Literary critic James Wood has again announced to the world that he alone possesses the requisite sensitivity and depth to be a non-believer.
In 2006, he castigated the so-called New Atheists for their shallow criticisms of faith while recounting at great length the hardly dissimilar grounds for his own lack of belief. He has repeated this conflicted performance in a review for the New Yorker of Oxford English professor Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution. (For a sample of Eagleton’s religious writing, which makes his Marxism look positively rigorous, see here.)
Wood mocks Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens’ image of God as the Being who
created the world, controls our destinies, resides in Heaven, loves us when He is not punishing us, intervenes to perform miracles, sent His only son to die on the Cross and save us from sin, and promises Heaven for the devout.
Now where would they have gotten those ideas?
The New Atheists’ conception of God “is not very Judaic, or very philosophical,” Wood notes in disapproval.
Then he goes on to criticize Eagleton for just such a “philosophical” view of god, one that ignores the anthropomorphic qualities that he has just criticized the New Atheists for foregrounding:
Eagleton’s Thomistic God [is] bodiless as vapor, distant, sublimely indifferent. . . [But] the Christian God is personal . . . Daily religious belief is full of such implied propositions [as] ‘God is just’; ‘God saves my soul’; [and] ‘Christ was God made man’.
No kidding.
Wood’s preening efforts at distinguishing himself from other disbelievers reach a climax of incoherence at the conclusion of his review:
What is needed is neither the overweening rationalism of a Dawkins nor the rarefied religious belief of an Eagleton but a theologically engaged atheism that resembles disappointed belief. Such atheism, only a semitone from faith, would be, like musical dissonance, the more acute for its proximity. . . . It would be unafraid to credit the immense allure of religious tradition, but at the same time it would be ready to argue that the abstract God of the philosophers and the theologian is no more probable than the idolatrous God of the fundamentalists, makes no better sense of the fallen world, and is certainly no more likable or worthy of our worshipful respect—alas.
In other words, vulnerable to the identical critique as that of those crude New Atheists.
As for Eagleton’s conception of God, the problem is not that it is too disembodied and too detached from the world, the problem is that it is made up out of whole cloth—like every other assertion about God. God “fashioned us just for the fun of it—he is not neurotically possessive of us,” according to Eagleton. How in the world does Eagleton know that? Has he interviewed his subject? “Unlike George Bush, God is not an interventionist kind of ruler,” Eagleton adds. By what means of proof does Eagleton plan to dissuade people who think that God is daily involved with his creation? Marxism’ evidential base is rock-solid compared to these unmoored projections of fantasy.
Heather — please! Read Edward Feser’s _The Last Superstition_ (FWIW, the illustrations are conservative-friendly), and only comment on theology again after having digested it. An argument with the Thomistic tradition would be worthwhile; this shadow-boxing you do with the shallowest representatives of the theistic tradition is a waste of your abilities.
Marxism’ evidential base is rock-solid compared to these unmoored projections of fantasy.
ouch!
Uh, I’m no fan of Eagleton’s book, but his argument actually isn’t made up by him. It is based on Thomas Aquinas. Eagleton’s book is a sustained effort to put forward a Thomist theology to modern, skeptical readers. I don’t think he succeeds, but it is important to know where his ideas come from.
And Thomas got his ideas regarding God not from Aristotle (as widely believed), but from St. Augustine and the Bible.
Again, Eagleton may be profoundly wrong and deeply unpersuasive, but that doesn’t mean he’s just makin’ stuff up. He is arguing out of a deeper tradition.
Part of the problem with those who cling to the atheist “courtier’s reply” view is that they never end up reading serious background theology. The most sustained and sophisticated defense of theism is that of Thomas Aquinas. Even today, that’s the best view that’s out there. Feser bases his argument on it. So does Eagleton. To understand their positions, one has to understand Thomas.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that Thomas is right. But good night — have enough intellectual curiosity to actually understand the argument before you refute it with such witty but superficial banter.
Good post, Mark. Lord knows Dawkins didn’t bother reading Aquinas very well before presuming to refute. His restatement of Aquinas’ arguments were just embarrassingly bad. In this case, he can’t even claim the “Courtier’s Reply” as cover, since he picked Aquinas as his punching bag.
