Literary critic James Wood has again announced to the world that he alone possesses the requisite sensitivity and depth to be a non-believer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 2006, he castigated <\/a>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.\u00a0 He has repeated this conflicted performance in a review for the New Yorker <\/a>of Oxford English professor Terry Eagleton\u2019s Reason, Faith, and Revolution.\u00a0 (For a sample of Eagleton\u2019s religious writing, which makes his Marxism look positively rigorous, see here<\/a>.)\u00a0<\/p>\n Wood mocks Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens\u2019 image of God as the Being who<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now where would they have gotten those ideas?<\/p>\n The New Atheists\u2019 conception of God \u201cis not very Judaic, or very philosophical,\u201d Wood notes in disapproval.\u00a0<\/p>\n Then he goes on to criticize Eagleton for just such a \u201cphilosophical\u201d view of god, one that ignores the anthropomorphic qualities that he has just criticized the New Atheists for foregrounding:<\/p>\n Eagleton\u2019s Thomistic God [is] bodiless as vapor, distant,\u00a0 sublimely indifferent. . .\u00a0 [But] the Christian God is <\/em>personal . . . Daily religious belief is full of such implied propositions [as] \u2018God is just\u2019; \u2018God saves my soul\u2019; [and] \u2018Christ was God made man\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n No kidding.\u00a0<\/p>\n Wood\u2019s preening efforts at distinguishing himself from other disbelievers reach a climax of incoherence at the conclusion of his review:\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 Such atheism, only a semitone from faith, would be, like musical dissonance, the more acute for its proximity.\u00a0 . . . 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\u2014alas.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In other words, vulnerable to the identical critique as that of those\u00a0crude \u00a0New Atheists.<\/p>\n As for Eagleton\u2019s 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\u2014like every other assertion about God.\u00a0 God \u201cfashioned us just for the fun of it\u2014he is not neurotically possessive of us,\u201d according to Eagleton.\u00a0 How in the world does Eagleton know that?\u00a0 Has he interviewed his subject? \u201cUnlike George Bush, God is not an interventionist kind of ruler,\u201d\u00a0Eagleton\u00a0adds.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0By what means of proof does Eagleton plan to dissuade people who think that God is daily involved with his creation?\u00a0\u00a0Marxism’ evidential base is rock-solid compared to these unmoored projections of fantasy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Literary critic James Wood has again announced to the world that he alone possesses the requisite sensitivity and depth to be a non-believer.\u00a0 In 2006, he castigated the so-called New Atheists for their shallow criticisms of faith while recounting at … Continue reading