Terry Eagleton - The God Debate

so good evening am I a principal of the University and I've got tremendous pleasure in welcoming you all to Terry Eagleton's gifford lecture entitled the god debate professor Eagleton is a literary theorist widely regarded as one of the most influential contemporary literary critics and theorists in the english-speaking world a man of many parts The Guardian in a profile in 2002 described professor Eagleton as a Catholic of Irish descent in Protestant England a working-class boy whose professional life was spent at the heart of a ruling class institution a Marxist revolutionary who was not only tolerated but rewarded by the liberal establishment he obtained both his BA in it and both his MA and PhD from Trinity College Cambridge and while there was a student of the literary critic Raymond Williams he is a former Thomas Morton professor at Oxford University he also previously held a chair of John the chair the John Edward Taylor chair of English literature at Manchester and delivered Yale University's important Terry lectures professor Eagleton is a fellow of the British Academy an honorary fellow of Jesus College Cambridge and the author of some 50 books of literary cultural and political criticism recent books include titles such as how to read a poem the meaning of life and trouble with strangers a study of ethics the lecture this evening will be recorded it will be available online on the university's Giffard website I've great pleasure in handing you over to Professor Eagleton [Applause] source delightful to be back in Edinburgh not least to be invited to give this prestigious lecture which I'm very honored to be advised to do and I'm particularly grateful to Lynne hyams for all her scrupulous and efficient work in getting me here why are the most unlikely people including me suddenly talking about God I mean why is it that the Almighty just as like some aging celebrity just look just as he was looking set for a you know a well-deserved retirement from the public stage and no doubt having surveyed the catastrophic history he created bitterly regretting that he'd ever created the slightest particle of matter not least Britney Spears why is it that just at this supposedly post metaphysical post theological point in the evolution of Western society he's been whisked abruptly back into the limelight besieged by paparazzi jostled by professors and so on why have the book stock shops suddenly started to sprout sections labeled atheism if why is it that Richard Dawkins and myself have been asked to contribute front page articles on the so-called God debates - what no not the church times not even the Guardian but the Wall Street Journal circulation 20 million I've informed the editor I'll be delighted to do this as long as my last sentence can be the Wall Street Journal would never have given Jesus a column why is the world suddenly thronged with atheists who are as obsessed with religion as Puritans are with sex this is getting to be true I mean Lee being obsessed with religion thing even even in England where religion is in general a rather moderate discrete slightly shamefaced affair and you know where people are likely to believe that when religion starts interfering with your everyday life and it's time to give it up in that sense it resembles alcohol and I suppose one can't imagine the Queen's chaplain inquiring whether one's been washed in the blood of the Lamb the English take things much more moderately than that much more temperately if they ever get round to driving on the right they will do so gradually though one must I think linger a little over the word atheist there in order to reject religious faith an atheist I suppose must first grasp something of what it entails what he or she is rejecting rather as one can't argue about the value of synecdoche if one believes it's a small town in upper New York State it's deeply doubtful however it seems to me anyway that Dickens as I've ever entry' taken the liberty of dubbing Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have any such grasp at all and therefore logically questionable I think whether they could be called atheists in the first place more or less to a man and a woman every single current champion of the anti-religious case subscribes to what I've called in a remarkably cheap and extraordinary attractive book called recent faith and revolution on sale outside the door what I've called the Yeti view of faith they imagine that the question do you believe in God is rather like the question do you believe in the Yeti or the Loch Ness monster or alien abductions speaking of those incidentally I should mention that my wife and two of my five children who are Americans belonged to that much hounded and reviled and persecuted group minority of their fellow countrymen those who haven't been abducted by aliens extraordinary hearts survive these days in that persecutory climate belief in God of course has precious little to do with subscribing to the proposition that there exists somewhere a Supreme Being as I hope any Tenderfoot theology student might advise Dickens the grammar of I believe in God is only superficially akin to I believe in Bigfoot or I believe least some goblins are gay the Devils are said to believe in God's existence but they don't of course believe in him Abraham had faith in God but he lived in the culture which could scarcely have imagined that he didn't exist for the so-called New Testament faith is the kind of commitment I suppose manifested by a tortured criminal at the end of his tether tether a political criminal at that foundering in attrocious pain and a sense of utter abandonment who nevertheless mysteriously perhaps mysteriously to himself remains faithful to the power of a transformative love the stark signifier of faith surely for Christianity is the mutilated and tortured body of one who was homeless and property lists denounced the rich and powerful was remarkably laid-back about sex appeared deeply hostile to the family held that the losers and deadbeats would inherit the earth spoke up for love and justice and was done to death by the state for his pains it's no wonder perhaps in the light of all this that the figure of Jesus isn't exactly persona in Richard Dawkins is North Oxford or