Faith and delusion
British literary critic and theorist Terry Eagleton
An Oxford chap named Richard Dawkins who needs a lot of our prayers is making a lot of money ridiculing those of us who have faith. His book, The God Delusion, does its best to place Christians, Jews and Muslims in the same boat as adults who believe in Santa Claus.
The odd thing is that Dawkins waxes so poetic about Darwin, atheism and anti-creationism that — well, he’s religious in his fervor for these topics, but woefully ignorant about religion. (You might even say he’s delusional about what faith is.)
Here’s what author and literary critic Terry Eagleton had to say about The God Delusion and Dawkins in the London Review of Books:
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.
Read Terry Eagleton’s excellent essay on this book here. Funny how atheism brings out the religious fanatic in some folks!
