, it is our dependence on God that allows us to be self-determining, as it is our dependence on language or history or culture which allows us to come into our own as persons.
p.16-17
Theologians are not in the least interested qua theologians in, say, whether a process as crude and blundering as evolution could have produced something as exquisitely complex as Henry James. The difference between science and theology, as I understand it, is one over whether you see the world as a gift or not; and you cannot resolve this just by inspecting the thing, any more than you can deduce from examining a porcelain vase that it is a wedding present.
p.36-37
The advanced capitalist system is inherently atheistic. It is godless in its actual material practices, and in the values and beliefs implicit in them, whatever some of its apologists might piously aver. As such, it is atheistic in all the wrong ways, whereas Marx and Nietzsche are atheistic in what are by and large the right kind of ways. A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics, and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the kind of depth where teological questions can even be properly raised, just as it rules out political and moral questions of a certain profundity. What on earth would be the point of God in such a setup, other than as ideological legitimation, spiritual nostalgia, or a means of private extrication from a valueless world?
•
Romanticism, as Marx himself pointed out, is among other things the flip side of utilitarianism. Those who are in every other way worldly, cynical, and hard-boiled (Hollywood superstars and the like) reveal a truly bottomless gullibility when it comes to spirituality. Nobody is more otherworldly than the worldly, nobody more soft-centered than the hard-nosed. Spiritual matters must naturally be as remote from their lawyers, minders, agents, and hairstylists as one could imagine, in order to provide some fantasy alternative to them. This is why people who are in every other respect urbane and streetwise believe that affairs on earth are being controlled from an alien spaceship parked behind a cloud. They would probably not believe this if they had only $38 in the bank. Money is a great breeder of unreality.
p.40
With dreary predictability, Daniel C. Dennett defines religions at the beginning of his Breaking the Spell as “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought”, which as far as Christianity goes is rather like beginning a history of the potato by defining it as a rare species of rattlesnake. Predictably, Dennett’s image of God is a Satanic one. He also commits the Ditchkins-like blunder of believing that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world, which is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.
When people like this are told that these are crude distortions of Christian belief, they imagine that this means not that they never were orthodox doctrine, but that they have been ditched in the modern age by a clutch of guitar-toting liberal revisionists. … There are always topics on which otherwise scrupulous minds will cave in to the grossest prejudice with hardly a struggle. For most academic psychologists, it is Jacques Lacan; for Oxbridge philosophers it is Heidegger or Sartre; for former citizens of the Soviet bloc it is Marx; for militant atheists it is religion.
p.50-51
Ditchkins [Dawkins + Hitchens —F.] on theology is rather like someone who lays claim to the title of literary criticism by commenting that there are some nice bits in the novel and some scary bits as well, and it’s all very sad at the end.
p.53
God is not Great is also a fine illustration of how atheistic fundamentalists are in some ways the inverted mirror image of Christian ones. And not just in their intemperate zeal and tedious obsessiveness. Hitchens argues earnestly that the Book of Genesis doesn’t mention marsupials; that the Old Testament Jews surely couldn’t have wandered for forty years in the desert; that the capture of the huge bedstead of the giant Og, king of Bashan, might never have occured at all, and so on. This is rather like someone vehemently trying to convince you, with fastidious attention to architectural and zoological detail, that King Kong could not possibly have scaled the Empire State Building because it would have collapsed under his weight. This is not to relegate the Bible as a whole to the realm of myth, poetry, and fiction, thus shielding it conveniently from rational and historical investigation. It is simply to indicate that the relations between these domains and historical fact in Scripture are exceedingly complex, and that on this score as on many another, Hitchens is hair-raisingly ignorant of generations of modern biblical scholarshi
p.54
Yet it is most certainly Christianity itself which is primarily responsible for the intellectual sloppiness of its critics. Apart from the signal instance of Stalinism, it is hard to think of a historical movement that has more squalidly betrayed its own revolutionary origins.
