Mark Vernon discusses what he calls ‘common mistakes of atheists’ – but the examples he gives aren’t examples, because they don’t make the mistakes he says they make. His attributions are rather sloppy. Okay very sloppy. He doesn’t quote, he just says.

If you do the rounds of the philosophically minded blogs of atheists, it is common for arguments about the non-existence of God to be rehearsed. Typically, they present ‘proofs’ that require empirical evidence. For example, Stephen Law, argues that if God is all-powerful and all-good, then the fact that there is so much evil in the world provides evidence that tilts the odds decisively against God’s existence.

But arguing that something tilts the odds is not the same … Read the rest

To be fair to Terry Eagleton, he’s perfectly capable of being entirely lucid and even (dare I say it) sensible. I leafed through The Eagelton Reader earlier today to find a sample – and it was not difficult. From an essay called ‘Deconstruction and Human Rights’:

Equivocation and ambiguity are not always moral virtues; and there seems no doubt that such finespun obliquity on issues of central political importance has done much to disillusion those erstwhile enthusiasts for deconstruction who somewhat gullibly credited its promissory note to deliver some political goods.

There you go. Clear as a bell.

Update: I shortened the quoted passage, to omit a swipe at Derrida that I almost didn’t include to begin with, but ended … Read the rest

I’m not the only one who wasn’t impressed or convinced by that piece by Stuart Jeffries. Caspar Melville is another.

Stuart Jeffries piece on faith and unbelief is an example of a certain kind of liberal intellectual position which seeks to stand above the current debates about the place of religion in contemporary society…He quotes without challenge the preposterous assertion from Colin Slee, Dean of Southwark, that “atheists like Richard Dawkins are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube” (since when is writing books and making arguments comparable to mass murder?)…Jeffries is quite right to point out that these days secularists seem exasperated. But who can blame us when the case against unaccountable

In sharp contrast to Our Terry, here’s a nice thing – a former MP (Labour) for Reading East who is reading Why Truth Matters and thinks it’s worth reading.

If you go to the Butterflies and Wheels site, you will find a fascinating thread prompted by a piece by Nick Cohen in the Observer yesterday; the piece was largely about the jailed Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Suleiman, but also mentioned Chinese government attempts to police the internet – but as so often it is the comment thread which proves the more illuminating. It is a fact that hardly any bloggers posting in English have had anything to say about Kareem. It is a fact, for instance, that when I posted

Time to get out the trusty old grain of salt, and put it to good use. It’s to do with Terry Eagleton again.

In the preface to his latest book, The Meaning of Life, Terry Eagleton writes that his subject matter is fit only for the crazed and the comic, and hopes that he inclines more towards the latter. “I have tried to treat a high-minded topic as lightly and lucidly as possible,” he says. He has certainly managed the light bit…But comic? Or lucid? There are precious few gags on offer – unless you count passing references to Monty Python and Douglas Adams – and the prose is so dense in parts, you can re-read a passage several