Preening he may be, but Woods is clearly a more sophisticated critic of Christianity than Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, or Heather MacDonald. Asking that atheists actually know something about the subject matter before writing tomes on the subject hardly seems like too much to ask. (I’m not saying that an atheist needs to study theology and the history of religious thought before becoming an atheist, just before writing a book about religion and theology as Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens have done.)
In philosophy, there is this thing called “the principle of charity.” One criticizes an argument by engaging the best, strongest possible interpretation of the argument. This helps one avoid straw men, ad hominems, etc. Of course, it’s much more amusing and far easier to make fun of people who see Jesus in a piece of toast and certainly there’s a place for that, but don’t expect anyone to take you too terribly seriously as a thinker or critic of religion if that’s all you can do. And that’s pretty much all Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris do. They certainly never engage the best, strongest possible arguments for religion and their books are full of straw men and ad hominems. All of them are fine polemicists, but nobody should take them even slightly seriously as philosophers of atheism. Fortunately atheism has a great many very fine philosophers which Mr. Woods is unaware of, since they’re not famous and their books don’t sell particularly well. Obviously it’s far more profitable to do what Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris do and more power to them for making piles of money by feeding their audience red meat. But don’t ask me to respect them just because they’re “on my side.”
Well said, Andrew. A debate between (say) Thomas Nagel and Feser would be time well spent.
What’s weird Andrew is that many of these atheist popularizers don’t bother to do an even preliminary literature search before writing. As you said, whether you agree with them or not it isn’t as if these topics haven’t been debated ad nauseum in philosophical departments the last century with a very large degree of rigor. The intellectual framework is already done. Why not make use of it?
While I’m no atheist I prefer the more meaty discussions. The kind one finds may convince a few – but it’ll convince the kind of people likely to be convinced by crappy Christian apologetics as well. At best you’ll tie into a few pre-existing prejudices to lead people towards a position they were already headed to. (And I’m not so naive as to think most people’s beliefs are determined by rigorous rational thinking) So perhaps they will gain “converts.” Of course maybe that’s all Hitchens, Dawkins and company want.
“Asking that atheists actually know something about the subject matter before writing tomes on the subject hardly seems like too much to ask.”
Here’s what I find amusing: some religious nuts get upset that other people reject the nuts’ fantasies without having studied the details of those fantasies. Is everyone, atheist of not, “supposed to” study all the religious beliefs described in, say, The Golden Bough, before rejecting one set of beliefs in favor of another? How many of the religious nuts have done that, and why do they seem to assume that their own religion (generally Christianity) needs to be studied in detail before being rejected, but other religions (or sets of beliefs) can be rejected out of hand? The obvious answer: “My own religion, which I have studied, is better than those other religions, which I haven’t studied.”
May Crom smite them all – or at least put thorns in their footprints.
FWIW, I still think George H. Smith’s Atheism: The Case Against God is the best popular atheist polemic out there, despite its being written in 1974 and being chock full o’Randiness. Smith lays out the best arguments and deals with them in a way that doesn’t hold his readership in contempt. His section on Jesus is fantastic, too, because he doesn’t waste time with the historicity arguments, but takes on Jesus as presented in the Gospels. It’s quite a good book. It could use a new and revised edition to take into account new science and arguments (and perhaps delete a few excess, vanity Rand and Branden quotes).
What’s weird Andrew is that many of these atheist popularizers don’t bother to do an even preliminary literature search before writing.
i think the issue is that the new atheists view religion as a *natural phenomenon*, not a theological one. dawkins is obvious familiar with the cognitive anthropological literature in *the god delusion*, it’s in the biblio and he makes reference to it, though he doesn’t take it to heart as much i would have expected him too. sophisticated believers seem to assume that *theology* is sine qua non of religion, but for an unbeliever that is not as important since we experience religion through the actions and intentions of believers. by analogy, for many westerners buddhism is the exoteric element of temples & monks, and not the deeper metaphysic. and will always be such.