p.55
This brand of piety [that of liberal Establishment’s —F] is horrified by the sight of a female breast, but considerably less appalled by the obscene inequalities between rich and poor. It laments the death of a fetus, but is apparently undisturbed by the burning to death of children in Iraq or Afghanistan in the name of U.S. global dominion. By and large, it worships a God fashioned blasphemously in its own image —a clean-shaven, short-haired, gun-toting, sexually obsessive God with a special regard for that ontologically privileged piece of the globe just south of Canada and north of Mexico rather than the Yahweh who is homeless, faceless, stateless, and imageless, who prods his people out of their comfortable settlement into the trackless terrors of the desert, and who brusquely informs them that their burnt offerings stink in his nostrils, One is told that there is an American prayer “for High Achievers”, in which God is said to be “the greatest achiever of all”. in fact, the only one of his achievements er can actually see with our eyes is the world; and if this is the best he can do, one is distinctly underwhelmed by his talents.
p.55-56
The grim truth about 9/11, Faludi claims, is that the death toll would have been considerably lower had the firefighters not been sent into the World Trade Center. About three times more firefighters than office workers died on the floors below the impact of the aircraft. But in they were sent anyway, and the media response was to make Sir Galahads of them all. One demented U.S. journal raved that the New York Fire Department were heroes in possession of godlike prowess, beneficence, and divinity. many of the firefighters themselves begged leave to demur. The fact that they died partly because their radios were not working was swept decorously under the carpet.
p.63
The secular version of the Ten Commandments which he [ Dawkins —F. ] commends to us in The God Delusion, one of which counsels us to enjoy our sex lives as long as they don’t damage others, are for the most part an assortment of bland liberal platitudes. They can be contrasted in this respect with “Honour your father and your mother”, which some Old Testament scholars take to refer not to one’s parents but to the old and useless of the tribe who can no longer labor. Or “Do not steal”, which in the judgment of some commentators refers not to private property (there was little enough of that around the place) but to the ancient practice of kidnapping the young men of other tribes for their labor power. Or “Keep holy the Sabbath day”, which refers not to going to church but the need for a break from the burden of labor. it is a kind of early health-and-welfare requirement. Or “Thou shalt not commit adultery”, which warns us not to exploit our sexual charm to break up other people’s relationships. The Commandments, writes Herbert McCabe, “tell us to abandon the gods and live in righteousness, in friendship and justice with one another”.
p.66
Marxists cast a cold eye on the kind of progressivist euphoria, of which Dawkins (a spiritual child of H. G. Wells and C. P. Snow) is so resplendent an example, for which, apart from the odd, stubbornly lingering spot of barbarism here and there, history as a whole is still steadily on the up. If ever there was a pious myth and piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world. This brittle tirumphalism is a hangover from the heroic epoch of liberalism, when the middle classes’ star was in the ascendant. Today, it sits cheek by jowl with the cynicism, skepticism, or nihilism into which much of that honorable lineage has degenerated. Radicals are those who believe that things are extremely bad with us, but that they could be feasibly much improved; conservatives believe that things are pretty bad with us but that’s just the way it is with the human animal, and liberals believe that ther’s a little bit of good and bad in us all.
As Dan Hind argues, the chief threat to enlightened values today springs not from feng shui, faith healing, post-modern relativism, or religious fundamentalism. As usual, it springs from some of the fruits of Enlightenment itself, which has always been its own worst enemy. The language of Enlightenment has been hijacked in the name of corporate greed, the police state, a politically compromised science, and a permanent war economy.
p.70-71
Liberal-capitalist cultures inevitably give birth to ills which undermine their own values. This vital contradiction cannot be grasped as long as irrationalism is always seen as a feature of the Other. Dividing the world between the reasonable and unreasonable, which tends nowadays to coincide rather conveniently with the axis of West and East, overlooks the fact that capitalism breeds irrationalism as predictably as extraterrestrial aliens turn out to be grotesque but easily recognizable versions of ourselves. It is not simply, as Ditchkins seems comfortingly to imagine, that there are still pockets of benightedness within an enlightened world. Benightedness is far closer to the bone than that. The choice between West and East is sometimes one between which particular squalid bunch of murderous fanatics one prefers to back.
