Terry Eagleton remains smug. News at 11.
Jun. 27th, 2011 08:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsThere are few things that annoy me more than smugness. Terry Eagleton reviews The Joy af Secularilsm, a collection of essays about the slow secularizing of the world. Eagleton is a theologist of some stripe who reacts with appropriate British horror to the the American popular notions of a God incarnate and interventionist, but who is equally horrified when philosophers misidentify God as "a being" and somehow responsible for this world. His reviews of Gnu Atheist books are among the finest examples of The Courtier's Reply ("Who are you to say the Emperor has no clothes? Have you studied fashion?") ever devised.
So when Eagleton writes, "Here, there is no callow and triumphalist rationalism, which in any case is simply the flip side of evangelical fervour," he is, with a wave of his blessed hand, dispensing with the most critical issue in the entire debate: one side has evidence. One side has tools with which we can examine the emperor and can say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there isn't a stitch on that man.
If only Terry Eagleton were actually willing to look through a microscope. Despite his sneering, "The history of modernity is, among other things, the history of substitutes for God. Art, culture, nation, Geist, humanity, society: all these, along with a clutch of other hopeful aspirants, have been tried from time to time," theology still offers us nothing but a veneer for community that, sadly, discourages critical thought when it is most needed.
So when Eagleton writes, "Here, there is no callow and triumphalist rationalism, which in any case is simply the flip side of evangelical fervour," he is, with a wave of his blessed hand, dispensing with the most critical issue in the entire debate: one side has evidence. One side has tools with which we can examine the emperor and can say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there isn't a stitch on that man.
If only Terry Eagleton were actually willing to look through a microscope. Despite his sneering, "The history of modernity is, among other things, the history of substitutes for God. Art, culture, nation, Geist, humanity, society: all these, along with a clutch of other hopeful aspirants, have been tried from time to time," theology still offers us nothing but a veneer for community that, sadly, discourages critical thought when it is most needed.
