God Talk

Stanley Fish offers a helpful summary of one of Terry Eagleton's latest on his NY Times Blog this week. Eagleton is a philosopher and critical theorist formerly based at the University of Manchester who has maintained a pointed and critical stance towards the rise in "school-yard" atheist figures such as Hitchins and Dawkins or as he refers to them, Ditchkins. Fish's opening paragraph gives the gist of what's going on in Eagleton's work:

Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty, scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance — science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed. “What other symbolic form,” he queries, “has managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women?”

I'll be teaching a course this Autumn on this kind of return of religion in academic discourse and the reasons why so many theorists are drawn to its themes and discourse as they grapple with today's social and political questions.

Did Darwin Kill God?

Conor Cunningham's BBC program "Did Darwin Kill God?" aired this week on BBC2. I was away at a conference near Utrecht in the Netherlands and did not get to see it debut on Tuesday night but just saw it on BBC's website here. Conor is co-director of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham and has been researching the philosophical and theological coherency of Darwin's ideas and the debates which have followed from them for some time now. I was therefore hoping this would be a great program. However, my expectations were far exceeded in this regard. It is one of the best comments on the problem with the contemporary evolution vs. creation debate I've ever seen. I genuinely hope it gains a wide viewership. In brief, he demonstrates on the one hand why literalist creationism is inconsistent with historic Christianity, but so too, on the other hand, why ultra Darwinism is inconsistent with Darwin's ideas and the basic tenets of science more generally. Conor clearly and straightforwardly explains why fundamentalists on both sides of the debate have contorted Christianity and Darwin's theory into an absurd and unnecessary war. In sum, irreligious philosophers and scientists just as much as religious people of a variety of traditions would greatly benefit from seeing this program. I highly recommend it.