In defense of the New Atheists, I don’t believe that they see themselves as participating in the same sort of project that philosophers of religion are occupied with. There’s definitely something to Coyne’s (I think) point that the Christianity discussed by theologians and philosophers is a religion with vanishingly few adherents. The New Atheists are concerned with attacking the reasons that many people actually have for believing in the Christianity that they actually do.
And this is worthwhile. It seems unlikely to me that discussion of a certain kind of idealized Christianity can still be particularly productive. Highly educated people tend irreligious, and those whose work requires them to understand religious thought or the human mind (theologians excepted) are overwhelmingly irreligious. And many of those who are religious aren’t identifiably Christian. I’ve heard philosophers seriously discuss how justifiable it is to count a job applicant’s religion as a negative (and it’s assumed that this does happen somewhat frequently). If you start from the assumption that atheism vs theism has been basically settled among intellectuals, then what’s left is to popularize those findings. It’s at least plausible that the only reason we still have as many religious intellectuals as we do is that they’re coming out of a huge pool of religious non-intellectuals.
And it’s US non-intellectuals as a group that have been basically left alone by atheists through several hundred years of back and forth. There’s really never been any kind of atheist popularization here comparable to widespread Marxism or humanism in Europe. On the other side, there are people pretending to speak authoritatively against atheism in every church in the country while clearly not understanding the first thing about serious arguments for either, to say nothing of whole television channels and publishing companies dedicated to producing or sustaining the sillier forms of belief. National politicians regularly produce inane arguments for Christianity or against atheism, and it’s downright epidemic among local politicians.
The New Atheists are providing a valuable and, it seems, effective counterpoint to the masses of terrible pro-religious argument out there by providing reasons not to believe that the less informed or able can still find satisfying. Their arguments aren’t dishonest, just overly simple, but that’s a criticism that could be leveled at popularizers of anything – one could attack Dawkins’ explanations of evolution on the same grounds.
Well said, Andrew. A debate between (say) Thomas Nagel and Feser would be time well spent.
My own favorite atheist philosopher of religion is Michael Martin, who could cope with Feser. Not sure if Nagel could.
What’s weird Andrew is that many of these atheist popularizers don’t bother to do an even preliminary literature search before writing. As you said, whether you agree with them or not it isn’t as if these topics haven’t been debated ad nauseum in philosophical departments the last century with a very large degree of rigor. The intellectual framework is already done. Why not make use of it?
Yes, exactly.
Here’s what I find amusing: some religious nuts get upset that other people reject the nuts’ fantasies without having studied the details of those fantasies. Is everyone, atheist of not, “supposed to” study all the religious beliefs described in, say, The Golden Bough, before rejecting one set of beliefs in favor of another? How many of the religious nuts have done that, and why do they seem to assume that their own religion (generally Christianity) needs to be studied in detail before being rejected, but other religions (or sets of beliefs) can be rejected out of hand?
I specifically addressed this in my comment. I said, “(I’m not saying that an atheist needs to study theology and the history of religious thought before becoming an atheist, just before writing a book about religion and theology as Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens have done.)” I agree with you that one does not need to know the torturous specifics about any religious belief system before plumping for atheism. But I do ask that if Dawkins is, say, going to write about what’s wrong with Saint Paul, he should first have some sort of basic idea about what it was that Saint Paul actually said. And, if you read The God Delusion, Dawkins’s ignorance is very obvious to anyone who knows anything about the subject.
FWIW, I still think George H. Smith’s Atheism: The Case Against God is the best popular atheist polemic out there, despite its being written in 1974 and being chock full o’Randiness.
I couldn’t agree more. Despite Smith’s being a Randroid, his work is just miles and miles above Dawkins, Hitchens, et al., while still being comprehensible to the layman. As a popular work on atheism, Smith just mops the floor with Dawkins. When Smith actually grapples with Christianity specifically, it is clear that he, unlike Dawkins, had actually done his homework.
i think the issue is that the new atheists view religion as a *natural phenomenon*, not a theological one. dawkins is obvious familiar with the cognitive anthropological literature in *the god delusion*, it’s in the biblio and he makes reference to it, though he doesn’t take it to heart as much i would have expected him too.
