Notes from Evil Bender

Via Crooked Timber, I find that Stanley Fish is eager to use Terry Eagleton to bash atheists.* The piece relies almost entirely on misrepresentations of mainstream atheist opinion, and a conception of faith and Christianity that would does not represent religion or Christianity as adhered to by most practitioners. In other words, the essay commits the usual theologists’ sins of attacking strawmen and proposing a convoluted understanding of faith resembling the “no true Scotsman” fallacy.

PZ’s already promised to have more to say about the piece, so I’ll limit my usual rant to a fairly reasonable size. A few observations will suffice to illustrate the problem. Fish writes,

By theological questions, Eagleton means questions like, “Why is there anything in the first place?”, “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?” and “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?”

Ugh. The first question may not end up being answerable by science, but we’re learning more about the early state of the Universe all the time. Science may find that it cannot demonstrate anything about what, if anything, predated the big bang, but Fish/Eagleton beg the question by assuming it cannot. This is a god of the gaps fallacy, of course, and doesn’t become anyone wishing to be taken seriously as a defender of faith.

The second question is phrased oddly, but if it means, as I take it to, “why are we able to understand and value those things that surround us” it is, to put it kindly, odd indeed to say theology answers the question and science does not. Evolutionary theory suggests a clear answer to the question: these things are intelligible to use because we have evoloved in such a way that allows them to be so. It isn’t difficult to see that creatures which cannot interact effectively with their environment are selected against. Human evolution has caused us to be less strong and agile than many creatures, and to have longer periods of regularly helpless childhoods, and in exchange we have big brains that allow us to understand a lot about the world around us, to make tools and solve abstract problems.

The same basic reasoning is true for the third problems: we see the universe as orderly and understandable because a) experience has shown that the universe follows basic laws and that we can predict the effect of those laws and b) because our brains have evolved to seek and understand patterns, even when that ability works to our detriment.

So Fish’s examples of questions only answerable through theology are in two cases clearly answered by science, and even if you wish to assume that the origin of the universe, unlike all of the other now-defunct god of the gaps arguments, will never be understood by science, that still leaves the question of how can something that replaces reason and evidence with “faith” possibly hope to provide true (as opposed to emotionally satisfying) reasons for anything.

That religion is really about experience and not truth seems to be something Fish is on the verge of admitting:

When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the telescope and the microscope” religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important,” Eagleton replies, “But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”

Eagleton is on the verge, it seems, of arguing that religion, properly understood, is a way of relating to the world, like art and music, rather than a system that makes truth claims (“explanations”) about reality. I have zero problem with the religions of those who understand their faith in such a way, but Fish doesn’t seem to understand that most religious people believe their faith does offer explanations. How else is one to explain that nearly half the American population areyoung earth creationists. They clearly don’t think that religion offers no explanations. Neither does Fish, it would seem, who doesn’t bother to explain how theology can answer important questions but not provide explanations. He does not appear to be using either terms in the way they are commonly understood.

Yong earth creationists and mainstream religious people could be wrong, of course, and Fish right, but how could one determine such things? They are, after all, a matter of faith, by their very definition. Yet I could still forgive Fish his conception of religion which is so out of step with most religion, were it not for his hugely uncharitable understanding of the atheist’s position:

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