In his Opinion post for the New York Times, Stanely Fish reviews Terry Eagleton’s latest book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution. In the book, Eagleton, one of the last great Marxist literary and social critics, argues that the Enlightenment view of science, liberalism, and capitalism offer the promise of human progress; however, history has demonstrated that each of these ideologies has failed to bring such progress about, and furthermore, they are not capable of doing so. Therefore, for Eagleton, they are each a superstition, a faith, just like religious faith. The difference is that religious can offer us answers to some of life’s deep questions, “why do we exist instead of not existing?” “How is it that we can intelligibly understand reality?” Etc…
While I don’t agree with all of Eagleton’s assumptions about the authority of Scripture and religion, he does offer an important and persuasive critique of the new Athiest’s arguments concerning science and faith.
Alan Noble (Co-Founder/Editor) is a graduate student at Baylor University pursuing his Ph.D. in Contemporary American Literature. To feed himself and his wife, he teaches Freshman Composition at the university. In 2006, he graduated from Cal. State Bakersfield with a Master’s degree in English. In addition to studying, teaching, and writing, Alan enjoys watching college basketball (Go Bears!) and NBA games with his wife and daughter, and loves Star Wars. While not particularly good at making art of any kind, Alan has an intense interest in the arts and culture and how believers ought to interact with them to the glory of God and edification of others. Alan lives in Waco, Texas with his Math-loving wife, owl-loving daughter, and their no-longer-able-to-skateboard-because-of-an-injury English Bulldog, Gertrude.
Email: noble.noneuclidean [at] gmail [dot] com
Eagleton is one of those Marxists in denial about capitalism; it’s not by any means perfect, but to assert that capitalism has not brought about any progress (not mentioning science and liberalism) is plain wrongheaded and completely ignorant of the reality on the ground.
Yet another critic of “capitalism/western democracy/liberalism” who offers no viable superior model.
This is part of his and those pathetic Chomskyite types argument which ends with them talking of Al Qaeda as if it is a kind of liberation theology. Nonsense. Buy Hitchens, if for nothing else than that he is a far superior writer to Eagleton.