This is no defense. The “principle of charity” still applies if you’re actually making a serious argument. Dawkins is a half-way decent polemicist, I suppose, if you’re into that sort of thing, but a ludicrously bad philosopher, precisely because he never bothers to take his opponents’ arguments seriously.
Oh, I should also mention that Smith makes a somewhat plausible case for atheist morality, something that Dawkins is completely befuddled by. Smith’s argument isn’t nearly as good as Michael Martin’s or many other atheist ethicists, but he at least understands the issues, while Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris are quite obviously completely baffled.
@Andrew Stevens
You may be right about Dawkins and Hitchens (especially Dawkins) although I’m not sure that their ignorance of what you might call “sophisticated” theology weakens their critique of popular religious belief in general. About Harris however, you are simply dead wrong — he has read and studied a more diverse body of religious texts than certainly the vast majority of believers and probably the vast majority of theologians as well.
but a ludicrously bad philosopher, precisely because he never bothers to take his opponents’ arguments seriously.
andrew, again, for most atheists philosophy has nothing to do with religion. many religionists, philosophical or not, would contend that it lay at the root of religion, but as an empirical matter many atheists don’t agree with this at all. personally, i’ve read aquinas, michael martin, and some of the stuff by people like plantiga, but these are only really relevant for religion nerds. dawkins would have been more polished if he’d engaged this, but empirically the delusion that he’s referring to is more a function of psychology than philosophy.
there really isn’t much of a market in convincing smart people to not be religious. they’re relative low hanging fruit. if you want to be an atheist evangelist the biggest audience are among dullards who wouldn’t know the difference between teleological and telephone.
there really isn’t much of a market in convincing smart people to not be religious. they’re relative low hanging fruit. if you want to be an atheist evangelist the biggest audience are among dullards who wouldn’t know the difference between teleological and telephone.
I agree with the point that the NA’s want to argue with the theology of the believers and not the academics, and that’s fine. However, if what you write is what Dawkins thinks, then it betrays a massive amount of contempt for his readership. Second, Dawkins explicitly tries to take down Aquinas and Anselm, and he rather embarrasses himself. Tom Piatak has pointed the numerous errors fact you can find in Hitchens’ book. In Harris’ defense, he doesn’t attempt to be as comprehensive in his works, but they suffer from a lack of originality, so they come off as hollow tub-thumping.
As I’ve said, it’s not like you can’t write an intelligent middle-brow atheist polemic. George Smith, IMO, did just that.
@ ANdrew STevens:
you said: ”
Oh, I should also mention that Smith makes a somewhat plausible case for atheist morality”
Do you have a link to Smith’s or Martin’s argument for atheist morality?
You may be right about Dawkins and Hitchens (especially Dawkins) although I’m not sure that their ignorance of what you might call “sophisticated” theology weakens their critique of popular religious belief in general. About Harris however, you are simply dead wrong — he has read and studied a more diverse body of religious texts than certainly the vast majority of believers and probably the vast majority of theologians as well.
I’m going to assume you’re right about this. I have heard and read a great deal of Dawkins and Hitchens and I have heard Harris speak, but I have to admit I haven’t read his book and I should probably have left him off of my critique. I left him on only because he was referenced in the original post. Mea culpa.
Oh, I should also mention that Smith makes a somewhat plausible case for atheist morality”
Do you have a link to Smith’s or Martin’s argument for atheist morality?
Smith wrote his book in ’74 so I’m unaware of any significant web presence so I would have to refer you to his actual book. As for Martin, start with this link, though his books will give you a more complete account. In particular, I would point you to this article.
i too would recommend smith’s book, with the caveats noted above. martin’s atheist: a philosophical justification is heavy going, but i found it worthwhile.
@David Hume
Razib, I think you are missing the point.
Elite religion is it’s own phenomenon, related to popular religion, and based on many of the same mental tendencies, but not identical with it. Therefore, you can’t somehow refute elite religious doctrine by pointing out all the kooky things the average believer believes or by pointing to the mental tendencies of the human mind that create the impetus for religion.
