Terry Eagleton on Dawkins

I am definitely not a one-issue man and i certainly do not have an obsession about Richard Dawkins – but i couldn’t resist throwing in this tongue-in-cheek with a serious edge quotation from a review by Terry Eagleton, ex-Marxist cultural and literary critic. He certainly wouldn’t call himself a Christian – which partly is what makes this so fun.

“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.”

To read the whole review click HERE

Grateful to Graham Tomlin‘s occasional blog for putting me onto this.