I have to confess that I'm suffering from God fatigue nevertheless Stanley Fish's discussion of Terry Eagleton's book is worth reading even though it leaves me wondering whether any good or even useful can come out of the endless arguments between the faithful and the atheists. I think the solution might just be for both sides to get together and to settle everything with a manly dance contest so that the rest of us can move on. Sugary excerpt:
Progress, liberalism and enlightenment — these are the watchwords of
those, like Hitchens, who believe that in a modern world, religion has
nothing to offer us. Don’t we discover cures for diseases every day?
Doesn’t technology continually extend our powers and offer the promise
of mastering nature? Who needs an outmoded, left-over medieval
superstition?
Eagleton punctures the complacency of these questions when he turns
the tables and applies the label of “superstition” to the idea of
progress. It is a superstition — an idol or “a belief not logically
related to a course of events” (American Heritage Dictionary) — because
it is blind to what is now done in its name: “The language of
enlightenment has been hijacked in the name of corporate greed, the
police state, a politically compromised science, and a permanent war
economy,” all in the service, Eagleton contends, of an empty
suburbanism that produces ever more things without any care as to
whether or not the things produced have true value.
And as for the vaunted triumph of liberalism, what about “the misery
wreaked by racism and sexism, the sordid history of colonialism and
imperialism, the generation of poverty and famine”? Only by ignoring
all this and much more can the claim of human progress at the end of
history be maintained: “If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of
credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a
few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world.”
That kind of belief will have little use for a creed that has at its
center “one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for
his pains.” No wonder “Ditchkins” — Eagleton’s contemptuous amalgam of
Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, perhaps with a sidelong glance at Luke
6:39, “Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the
ditch?” — seems incapable of responding to “the kind of commitment made
manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in
darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to
the promise of a transformative love.”
I always thought that Christopher Hitchens should have titled his book God is absent to assert that fact that the trouble with God is that her/his/its presence is a scandal because it is made of puff and huff. The reason why I'm getting bore with this battle between believers and non-believers is that it puts God at the center of everything when s/he/it is irrelevant.
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