Reason, Faith, and Revolution. Grrr...

I am growing increasingly frustrated with Eagleton's book Reason, Faith, and Revolution. I said in the last post about it that his argument suffers a fatal flaw in the first few pages. I'm reconsidering that as his goal was far less grand than I expected. The flaw is not fatal, only annoying since the most Eagleton argues for in Part I, The Scum of the Earth, is that the Christian narrative he relates is not stupid. Since it's a mixture of good Anabaptist theology, good Yale post-liberalism, and bad liberal Christianity, it is mostly not stupid. He wants to make the point that Dawkins and Hitchens overstate the stupidity of Christianity (theist faith, really) in their anti-religious tomes The God Delusion and God is not Great.

Here's the money quote from page 6:

Dawkins makes an error of genre, or category mistake, about the kind of thing Christian belief is. He imagines that it is either some kind of pseudo-science, or that, if it is not that, then it conveniently dispenses itself from the need for evidence altogether. He also has an old-fashioned scientistic notion of what constitutes evidence. Life for Dawkins would seem to divide neatly down the middle between things you can prove beyond all doubt, and blind faith. He fails to see that all the most interesting stuff goes on in neither of these places.

So, after misunderstanding what Dawkins is saying, Eagleton then proceeds to offer theological assertions without evidence to show that his version of Christianity may not be provable, but it is not stupid. Bravo! Except that less than one percent of Christians believe anything like Eagleton articulates. Christianity is largely practiced by evangelicals and fundamentalists. Mainstream Christians are next, and finally liberals, and under them the Anabaptists who are a blip on the theological landscape. People as diverse as John Howard Yoder and Brian McLaren would have very little to critique about Eagleton's grand narrative, but how many Christians wouldn't find Yoder to be a raving heretic and how many already do believe McLaren is one?

To say that something isn't stupid does nothing to address the critiques of Dawkins, Hitchens, et al. (Many statements aren't stupid and aren't provable, but who bets their life on them?) Their critique, and it still stands, is that if a faith group is going to make outlandish claims about who God is, what God expects, how governments should be constructed based on God's will, punishment for sin, what constitutes sin, where we go when we die, who is in and who is out, the roles of women and men, etc., then those faith groups ought to play by the same rules of evidence as people in the scientific fields who make claims about how the world works. Note that Eagleton uses the pejorative scientistic to make Dawkins's methodology look religious or ideological, not scientific. If a scientist says something about physics or chemistry, she is expected to provide testing data, evidence, lab notes, etc., and be able to recreate the experiment when asked to do so.

When a theologian makes a claim about what God has said, that claim requires little more than an appeal to a sacred text combined with the exercise of insular logic from within a closed system. How exactly does one meaningfully appeal the ruling of a theologian? With a prooftext? A different theological system? An appeal to a broader understanding of reason? By finding a new church? Given that none of the first principles of theology are demonstrable, Hitchens and Dawkins are right that these people ought not be allowed to dictate what is moral from a position of epistemological certainty, a position the evangelical and fundamentalist churches believe is theirs by inheritance of a faith tradition "once for all delivered."

Next time, Eagleton's bizarrely misstated claim that atheists don't know theology.

Comments

[Leighton]

Except that less than one percent of Christians believe anything like Eagleton articulates.

Indeed; in a recent radio interview, he claimed that no theologian actually believes in God as a being. Huh?

This false consensus tactic reminds me of a lot of Mere Christianity fans who haven't been exposed to much in the way of apologetics, and are blown away by Lewis's seemingly reasonable defense of the faith. Yet they don't notice that when Lewis makes categorical claims of the form "Christians really believe X because of Y," they don't, personally, know a single Christian who would say they believe X because of Y. It's literature for ideological partisans who don't really care about investigating issues, so much as making people whose ideas are uncomfortable to them look like idiots.