in the more fashionable Washington bars when Richard Dawkins announced excitedly recently on a television program that evolution he said had proved that our ancestors were winners his statement was far more on Christian in my view than his reflection on the origins of the universe no one who like Dawkins can write with breathtaking smugness losing complacency at every turn of phrase that I quote most people in the 20th century are morally way ahead of our counterparts in the Middle Ages or in the time of Abraham or even in the 1920s nobody who can penned that of third phrase could possibly have the depth of tragic unflinching moral realism that Christian faith appears to demand for the good professor who would seem everyone is just getting nicer and nicer one appreciates by contrast with that just how disruptive lis radical the doctrine of original sin is or can be Dawkins just doesn't believe that things are all that bad and no doubt in North Oxford they're not this is also why he doesn't believe in the need for radical political change his self-satisfied enlightenment doctrine of progress I mean progress with a very thumping Herbert Spencer like capital P not just the kind of progress we all believe in right is in this sense an T progressive Christopher Hitchens is equally ensnared in this primitive credulous superstition of progress with a very large capital letter writing as he does that I quote we can look forward to the evolution of our poor brains and - stupendous advances in medicine and life extensions but often you find Hitchens speaking like Michael Jackson whose hope that he would live forever proved as we know to have been you know a touch unrealistic eternal life surely is a matter of embracing your mortality not by passing it Dickens is just as theologically illiterate about the doctrine of creation about which he's rather perhaps too concerned he seems to imagine that it has something to do with how the world got off the ground and the why he thinks that that the Christian doctrine of creation or the judeo-christian doctrine has something to do with how the world originated and he thinks that science not understandably he thinks that science can offer a vastly more plausible explanation of that than can the book of Genesis but the doctrine of creation is not of course about this at all the New Testament for example has almost nothing to say about God as celestial manufacturer solutions are not in competition with asterisk this anymore those sculptors are at war with stockbrokers the greatest theologian who ever wrote some Thomas Aquinas thought it was quite possible that the universe had no origin at all yet he believed devoutly in the doctrine of creation Aquinas thought that when it came to such matters as how the universe popped into existence one had quite properly to be an atheist believe the question to science creation concerns not of course the origin of the world which is a matter for science but the curious fact that it's there in the first place and it's radical dependency dependent for its very freedom and autonomy in a striking paradox on a God who brought it about just for the fun of it or to use a more theological term just for the hell of it the doctrine of creation thus thus means there precisely isn't an explanation for the world that God created it out of his own eternal gratuitous self delight conjuring it up simply for the hell of it out of the unfathomable abyss of his love and thus acting a lot more like an artist than a manufacturer the world is the original at grata we a question of grace and gift which like God himself this surely is the doctrine of creation has no ground or purpose or end or S on deathcore other than those it bears within itself the cosmos is a gloriously pointless work of art not an instrumental or utilitarian product and the doctrine of creation I think is trying to get at this remarkable fact ditch khun's by contrast seems to imagine that Christian faith is meant to be an explanation of the world which is rather like supposing that Moby Dick is meant to be a report on the whaling industry it's doubtful then in my view whether one can even award the title of atheist to such a botched understanding of what it is one is rejecting any more than one would say describe Brad Pitt as an anti philosopher and me to be an anti philosopher like k2 guard Nietzsche Adorno Freud Wittgenstein Delhi da you have to reject the orthodox political the philosophical project of your time for physically interesting reasons a category into which I think mr. Pitt fails to fall even so were left with the question of why God has staged his abrupt and dramatic reentry onto the pursuit of the public stage right now why at this studio confidently as it were post metaphysical point does that happen and I think that one might do worse than answer in two words or other pain in two numbers 911 I mean of course the second 911 not the first I mean the more recent 9/11 I'm not talking about you know the 11th of September 1971 exactly 30 years before the destruction of the World Trade Center when the United States violently overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende of Chile and installed in its place an odious puppet dictatorship that went on to murder far more people than disappeared and were killed in the World Trade Center the emergence of God talk again in our time has in my view much to do with the destruction of that building even though some of it as with say Richard Dawkins certainly predates that but it's intensified it's quickened after that date and I want just to ask why it's only really since then the writers like Christopher Hitchens have begun to ramble on dyspeptic Lee about the virgin birth in Vanity Fair I should perhaps adhere on a personal note that many years ago Chris Hitchens as he then was he was a lowly Chris in these days and not a Christopher he and I were comrades and activists together with a far left organization in Oxford but he has matured I was grown up I was about to say sobered up but that might be stretching it a bit far settled in Washington made his peace with the Pentagon and discarded his infantile leftist delusions whereas I've remained as you see stuck in the same old groove unable to accept that things have changed clinging to my