Author: Ophelia Benson

Sometimes the jaw simply drops, the incredulous oath simply forces its way out past the teeth. This is one of those times – Terry Eagleton explaining the merits of a Catholic schooling to Laurie Taylor.

“I valued the way it taught me to think analytically, to not be afraid of analytic thought, however nonsensical some of the content surely was. There was an opportunity to argue.”

But how could he square that relatively sanguine memory with the requirement at Catholic schools to memorise and recite the absurd one-line strictures contained in the standard catechism?

“I agree that the catechism was a way of short-circuiting thought. But it wasn’t all there was. I also remember a religious teacher in the sixth form, a rational enlightened man, quoting from an awful textbook called The Fundamentals of Religion that we had to learn like a garage mechanic boning up on parts. He came to a passage which dismissed Buddhism in two sentences, looked up, and said, ‘That’s shoddy scholarship’. That phrase resounded in my ears. It wasn’t typical. But it did happen. It was possible.”

Jeezis. He’s (apparently) serious. Years and years of the catechism and everything that goes with it, countered by one teacher on one occasion uttering three words that point out an obvious absurdity. It wasn’t typical, but it did happen, therefore his Catholic schooling taught him to think analytically.

Except of course it didn’t, and neither did anything else, or if it did, he forgot it all again later. Judging by his current performance he’s crap at thinking analytically. As witnessed by this artless confession to Taylor, and by the whole interview, and by his horrible book, and by his horrible LRB review of Dawkins’s book. It’s not that there’s no fault to find with Dawkins’s book, it’s that Eagleton does such a bad job of finding it or saying it.

But hadn’t he as an intelligent sixth-former sometimes wanted to kick against the awful certainty of Catholic doctrine, its sheer unreadiness to entertain the idea that there might be something in other religions or ways of thought?

“Well, there is a bad side to certainty but there’s also a good side. People with my background don’t automatically thrill to the idea that we don’t know what we think about anything. I was taught by people at Cambridge who got an almost erotic frisson from the idea that they didn’t know what they thought and could afford not to know. Whereas I came from a background where it was thought that there were certain things you really had to get sorted out. There’s a difference between reasonable certainty and dogmatism.”

Is there ‘a good side’ to the awful certainty of Catholic doctrine? Eagleton seems to be saying, in his typically evasive, deniable (so much for ‘reasonable certainty’) way, that there is. Well there isn’t. Amen.

Comment is Free’s ‘Belief’ asks whether we should believe in belief and makes a highly debatable assertion on the way.

[S]ocieties do need myths, as indeed do individuals. Take away their organising beliefs about their purpose in the world and both individuals and societies disintegrate: the belief that societies can function without myths, or rather that they should and will in the enlightened future, is itself a myth, and not a very helpful one.

Organizing beliefs are one thing, and myths are another. It is perfectly possible to have organizing beliefs about one’s purpose in the world without believing in myths. It gets rather exasperating sometimes noticing how sloppy and casual and offhanded people can be about mixing up their terminology. Yes organizing beliefs are generally useful (depending on what they are, of course), but that doesn’t just translate straight into ‘societies and individuals need myths.’

This is the stupidest thing I’ve read since…well since the last eruption from the twins. There’s so much stupid in it that it’s hard to single it all out.

Saying that science has made religion redundant is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov, says Terry Eagleton in this gloriously rumbustious counter-blast to Dawkinsite atheism…paradoxes sparkle throughout this coruscatingly brilliant polemic…

Brilliant my ass. It’s tricksy, it’s decorated, but it’s not brilliant.

Eagleton is not anti-science or reason. He merely points out that science has produced Hiroshima as well as penicillin.

Because nobody would know that if he hadn’t merely pointed it out, and besides it’s stupid to say that ‘science’ produced Hiroshima.

Eagleton is stronger on reason than Ditchkins, for he thinks carefully about what his opponents say whereas Dawkins & Co prefer knockabout rhetoric to serious engagement with mainstream religious thought.

How would somebody who mindlessly follows Eagleton’s mindless lead in using ‘Ditchkins’ know what being strong on reason even looks like? And how can he claim without irony that Eagleton ‘thinks carefully about what his opponents say’ two words after he’s echoed that very Eagleton in calling two of those very opponents by a stupid schoolyardy nonce-name? Don’t ask me; I can’t begin to figure it out.

This is, then, a demolition job which is both logically devastating and a magnificently whirling philippic. Ditchkins, he says, makes the error of conflating reason and rationality. Yet much of what seems reasonable in real life turns out not to be true. And much that is true, like quantum physics, seems rationally impossible.

My foot my tutor, as Prospero said. Contrary to what Paul Vallely clearly thinks, neither Dawkins nor Hitchens is actually stupider than Terry Eagleton. Neither of them needs Eagleton to explain quantum physics. Neither of them needs him to explain that much of what seems reasonable in real life turns out not to be true. Eagleton is a conceited teacher of English who got way too much undergraduate adulation early in life and let it go to his head. He is not a polymath or a universal genius or a towering intellect. Dawkins and Hitchens aren’t necessarily right about everything (I hope it’s needless to say) but that doesn’t mean Eagleton is the guy to set them straight. Paul Vallely isn’t even the guy to comment on anybody setting them straight.

There’s more, but it’s too sick-making. I’m outta here.

Daniel Dennett gives the believers just the tiniest of prods.

Today one of the most insistent forces arrayed in opposition to us vocal atheists is the “I’m an atheist but” crowd, who publicly deplore our “hostility”, our “rudeness” (which is actually just candour), while privately admitting that we’re right. They don’t themselves believe in God, but they certainly do believe in belief in God.

Yes, but that is because belief in God is a very peculiar and special kind of belief that goes all spiky and painful if outsiders explain why they don’t share it. It doesn’t work the other way, of course – non-believers don’t double up in pain if believers explain why they don’t share the non-belief. They get bored, they roll their eyes, they wish they were somewhere else with a bowl of ice cream, but they don’t break or fall apart or need hospitalization. That’s why vocal atheists are called hard names even by other atheists, while believers are wrapped in three layers of cotton wool and kept at an even temperature.