Some Goblins Are Gay (Terry Eagleton)

   Terry Eagleton thinks the New Atheism is botched and wrong. Terry Eagleton is a literature critic and theorist who connects Catholicism and Marxism (he gave a lecture called “Marxism as a Theodicy”), and wrote books like How to Read a Poem, The Illusions of Postmodernism, and The Meaning of Life in the “Very Short Introduction” series. I hadn’t heard of him before I stumbled upon his Gifford Lecture, “The God Debate.” My response? First, the audience wasn’t really having it—they didn’t laugh at almost any of his jokes, some of which were really good—and weren’t agreeing with him, based on the question and answer session. They do have some good points which I will address later.

PS: In what he admits is an irreverent move, he lumps Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in the name ‘Ditchkins’.

*Exceprts From Lecture*

Yeti flitting through the forest

   In order to reject religious faith, an atheist must first grasp something of what it entails, what he or she is rejecting. It’s deeply doubtful that Ditchkins has any such grasp at all and therefore logically questionable whether he can be called an atheist in the first place. More or less, every single current champion of the anti-religious case subscribes to what I’ve called the ‘Yeti’ view of faith. They imagine that the question, ‘do you believe in God?’ is rather like the question, ‘do you believe in the yeti?’ or ‘do you believe in the loch ness monster, or alien abductions?’ Belief in God, of course, has precious little to do with the proposition that there exists somewhere a supreme being. The grammar of ‘I believe in God’ is only superficially akin to the grammar of ‘I believe in big foot’ or ‘I believe at least some goblins are gay.’
   Ditchkins is just as theologically illiterate about the doctrine of creation. He seems to imagine that is has something to do with how the world got off the ground. I don’t know why he thinks that, that the Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation has something to do with how the world originated. He thinks that science can offer a vastly more plausible explanation of that than can the Book of Genesis, but the doctrine of creation is not, of course, about this at all. The New Testament, for example, has almost nothing to say about God as celestial manufacturer. Theologians are not in competition with astrophysics any more than sculptors are at war with stockbrokers. The greatest theologian who ever wrote, Thomas Aquinas, thought it was quite possible that the universe had no origin at all. Yet he believed devoutly in the doctrine of creation.

Creation concerns not, of course, the origin of the world, which is a matter for science, but the curious fact that it’s there in the first place, and its radical dependency, dependent for its very freedom and autonomy, in a striking paradox, on a god who brought it about just for the fun of it. Or, to use a more theological term, just for the hell of it. The doctrine of creation thus means that precisely there isn’t an explanation for the world, that God created it out of his own eternal gratuitous self-delight, conjuring it up simply for the hell of it, out of the unfathomable abyss of his love, and thus acting a lot more like an artist than a manufacturer. The world is the original a gratuis, a question of grace and gift, which, like God himself (this surely is the doctrine of creation), has no ground or purpose or end or raison d’ être, other than those it bears within itself. The cosmos is a gloriously pointless work of art, not an instrumental or utilitarian product, and the doctrine of creation is trying to get at this remarkable fact. Ditchkens, by contrast, seems to imagine that Christian faith is meant to be an explanation of the world, which is rather like supposing that Moby Dick is meant to be a report on the whaling industry. It’s doubtful, then, whether one can even award the title of atheist to such a botched understanding of what it is one is rejecting, any more than one would describe Brad Pitt as an anti-philosopher. To be an anti-philosopher, like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Adorno, Freud, Wittgenstein, or Derrida, you have to reject the orthodox philosophical project of your time for philosophically interesting reasons, a category into which Mr. Pitt fails to fall.


*Excerpts From Question and Answer*

Q: Do you actually have any evidence for the existence of God? Because it seems to me that you can talk about how nice you think the emperors clothes are and how fancy they are, but it doesn’t really matter if the emperor isn’t actually wearing any clothes at all. And in fact, I’m not sure who your talk is aimed at. Because you’re not going to convince any atheists, because you haven’t provided any evidence for the existence of God, and you’re not going to convince any religious people, because you’ve basically told them that what they believe is not actually what Christianity is. So I’m not entirely sure where your lecture is aimed.