Again, its fine if you don’t think elite religion is worth anything either or if you don’t want to was your time on the philosophy used to justify elite doctrine. I just don’t think that criticisms of popular religion or research on the origins of religious belief are all that relevant to whether or not, for example, God exists.
these are only really relevant for religion nerds.
Peoples engagement with the doctrinal substance and the philosophical background and their moving away from purely intuitive religious ideas is a sliding scale, not an either/or proposition. I will grant you that only a very few will read the likes of Aquinas or Martin.
Just as it it is wrong to treat elite religious doctrine as what defines religion, it is wrong to treat people’s unreflective supernatural intuitions as what defines religion.
Still waiting for someone to tell me what sort of evidence could possibly be adduced to back up Eagleton’s claim that God “fashioned us just for the fun of it.” I presume that Eagleton would be included among what the commenters are calling “elite religious thinkers.” However complex the edifice of Thomistic reasoning leading up to such conclusions, Eagleton’s claim about God is as unconnected to anything remotely verifiable or remotely based in actual knowledge as the claim of so-called “popular believers” (who are in fact taking their cues from the divines) that God cured their cancer. Whatever the pedigree for such claims, at bottom, they are made up out of the believer’s own desires for what a God should be.
Eagleton cheerfully distinguishes God from the evil George Bush, asserting that God is “not an interventionist kind of ruler.” I ask again: How does he know? Robert Novak would claim just as strong an intellectual connection to Aquinas. Yet Novak tells us in No One Sees God that God knows each of us “by name,” and shows his “care . . . every day” in human affairs. How does *Novak* know, and how are we to determine whether Novak and Eagleton is right?
Edward Feser has already admonished Secular Right for its petty puzzlement over actual religious practice and belief.
so-called “popular believers” (who are in fact taking their cues from the divines) that God cured their cancer.
You honestly don’t seem to be all that familiar with your co-blogger Razib’s work on religion. The fact is that most religious believers take their cues mainly from their own supernatural instincts, not from the divines. Razib, following the work of Pascal Boyer, Scott Atran, and Jason Sloane, has shown that on a popular level Christianity, Islam, Buddhism etc. are pretty much operationally the same in the believers’ mind, which isn’t exactly what you would expect if elite beliefs permeated everything down to the bottom. (Hell, Sloane’s book is entitled Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t.)
Now, what complicates things a bit is that religious elites will often pander to popular religious sentiments to a greater or lesser degree in order to attract followers. But it’s a huge stretch to say that that is a top down phenomenon.
It’s been famously said that politics is the art of finding a parade and putting yourself at the head of it – the same thing could be said of religion.
But once you’re at the head, it’s possible to steer the crowd by nudging the first few followers the way you want to go. Theology may have more to do with defining in-groups than anything else, which probably is why religious orthodoxies tend to split up into rival groups eventually. If the actual purpose for doctrine is to serve as identification, uniformity paradoxically would lead to lack of feedback controls and increased diversity – which then leads to contrary identification and splitting.
I was under the impression that thanking God for relief from affliction was not just a belated priestly rubber-stamp on some primitive folk practice, but a form of worship that reflected the very essence of God’s nature, as revealed in Holy Scripture.
Alas, alas, alas, this is the crux of the problem!
Religious nutcases never ever SERIOUSLY investigate this question, they all are presuppositionalists of some sort.
I read the New Yorker article carefully. It was clear Woods was criticizing the critics of the “New Atheism” using a wry sense of irony. I enjoyed how he dismantling a series of recent critiques against atheism. For me, it was enjoyable to read him work.
I think god is imaginary; nevertheless, chose a local church community from which to organize and participate in ethical action. I might attest to “such atheism, only a semitone from faith, would be, like musical dissonance, the more acute for its proximity.”
One thing Wood mentions in passing are the varieties of religious experience and how they deal with doubt. Those that embrace doubt about the omni-characteristics of God are more likely to give a secular view of social organization and responsibility a fair hearing.
Dr. Richard Beck’s blog Experimental Theology did a recent twenty part series on the varieties of religious experience, trying to make room for what he calls “sick souls”. Chapter 10 does a good job of explaining part of the question.