outmoded beliefs like a toddler to its blanket even so Hitchens tells us rather wistfully in his book God is not great but he feels no less radical than he did then a view share of him shared by about as many people as believed that Kate Winslet is the Antichrist very solemn audience the fall of the World Trade Center happened not long after some leading Western ideologues in the wake of the end of the Cold War had declared that history itself history of the large H was now at an end the end of history debate in the sense that the various grand narratives which had characterized modernity progress reason science enlightenment classical liberalism Marxism and the like were now definitively over what remained was a pragmatic post ideological distinctively post metaphysical form of late capitalism which was now the only game in town hence the phrase the end of history but the intellectual triumphalism which could promulgate this doctrine reflected an actual political triumphalism in the world not least in the West's heavy-handed and self-interested dealings with the so sometimes rather laughingly call I think underdeveloped world and that resulted with a consummate irony in the unleashing of a new grand narrative just as you thought you've closed one down that of radical Islam the very act of trying to close down history succeeded merely in pricing it open again and that wasn't the first time that that had happened Hegel for example who would disarming modesty thought that history had reached its final consummation inside his own head simply managed by this argument to open it up once again through provoking the response of you know regard marx nietzsche the door no there is others closing down history is an act within history which simply succeeds in piling more on the result however was that the West now found itself eyeball to eyeball with a full-blooded metaphysical opponent for whom absolute truths and rock solid foundations pose no problem at all would that they did at just the point where it was itself in danger of lapsing into a holy melange of moral relativism political pragmatism ontological anti foundationalism and philosophical skepticism a mixture which whatever else one might say about it has the disability of being gravely ideologically disarming not least at a time of acute political crisis Islamism so-called is forcing the West to confront some very good questions indeed at exactly the time when in laid-back postmodern late capitalist style post metaphysical capitalist style it's at least morally and intellectually equipped to do so when it has as it were engaged in an act of unilateral spiritual disarmament there are plenty of good reasons for opposing radical Islam not least its habitat lowing innocent civilians to bits there are many excellent reasons for detesting small clandestine groups who plot to maim and murder innocent men and women though some people admittedly think the CIA are doing quite a good job one of the more subtle reasons for being slammed for being alarmed by Islamism father is that it lays bare not I think deliberately not wittingly just by its existence lays bare the contradiction between the West's urgent need to believe and it's chronic incapacity to do so and this is a grave political as well as psychological problem capitalist civilizations can't help being adverse averse to what one might dub deep belief at least in their more advanced more technocratic stages market societies are inherently secular relativist and materialistic whatever they're civilians or their leaders might I minded lepra claim to legitimate their operations however they stand in need of values and principles rather more edifying and eternal than this which is one reason why they cling to religion even though they increasingly don't believe in it except in the pathologically godly United States it's true that this then has the embarrassing effect of exposing the rift between what they claim to believe in church or around the family fireside or in political assemblies and so on and the actual beliefs embedded in their profane everyday marketplace behavior when it comes to belief one of course always has to look at what people do the beliefs in Carnation implicit in their behavior not at what they say it's what one might call what the linguists might call the performative contradiction which we want such societies say and what they what they do and how they described themselves what they do what sort of saying is implicit in their doing it's this contradiction between the rhetoric and the which is so hard to handle and being confronted with a political force for whom that isn't really a problem whatever other problems it may sit maybe afflicted by is I think part of this story nowhere is this contradiction more glaringly obvious stand in the united states which is perhaps the most materialistic nation on earth but also one of the most deeply metaphysical loudly metaphysical the land of the free is awash with pious hand on heart earnestly Victorian talk about God family nation freedom and the like in a rhetorical mode that can only cause a jaded European to stare at his shoes and wait till it stops the more secularized rationalized pragmatic and technocratic you become in other words the more you will need to appeal to such heady and traditional forms of self legitimation but the more by the same token you will tend to discredit them not by what you say but by what you do by your actual profane everyday aver you will undermine your own rhetoric and then probably you will need some sort of discourse to move in to smooth over that contradiction a solution of kinds to this problem with this contradiction which is deep-seated in our kind of civilization was provided by nature long time ago who more or less said if put it in Marxist terms if the super structure and the base don't go together if what you do and what you say you do the way you explain that yourself are grotesquely it alls not least as fewer and fewer people believe religious rush nails then Nietzsche says cavalierly throw away the superstructure you don't need it you think you do you think you still need theological and metaphysical rationales for what you do but actually you don't and if you through the ways you have the courage like the infant