A: You have to be careful to phrase that question, about have you any evidence for the existence of God, in a non-yeti way, as in, has he been spotted flitting through the forest. There are, of course, non-yeti ways of posing that question, I’m not saying there are not. My objection to card-carrying rationalists like Ditchkins is that they don’t seem able to pose it in any other way than the yeti-ish way. Thomas Aquinas, a whole tradition of mainstream theology, talks about natural theology, about reasoning about God, but that’s not of course where Ditchkins starts from. The difference between a rationalist and a believer doesn’t seem to me that one believes that something exists and the other doesn’t. Now, there is extreme difficulty in shifting the argument on from here. Both sides—full-blooded rationalists, and most believers, are absolutely insistent that belief in God is something like belief in Big Foot. And until we can move it away, I don’t think we’ll make any progress.
    I have tried to take certain literary analogies to this, like Moby Dick—but the danger with that is that it sounds as though one is saying belief is just a comforting set of fictions. And I don’t want to say that. I think Christians have to say that if it’s not a fact in some sense—say, the resurrection: if it’s not in some sense of the word a fact, then their faith is in vain. But, at the same time, they would want to say that it wasn’t something you could photograph. The relations between myth, fiction, poetry, history, and fact, in a document like the Old or New Testament are, of course, exceedingly complex, and I know very little about them. I leave it to the scholars. But I’m sure in my own mind that if faith is just a sort of poetic fiction, it’s pretty worthless. I’m also sure that you can’t understand what it means if you see it in a sort of white-coated laboratory way that Dawkins seems to.
    Kierkegaard once said that what you have to understand is that the believer is somebody who is in love. Now this doesn’t solve the question by any means. But it shifts the terrain in a certain way. Can you give reasons for why you love somebody? Of course you can. If you can’t, the word ‘love’ is a mere empty sound. You have to be able to give reasons. You have to be able to spell out in public, rational , contestable discourse what you love about Mr. O’Shea, or whoever it happens to be. Is your love reducible to reasons? No. As Wittgenstein said, reasons have to end somewhere. And one way that you can concede that love isn’t reducible to reasons is that someone can accept all the reasons you give why you love a person but not love that person himself.

*Some Youtube Comments*

1. I agree that atheists tend to take "believe in X" as "think X exists" in debates when theists mean it differently, but that's just a technicality… he never addresses Dawkins's or Hitchens's main points. He needs to demonstrate that a deity exists before going on about other tribbles.

    My Response: it’s not just a technicality—they mean different things, according to Eagleton. I believe in love but I don’t think love exists like a stone or a tree or a human being exists. Love is an experience and has dynamics—God and faith are experiences that have dynamics. I think it would be a fruitful to ask, “What proof is there that God doesn’t exist?” and then go from there, instead of the other way around. Why assume something doesn’t exist if it isn’t harmful? God isn’t harmful—misunderstanding and abusing of what you call God’s word is harmful. Now, if a doctrine via a text indeed says, implicitly or explicitly, “kill others who do not believe in the same things you do,” this needs to be addressed. Doctrines do indeed say this.

2. Im sorry to burst your bubble....but there is no evidence for the existence of GOD. It doesn't matter how many times you repeat yourself, claim revelation and cite the billions of believers 'who can't all be wrong'. Your still talking a load of bollocks and deluding yourself your going to survive death, be reunited with your friends, loved ones and pets.
    I'm convinced many people cannot accept reality. Hence the creation of GOD and all the silly rules and rituals that go with it.

    My Response: Christianity does not say that you are going to be reunited with your friend, loved ones, and pets. That’s a Hallmark myth. Also, this is the Yeti view of God.

3. Perhaps no one laughed at his jokes because they were too easy and obvious and therefore not funny. I can't comment on the points he was trying to make because I'm not smart enough to understand them. It seems to me that Dawkins and Hitchens are more accessible for laymen because most people who read them can relate to what they are saying. Eagleton appeals mainly to very educated elites who hold views that are generally unrecognizable to the layman.

    My Response: This is a reasonable view I tend to agree with. Eagleton is working in subtleties, often removed—as in, who cares if a certain school of thought has misconstrued an idea? For most people, if the school of thought (New Atheism/atheism) seems correct and in line with their experience, it’s attractive. Eagleton is talking to scholarly people, those who get that it might be more complicated than ‘There’s a man in the sky.’ Maybe he should’ve started with that notion, or more basic notions, to get his point across. Either way, I think he’s right about Ditchkin’s faulty view of Christianity.


The lecture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCqHnwIR1PY