p.74
Whatever else one might think of the doctrine of Creation, it is at least a salve for humanist arrogance. The world for Aquinas is not our possession, to be molded and manipulated how we please, but a gift which incarnates an unknowable otherness, one whose material density and autonomy must be respected. This respect, at least, is one feature that theologians share in common with scientists. When it comes to knowledge, there is no question for Aquinas of Cartesian or empiricist “representations”, “mental images”, or “sense data”: when we see an elephant we see an elephant, not a private mental picture or an irregular gray patch on our eyeballs. In the act of knowing, subject and object are at one. There is thus no space through which skepticism might enter. As Heidegger commented about such skepticism, what is scandalous is not the possibility that there might be nothing out there, but the act of seriously indulging this fantasy in the first place. Because Aquinas, like the Heidegger who so grievously misunderstood him, views the self as corporeal —as an active project of engagement with the world, rather than a detached, contemplative window onto it —there can be no question of postmodern skepticism. Knowledge is simply one moment or aspect of our bodily collusion in reality, a moment which modernity falsely abstracts and enshrines.
p.79
Aquinas would no doubt have shared Wittgenstein’s bemusement at the commonplace phrase “the external world”. In what sense is a laburnum tree “outside”, then the real me must be somehow squatting inside my own body, like a man operating a crane. And who is operating him?
p.80
The radical shift in the social imaginary which Charles Taylor records, like all such transformations, reflected a deep-seated change in social practice. It was not simply a matter of religious obscurantism fading before the unsullied light of Reason. It was also a question of different conceptions of rationality. Reason for Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas is indissociable from certain ethical, ontological, metaphysical, and even aesthetic commitments which simply fall out of the modernist world picture. It is equally inseparable from a certain legacy of sapientia or wisdom. It follows that if the question “Is faith in God rational?” is posed from within a different (procedural, positivist, or verificationist) conception of reason, one for which the real is whatever can be experimentally verified or rationally deduced, it is almost bound to answer itself.
p.81
It is true, Dawkins magnanimously concedes, that Hitler slaughtered more people than Genghis did; but —so he comments as if by way of partial extenuation— he had 20th century technology at his disposal. Otherwise, we are invited to believe that the 20th century, by far the bloodiest century on record, was a beacon of moral progress because one heard less racsit chitchat in bars, or at least in the kind of bars Dawkins is likely to frequent. We are all getting nicer and nicer all the time. Scientific development and moral evolution would seem to go hand in hand, for Dawkins as for the dewy eyed Victorian rationalists. The idea that science might actually have contributed to our degradation as well as to our refinement is not even cursorily considered. Nor is it by hitchens. They are both excellent examples of finely intelligent men who have been rendered obtuse in certain respects by ideology.
There are Dawkins is gracious enough to acknowledge, “local and temporary setbacks” to human progress (one thinks of such minor backslidings as Belsen, Hiroshima, apartheid, and so on), but the general upward trend is unmistakable. We have it, then, from the mouth of Mr. Public Science himself that aside from a few local hiccups like acological disaster, ethnic wars, and potential nuclear catastrophe, History is perpetually on the up. Not even beaming, tambourine banging Evangelicals are quite so pathologically bullish. What is this but an example of blind faith? What rational soul would sign up to such a secular myth?
p.87-88
“It would be advisable”, Adorno remarks, “to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no ona should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies”.
p.93
In its heyday, middle-class liberalism was far more of a revolutionary current than socialism has ever managed to be. Any socialism which fails to build on its magnificient achievements risks moral and material bankruptcy from the outset.
p.94
“Russell and the parsons between them have done infinite harm, infinite harm”, Ludwig Wittgenstein once complained to a friend, yoking the most celebrated British antireligious liberal rationalist of his day with the very clerics against whom he inveighed.
p.95
A supercivilized brand of cultural supremacism, one which would no doubt find itself offended by common-or-garden racism, is now much in fashion, not least among the literary intelligentsia. Since branding others as inferior because of their race is no longer acceptable, relegating them to the outer darkness because of their religion may serve instead.
p.95
It is also dismaying, as I have noted already, to witness some Western liberals caving in to illiberalism without a struggle at the first assault on their liberal values. There is a familiar narrative behind this panic —a fable in which there is first barbarism and then civilization, but always with the possibility of barbarism returning to plague us. Civilization is dredged by sweat and toil from the fetid swamps of savagery, and is in perpetual danger of sliding back into them again. This was a familiar Victorian anxiety.