with its blanket to throw those aside don't you see you would realize that they were nothing and you were finally free just conjure up your values from that relative perspective of eternal flux which is the will to power just let your values as it were reflect what you do that's alright in the sort of you know a seminar in Tuebingen or somewhere but it's hard to do that when you're actually running the country not least because if you do conjure up your values from what you actually do you're in danger of ending up with all the worst values your ideology needs to legitimate your behavior give it some kind of more or less convincing rationale and not just to reflect it the world one might say is currently divided between those who believe far too much and those who believe far too little I like to think I stand in the middle there somewhere late capitalist cultures are not given to an excessive belief for at least two reasons one thing liberal democracies don't so much held beliefs as believe that people should be allowed to hold beliefs they display a certain creative indifference to what their citizens actually believe as long as they're allowed to get on with believing it and as long as they don't entertain or act upon beliefs which would prevent other people from getting on with believing whatever they believe such social orders then are agonistic by their very nature I saw a agnostic they're also agonistic I misread the word they're in fraud instead but they're also agonistic gnostic for the mode and this agnosticism however intellectually or morally laudable letting people get on with what they believe is politically perilous because the fact in this situation is that people's beliefs are bound to collide with each other to the point where any fundamental consensus necessary for political power becomes well nigh unsuitable another reason why that consensus becomes very difficult to achieve in late societies though this is another story is so-called multiculturalism if the dominant power will be interpreted in different ways by different communities that poses a problem for deep-seated political consensus anyway it's a characteristic surely of modernity and particularly of late modernity that that consensus is increasingly hard to come by in a way that would no doubt have struck many an ancient or many you will thinker as exceedingly strange almost everybody agrees that roasting babies over fires is not the most civilized way to behave but we can't agree on why we agree on that and we probably never will the price of freedom is potentially tragic conflict as well as a certain perilous vulnerability in the face of a robustly absolutist or illiberal or foundationalist enemy for another thing capitalism is not just it's just not the kind of life form that demands too much from its citizens by way of belief as long as they roll out of bed pay their taxes refrain from assaulting police officers they can believe more or less what they want it's not belief that keeps the system ticking over as its belief that keeps the Lutheran Church or the Flat Earth Society ticking over the system once again is thus bound to look particularly feeble and fragile when confronted with a stoutly absolutist foe post-modernism in particular commits the grave error I think of regarding all passionate conviction as it's so facto dogmatic its skeptical not just of this or that faith but in a sense of faith as such it tries to get by on as little of the staff as it decently can like a recovering cocaine addict for this friend of thought all certainty is latent ly authoritarian this is perhaps one reason why the postmodern young insert the word like into their speech every a couple of seconds to avoid the impression that they're being certain about something and thus in their own view distastefully a tourist authoritarian it's a kind of ritual hesitation and so a sort of authenticity in an age when you can't be sure of anything and where it seems overweening to imagine or to convey that you can by not putting the word like between the other words yet I think there's more to the general situation than that because I think the deepest irony is that liberal secularism of the kind I've been describing actually helps of course to breed fundamentalism these sworn antagonists are secretly sides of the same coin whether we're talking about fundamentalism which is Texan or Taliban fundamentalism like most forms of virulent aggression has its roots not in hatred though it may go on to hate but in fear and anxiety and insecurity it's the visceral creed of those who feel they've been left behind by modern society who've been driven into spiritual fanaticism of one species or another by a shallow purely technical technical rationality which leaves all the deeper spiritual issues disdainfully to one side and in doing so leaves them open to be monopolized by the rednecks and the bigots the other side of a 2-dimensional reality rationality is a faith-based politics so it's then not at all surprising I think that old-fashioned Victorian rationalists like Dawkins and Hitchens can only think of faith as anti rational there thus guilty or feederism or they would be if they were believers if you see what I mean blind faith and for Dickens astonishingly all faith is blind blind faith and a purely instrumental rationality purged and cleansed a value or faith of any kind supposedly go together like Laurel and Hardy opposites though of course they may be no is the secret complicity between too much belief and too little between liberal secularism and fundamentalism merely an intellectual affair would that it were radical Islam is among other things a product of Western liberal capitalist civilization it was the mid 20th century Western onslaught on secular liberal leftist and revolutionary nationalist forms of Islam in the Muslim world which created the vacuum into which Islamism was then able to move it was the West which was complicit in the murder of some half a million secular and leftist Muslims in Indonesia that Elstad liberal and secular estera bleeders in the Middle East for its own imperial ends and which deliberately nurtured radical Islam in Soviet occupied Afghanistan in all of these respects the chickens are well and truly coming home to roost now it seems