"God Talk" Fish on Eagleton on Dawkins and Hitchens

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.