What this fable overlooks is the fact that barbarism and civilization are not only sequential but synchronic —that human civilization is among other, rather finer things a “higher” or sublimated form of violence and aggression. For radical thought, barbarism remains one of the secretly enabling conditions or barely concealed underside of that precious thing we call civilization —a barbaric subtext which with the help of George Bush and his neocon gangsters has in recent years become rather less shamefaced and subterranean.
p.96
Such is Richard Dawkins’s unruffled impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring h imself to concede that a single human benefit has ever flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives to the selfless service of others in the name of Christ or Allah or the Buddha are simply wiped from human history —and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry.
•
In any case, Hitchens’s book [ God is not Great —F ] appears to claim any good that religious men and women have achieved for the cause of secular humanism, which is rather like arguing that any advances made by feminists are due entirely to the benign influence of their fathers.
p.97
With an equipoise rare in such debates, however, Ahmad also reminds us that “Taliban rule was hideous but it was the only time in post-communist Afghanistan when no women were raped by the ruling elite, no rulers took bribes, no poppy was grown or heroin manufactured”.
p.102
To adapt a phrase of Wittgenstein’s: If God could speak, we would not care about what he said.
Slavoj Zizek remarks in his In Defence of Lost Causes that fundamentalism confuses faith with knowledge. The fundamentalist is like the kind of neurotic who can’t trust that he is loved, but in infantile spirit demands some irrefragable proof of the fact. he is not really a believer at all. Fundamentalists are faithless. They are, in fact, the mirror image of skeptics. In a world of extreme uncertainty, only copper-bottomed, incontrovertible truths promulgated by God himself can be trusted, “For [religious fundamentalists],” Zizek writes, “religious statements and scientific statements belongs to the same modality of positive knowledge… the occurence of the term “science” in the very name of some of the fundamentalist sects (Christian Science, Scientology) is not just an obscene joke, but signals this reduction of belief to positive knowledge”.
p.114-115
If I am in love with you, I must be prepared to explain what it is about you I find so lovable, otherwise the word “love” here has no more meaning than a grunt. I must supply reasons for my affection. But I am also bound to acknowledge that someone else might wholeheartedly endorse my reasons yet not be in love with you at all. The evidence by itself will not decide the issue. At some point along the line, a particular way of seeing the evidence emerges, one which involves a peculiar kind of personal engagement with it; and none of this is reducible to the facts themselves, in the sense of being ineluctably motivated by a bare account of them.
p.116
The left-wing atheist Alain Badiou … grasps the point that the kind of truth involved in acts of faith is neither independent of propositional truth nor reducible to it. Faith for him consists in a tenacious loyalty to what he calls an “event” —an utterly original happening which is out of joint with the smooth flow of history, and which is unnameable and ungraspable within the context in which it occurs. Truth is what cuts against the grain of the world, breaking with an older dispensation and founding a radically new reality.
•
For Badiou, one becomes an authentic human subject, as opposed to a mere anonymous member of the biological species, through one’s passionate allegiance to such a revelation. There is no truth event without the decisive act of a subject (only a subject can affirm that a truth event has actually taken place), which is not to say that such events are merely subjective.