to me extraordinary that faced with this kind of Muslim militants a thinkers like Dawkins Hitchens Ian McEwan JC grayling and others should reach for the very sorts of grand narratives that advanced capitalist societies have supposedly discredited these foundational stories of science reason progress humanism enlightenment the rationalist critique of religion the victory of civilization over barbarism and the like and let me emphasize that all of these imposing abstractions have in my view some precious kernel of truth these fables actually belong to an earlier more buoyant and self-assured period in the history of the modern bourgeoisie when the middle classes were still on the make and still fueling various progressive and still had the world at their feet they spun such narratives out of that sense of buoyancy and hegemony and self-assurance speaking of the rising middle classes by the way if you open any history textbook at any period whatsoever it will all say three things it will say first of all it was a period of rapid change secondly it was essentially a transitional era and thirdly the middle classes went on rising that's what the middle class why God taught the middle classes on earth you'd like bread or the Sun here they just go on rising in Congress Lee either these very assured Universalist tall tales are now being revived by some anxious ideologues besieged liberal literati in particular in our own much more anxious skeptical unstable late bourgeois epoch and my argument has been that this is among other things an intellectually disreputable and indeed rather panic-stricken and I think culturally supremacist reaction to Islamist insurgency there's a need to fight that insurgency but this ain't the way to do it it's a misplaced reaction in other ways to since all the evidence suggests that Islamist militancy is scarcely motivated by religious faith at all in fact his advocates it's activists probably know about as much about the Koran as Lady Gaga does about the Book of Leviticus by and large radical Islam is politically and not religiously motivated as was of course the case with the devoutly Catholic myarray nothing to do with religion it's not out of the question my view and I said as much in New York that were it not for that squalid concentration camp known as the Gaza Strip the World Trade Center might well still be standing which is not of course to explain the turret to excuse that atrocity merely to help understand it what I'm suggesting then is that much of the so-called New Atheism though not all of it by any means belongs to the intellectual wing of the so-called war on terror the western wing with that scandalously it's those liberal literati who were supposedly guardians of the very flame of tolerance and mutual understanding and diversity Rushdie Amos McEwan Hitchens and their ilk who have been the first the first assault as it were to grab for a caricatured off the peg you reach me Dan version or of enlightenment in their panic-stricken response to the assault from the east I speak myself as a profound admirer of enlightenment but in its somewhat less Travis did or ideologically strident versions but it seems to me remarkable how blind the same liberal doraji are to the darker on the side of that precious movement of emancipation have quick they are to denounce the crimes of radical Islam and crimes they are while passing over in silence the outrages that Western imperialism has perpetrated upon the modern world outrages which account in part in part for the fact of the West is now in the firing line the myths of progress and again like everybody else I support progress with a small P I mean even post modernists accept anesthetics when they go to the dentist I take it this myth is resolutely linear once there was barbarism out of which civilization is painfully dredged and is always in peril of sliding back into it this in a world is the supremacist superstition I think of Dawkins and his friends the alternative is not to refuse to speak of civilization and barbarism at all in my view but to speak of them as say chronic rather than sequential for every emancipation an accompanying oppression for every magnificent Cathedral a pit of bones only Marxism to my knowledge says at the same time as it were out of both sides of its mouth that modernity enlightened modernity has been a tale of enthralling liberation from well-nigh intolerable oppressions and parochialism and has been one long nightmare and moreover that those two stories don't just sit cheek by jowl but are the repto and the verso of one another that for me is a good reason for being a marxist apart from the pleasure of annoying certain people there is let me just touch briefly on this before I end there's another vital reason I think for the resurgence of religion in our time well there's a reason which is simply connect you with a pervasive and fundamental sense of anxiety and sickening precariousness and in that situation many people grab for excesses of certainty but there is another perhaps most reasoned and that which I which is really another story and I can't really go into it's the fact that in our day a powerful alternative to religion has been unmasked as not really up to the mark and this is known as culture so the nineteenth century onwards as religious skepticism in Europe increasingly takes old an elusive entity known as culture was increasingly comport called upon to perform the kind of roles which religion had traditionally fulfilled like romanticism as the man said it's a kind of spilt religion and this wasn't half as implausible as it might sound both culture and religion after all are concerned with corporate acts transcendent truth ritual practices symbolic acts fundamental beliefs intuitive certainties organic unities and the like even so however Hardy tried culture was never really capable of stepping into original shoes it couldn't rival a set of beliefs which linked the most humble and trivial everyday practices of millions upon millions of people with certain absolutely fundamental indeed transcendent values and truths culture could never hold a candle to that most historically powerful of symbolic systems in its narrower aesthetic sense it involves too few people in its broader more promising anthropological