"C. G. Estabrook" wrote:
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> A review of Dawkins' God Delusion from Terry Eagleton, the pomo critic, recently profiled in the Chron. of H. Ed.:
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> http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=ts8bjvbfmvw83l7phns801j06js08yl3
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> ===
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> Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching
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> Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.
I haven't had time to follow this thread far since my return from Amherst, but a quick note here. Eagleton switches between "theology" and "religious faith" in this quoted passage. I have no doubt Dawkins is pretty innocent of both, but they do, I think, raise different issues. Faith is something one undoubtedly must experience to say much about it, and since I have never experienced it, I wouldn't think of commenting on it very extensively (if at all). But theology is, at least in part, subject to understanding from the non-believer, and in conjunction with literary studies I have in the past given considerable attention to several different traditions in theology. At least prior to Kant, most theologians seem to have claimed that their arguments could/should make sense to the non-believer -- in fact, should convince the non-believer.
And as C.G.E. pointed out sometime in the last year, serious consideration of theological argument does presuppose that the question of why there is something other than nothing should be accepted as a question requiring answer. And that question does _not_ strike me as a real question. That, perhaps, is the reason that Maritain's Degrees of Knowledge intrigued me up to the point at which he claimed to demonstrate the existence of God, at which point it cotinued to have interest, but only as an exhibit of a foreign culture! Why was I reading Maritain? Reading Pound requires reading Dante. Reading Dante requires having some decent appreciation of Thomistic thought. This does not mean, of course, that Dante is interesting only as a glosson Pound. Canto II of Heaven, for example, is endlessly fascinating in and of itself.
Carrol