"Makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann"

The Professor sent me this link to Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion in the London Review of Books. Apparently another savaging for Dawkins.

Yet Eagleton has some slippery arguments of his own up his sleeve: "It would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing," which reminds me of "to be or not to be, that is the answer, not the question"!

He setting up something of a straw man himself in this review − Richard Dawkins, the provincial philistine who thinks all faith is blind faith. I rather think Dawkins knows that many religious people consider themselves persuaded of the existence of God, but that they are sadly a minority. The reasonableness of some people's spirituality cannot begin to excuse the wider tendency throughout history to often violent unreasonableness.

I think it is also deeply disingenuous of Eagelton to insist that militant Islamism is a purely political phenomenon, and not a religious one at all.

And whilst Darwinian Natural Selection may not be able to explain how we first got on the simple to complex ladder, how nothing became something, it is not fair to say, I think, that Science as a whole has nada to contribute to answering this question, and can therefore leave this little niche for the religious to hold onto.