sense culture has value identity daily practice history kinship language symbol in those senses culture of course is extraordinarily important culture in that sense in our time can be defined in a word as that for which people are prepared to kill I'm not talking about being prepared to kill for Beethoven or borrow bowels act there may be a few seriously weird people hanging around in cave somewhere you know afraid to come out to prepare to kill for that but in the up center though in as it were the more anthropological rather than aesthetic sense of culture there's no doubt that people will kill or die for that nationalism within that has of course operated as one modern displacement of religion you know the nation like God has no origin and end is eternally self identical unified most mysterious unfathomable and so on there have been many displaced versions of religion in a sexualized European age but culture has been one of the most interesting one of the reasons why it has definitively failed I think as a solution in our age is it has shifted over from being part of the solution to being part of the problem and that is the net death knell for it culture in a certain rather generous idealist sense of the term was thought traditionally to embody the common ground which whatever our differences of ethnos or gender or class would embody the deepest common humanity by which we lived you that in itself was too abstract if that was to be effect if you needed a sort of palpable tangible portable version in but distillation of those values and that was known as literature if the war's over literature have been so bloody if there has been so much blood on the senior common room floors over a minority pursuit like literature some of the blood looking suspiciously like my own if that is the case it's because literature or art par excellence was a supremely tangible version because it will hold up and show to people not least to take to the colonies and show the natives what you believed which embodied this abstraction of culture culture as I say in our time however has shifted over to being part of the problem rather than solution because culture is now itself the language of political dissent and conflict far from being some rather hopelessly idealist reconciliation of mundane conflicts it is now the very language and articulation the language in which so many of those countless conflicts are now cast in the end of course what was responsible for the New Atheism was none of these things you know 9/11 or the failure of culture whatever it was really in itself we live in an age in which some Christians regard the glimpse of a female breasts as obscene but not the burning of children in Iraq and Afghanistan many of them worship a God fashioned blasphemously in their own image a short-haired clean-shaven blue blazers gun-toting Living God champion of the rich and powerful rather of what some Paul calls the of the earth it is the betrayals and self betrayals of religion surely which fundamentally and in the end are responsible for the new atheism and to that extent on my client claim they've got the diskens they deserve [Applause] first question please yeah we all this one off you take the microphone okay um I'm sure Ritchie psychology department um I hate to ask such a sublunary question um but do you actually have any evidence for the existence of God because it seems to me that you can talk about how nice you think the Emperor's clothes are and how fancy they are and and all that but it doesn't really matter if the Emperor isn't actually wearing any clothes at all um and in fact you don't seem to be I'm not sure who your talk is aimed at cuz you're not gonna convince any atheists because you haven't graded any evidence for the existence of God you're not gonna convince any religious people because you've basically told them that what they believe is not actually what say Christianity is so I'm gonna tell is sure where your your your lecture is aimed well I think you have to be careful to phrase that question about have you any evidence for the existence of God you know in a non yeti-ish way you know has he been spotted flitting through the forests and so on and and I think the problem I mean there of course there are non Yeti ways of posing that question I'm not saying they're not my objection to sort of card-carrying rationalists like Dickens is that they don't seem able to pose it in any other way than a yeti-ish way yes I mean Thomas Aquinas the whole tradition of mainstream theology talks about natural theology about reasoning about God and so on but that's not of course where they start from the difference between a rationalist and a believer doesn't seem to me that one believes that something exists and the other doesn't see what I mean but I can see by your sceptical expression that there is extreme difficulty in shifting the argument on from here that both sides I mean you know full-blooded rationalist and most believers are absolutely insistent the belief in God is something like belief in Bigfoot and until we can move it away I don't think we'll make any progress I mean it would be it's rather like it will night tape I don't know more might take a cert I have tried to take certain literary analogies to this I mentioned you know looking at Moby Dick as though it was a report on the whaling industry the danger with that is it sounds as though on saying that belief is just a comforting set of fictions yes and I don't want to say that I think Christians have to say if it's not a fact in some sense you know if they'll say the resurrection isn't in some sense of the word a fact then their faith is in vain yes but at the same time they would want to say I suppose it wasn't something you could photograph yeah the relations between myth fiction poetry history fact in a documents like the old or New Testament are of course exceedingly complex and I know very little about them I leave it to the scholars but I'm sure in my own mind that if faith is just a sort of poetic fiction it's pretty worthless I'm also sure that you can't understand what it means unless if you see it in the sort of white-coated the laboratory way that Dawkins seems to let me just I'm sorry I'm going on too long but let me just end I'm sure this