•
Badiou does, however, grasp the vital point that faith articulates a loving commitment before it counts as a description of the way things are.
p.117-119
Aquinas’s well-known demonstrations of the existence of God from reasoning about the universe already assume belief in him. Their intention is not to demonstrate God’s existence as one might demonstrate the presence of a previously undetected planet, but to show believers how their faith can make sense in terms of the natural world.
p.121
There are those nowadays who would regard faith in socialism as even more eccentric than the exotic conviction that the Blessed Virgin Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven. Why, then, do some of us still cling to this political faith, in the teeth of what many would regard as reason and solid evidence? Not only, I think, because socialism is such an extraordinarily good idea that it has proved exceedingly hard to discredit, and this despite its own most strenuous efforts. It is also because one cannot accept that this —the world we see groaning in agony around us— is the only way things could be, though empirically speaking this might certainly prove to be the case; because one gazes with wondering bemusement on those hard-headed types for whom all this, given a reformist tweak or two, is as good as it gets; because to back down from this vision would be to betray what one feels are the most precious powers and capacities of human beings; because however hard one tries, one simply cannot shake off the primitive conviction that this is not how it is supposed to be, however much we are conscious that this seeing the world in the light of Judgment Day, as Walter Benjamin might put it, is folly to the financiers and a stumbling block to stockbrokers; because there is something in this vision which calls to the depths of one’s being and evokes a passionate assent there; because not to feel this would not to be oneself; because one is too much in love with this vision of humankind to back down, walk away, or take no for an answer.
p.123
…like the man in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations who buys a second copy of the daily newspaper to assure himself that what the first copy said was true. Justifications must come to an end somewhere; and where they generally come to an end is in some kind of faith.
p.124
For Aquinas, to quote Denys Turner, “rationality is the form of our animality… bodiliness is the stuff of our intellectual being”. Theology is in this sense a species of materialism. We reason as we do because of the kind of material creatures we are. We are reasonable because we are animals, not despite being so. If an angel could speak, we would not be able to understand what he said.
p.129
Radical Islam generally understands exceedingly little about its own religious faith, and there is good evidence, as we have seen, to suggest that its actions are for the most part politically driven.
p.141
Liberal society’s summum bonum is to leave believers to get on with it unmolested —rather as the English would walk by if you were bleeding at the roadside, not because they are hard-hearted but because they would be loath to interfere with your privacy.
p.144
The idea, touted in particular by some Americans, that Islamic radicals are envious of Western freedoms is about as convincing as the suggestion that they are secretly hankering to sit in cafés smoking dope and reading Gilles Deleuze.
p.145
Perhaps he [ C. Hitchens —F. ] finds it mildly embarrassing in his new post-Marxist persona that “Religion is poison” was the slogan under which Mao launched his assault on the people and culture of Tibet.
p.148
A surfeit of belief is what agnostic, late-capitalist civilization itself has helped to spawn. This is not only because it has helped to create the conditions for fundamentalism. it is also because when reason becomes too dominative, calculative, and instrumental, it ends up as too shallow a soil for a reasonable kind of faith to flourish. As a result, faith lapses into the kind of irrationalism which theologians call fideism, turning its back on reason altogether. From there, it is an easy enough step to fanaticism. Rationalism and fideism are each other’s mirror image.
p.148
Nature always has the edge over culture in the end. It is known as death.
p.158
If politics has so far failed to unite the wretched of the earth in the name of transforming their condition, we can be sure that culture will not accomplish the task in its stead. Culture, for one thing, is too much a matter of affirming what you are or have been, rather than what you might become. What, then, of religion? What we know as Christendom saw itself as a unity of culture and civilization. If religion has proved so far and away the most powerful, tenacious, universal symbolic form humanity has yet to come up with, it is partly on this account. What other symbolic form has managed to forge such direct links between the most absolute and universal of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women?
p.165
The distinction between Ditchkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. There are those like Ditchkins who hold that if we can only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be free. This in my own view is itself a myth, though a generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision of the free flourishing of humanity; but it holds that this is possible only by confronting the very worst. The only affirmation of humanity worth having in the end is one which, like the disillusioned post-Restoration Milton, seriously wonders whether humanity is worth saving in the first place, and can see what Jonathan Swift’s king of Brobdingnag has in mind when he describes the human species as an odious race of vermin. Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals did not continue to stand in its way.
p.169