won't convince you but it might give you an idea of what I mean I say in this remarkably cheap and extraordinary attractive book of mine which is on sale at the end of the doors are closed so you can't get out I'm afraid unless you I say I think think of being in love with somebody if failure garden once said the what you have to understand is and I never understood this for years and years is the believer is somebody who's in love so Kierkegaard said and that's unsolved the question by any means but it gives us it shifts the terrain a certain way can you reasons why for why you love somebody of course you can if you can't the word love is a mere empty sound you know you have to be able to give reasons you have to be able to spell out in public rational contestable discourse what it is that you love about mr. O'Shay or whoever it happens to be yes yeah is your love reducible to reasons no as Viktor Stein says reasons have to end somewhere and one way in which one can see that one's love is not reducible to reasons though it involves them is that somebody else can accept all the reasons you give and not love the person themselves thank you so John holding some dangerous and I suppose he would be a perspective on where we've got to let me put it that way and and perhaps tried to fit your remarks into this you might say that in the 19th century there was a great deal of thrashing about from the part of religiously conservative people who felt deeply threatened by a whole variety of scholarly and other developments so within biblical scholarship on the one hand scientific developments and so on on the other and went into a kind of crisis of faith and embraced certain ideas but a culture was actually part of that high culture movement was part of that it seems to me there's a sort of corresponding movement on the left in the 20th century which is there's a lot of thrashing about there as well because it's had taken away from it the possibility of a certain kind of prophetic critical position on society so the religious belief of the 19th century was able to invoke a kind of authority figure of God who looked down upon the people and judged him as having breached covenant and unworthy and so on and this gave of her and in the 20th century the Left invoked a kind of a gospel of the poor as leverage against another kind of structure that wasn't liked and so on but although these are culturally interesting phenomena and these seem to me to leave the question of the truth or otherwise of religion pretty much where it was and here I suppose I have some sympathy for the previous questioner in as much as supposing we say well you know religions are wonderful or offered something that for which there is no substitute that doesn't it off itself sure that it's it's true or that it has anything like a secure foundation and putting it the other way around I don't I've some doubts as the extent to which one can embrace say Christianity without taking it very seriously for example in its polar inversions and its poor line versions are very anti pathetic I would imagine to many of the things that you yourself would value so for example you will search both the old and new testaments and never find anywhere in it adoption of equality there's no point in either of the old or New Testaments that we're told that God loves all equally for example simply no place in the entire Hebrew Christian Bible in which there's a doctrine of the Equality of humankind on the contrary you get a certain set of elites and such like and this is why I mean that's originally the elite of the covenant but it's the elite of the elect and the one part and so on so what you get out of Christianity is something very uncomfortable but it's not it doesn't lend itself it seems to me to the critical position of the right and the 19th century of the position of the left in the 20th century and I just my thought is if one's going to take it seriously the question then is what is the content that one's taking seriously if one leaves behind is other rhetorical instruments that it provides and says ok well that's that's been exceedingly interesting what you've had to say tonight contributes much to that but what is the content of religion that you would advise the city so basically what I took myself to be talking about the content of Christianity quite a good at the time and I'm surprised that you see it either in terms of a certain rhetoric or simply in terms of it were of a certain commitment to the poor that interest to that I would absolutely agree with you that there are all kinds of commitments the poor that don't entail the truth of Christianity and what you call the truth of Christianity can't stand or fall by that but I didn't argue that it that it did I think Paul is one of the most magnificent of writers he understands as the as the political left does that um was to put it in Yates's terms nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent deep deep impulse theology surely whatever one might say about this or that doctrine of equality is the belief in a cowboy is a belief in a certain kind of tragedy nice to say that without a certain passage of dispossession no value can emerge I mean I think that there are I mean the auto Buddhists when you talk about the truth of Christianity well you know um as my old friend and theologian Herbert and the cave used to say what the New Testament argues though if you don't love you dead and if you do they'll kill you I think that's profoundly true and I think that if one's talking about the truth of Christianity one has to talk about it in those terms yes does that strike you or whoever as utterly central to humanity into history certainly does me yes that's how I would like to approach it but that's not the same kind of truth is it the Dawkins and Hitchens have in mind and that's a very important point when you talk about the left the left's involvement in theology in the twentieth century actually one might say that now with a Gambon with jiseok with bad you with a whole number of resolutely atheist leftist thinkers who are writing fascinating books about all and Christianity and Judaism I would say indeed almost that much of the most interesting theology in our time is coming from the secular atheistic left why is an interesting question but part part of part of that not least in the work of Alain Badiou is the need to redefine the concept of truth it and that use concept of truth as a certain kind but you as a resolute atheist as a certain kind of tenacious and unwavering commitment to a revelatory event his various kinds seems to me a very useful idea for theologians to pursue they could learn quite a bit from my name is Rhys and I editor webzine called pulse my question was regarding these isn't there a fundamental difference in how this debate has played out in the United States and here and that's why I would like to draw a distinction between somebody like Hitchens and somebody like Dawkins because Dawkins appear more politically ignorant whereas Hitchens appears to have an agenda and similarly there are people like Sam Harris who in his book for example he argues at one point that in the interest of progress if we have to consider a nuclear first strike on the Middle East so he says that it's a worthwhile price for progress and similarly he draws on Alan Dershowitz to defend torture in his book so I think that subtext appears to be more political one recent bestseller around here has been Cristobal Caldwell's book who claims that Europe is about to be conquered by its increasing Muslim population and one of the arguments he makes in his book is that the only counter to that is a similar form of fanatical belief and that's why he says that there's an the West has an interest in reviving Christianity because it's anti-muslim he according to him he says that that is only think which will steal the spines of Europe against Islam at this point so various neoconservatives are using this argument so we think that there's a difference between the two yes I do although I wouldn't I wouldn't over rate it too much and there are lots of iron is there too of me for example yes one of the things wrong with Dawkins is he's not he doesn't really well like most English middle-class liberals he doesn't really feel politics and his bones there's no reason why he shouldn't in a way and he doesn't really latch on to that kind of discourse at all worth of course Hitchens as a partly renegade Marxist certainly does and you're right on the other hand Dawkins opposed the war in Iraq and Creek and of course Hitchens not only didn't oppose it but is very pally with many of its architects so I think it's a it's a it's a computer complex situation you know as far as politics didn't go but what I was trying to argue was there is indeed a political subtext to the so-called God debate which I think hasn't always been really Bank offski from from law I hate to introduce marks Burke into it but um you're talking about um the progress of rationality and progressive will be hardly stand in respective marks it was in some respects clearly a Victorian rationalism in some respects he was and I've just written another extraordinary attractive book which actually takes ten of the most standard and intelligent objections to marks including that one yeah and lots of others you know Marxism is a form of terrorism or tyranny or Authority and tries to refute each one one by one and sometimes Marx talks in a good old Victorian progressive East Way yes that's absolutely true and sometimes he doesn't there are different Marx's there I think actually one of the most interesting thing well the strengths of Maha is that he combines a certain kind of enlightenment rationalism with a certain kind of romantic humanism he has a passion for the sensuously particular which he calls among other things useful you but lots of other things says and yet he insists upon quite properly in my view upon a certain universalism which is part of a other of an Enlightenment belief yes in other words enlightenment rationalist is not in my view is afraid to be unpacked and not simply used pejoratively when enlightenment rationalists appealed to universality and the utterly abstract equality of all human beings which makes any good postmodernist these days wince when they did so the austere regimes trembled it's the wine then twas the eschatology the eschatology well some people I mean there's great debaters you know among Marxist scholars over whether Marx is an eschatological Marx began his whole career in contention with utopianism Marx's work took off the ground in a ferocious argument with as it were certain eschatological versions of socialism and he deeply disagreed with Marx for one thing notoriously refused to predict the future you know and and anti-marxist attack him for that too yes so it's a very it's a very complex argument but I think that I would say to his best Marx and this is another reason to be a Marxist apart from just annoying people Marx combines the best of the romantic humanist tradition which otherwise is in danger of lapsing into a certain kind of myopic particularism with the best of the Enlightenment rationalist tradition a great pleasure to propose a vote of thanks and we are used in the Gifford lectures to have very famous people deliver brilliant lectures but even in that context I have to say tonight we had an outstanding usually with performance and outstanding performance from Professor Eagleton he addressed very important topics he did it with great erudition also I think that it's the most amusing gifford lecture I've ever heard and I think the ability to introduce these apparently irreverent light touches oh they're very helpful particularly for as it were a boring old scientist rather than the humanities person like myself it gave me some very very good mental hooks I I appreciated the amusing touches but most importantly he challenged I think the great majority of us in with respect to the integrity of the views of the world we would would hold on these things and I think the importance of the election the challenges we were given I really deserve great appreciation so please join me this production is copyright the University of Edinburgh

Channel: The University of Edinburgh

Views: 99,040

Keywords: gifford, lecture, professor terry eagleton, god debate, war on terror, religion, divinity, edinburgh, university, debate, Humanities, Social, Science, HSS

Id: QCqHnwIR1PY

Length: 62min 19sec (3739 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2010