Terry Eagleton reviews Richard Dawkin's book The God Delusion. He is bothered by Dawkin's religious devotion to attacking religion.

Apart from the occasional perfunctory gesture to ?sophisticated? religious believers, Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass.

Eagleton argues that Dawkins doesn't fairly portray religion, that he doesn't understand religion properly, and so presents a strawman, a radicalized version of religion, to be rejected. But Eagleton's own notion of God and Christianity, which he thinks should excape Dawkin's diatribe, is highly stylized and in need of clarification.

For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ?existent?: in one sense of that word 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. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

In what sense is God a person? What is it to be a condition of possibility? What is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing? Eagleton's religion has many of the same goals as Dawkin's strawman.

Salvation for Christianity has to do with caring for the sick and welcoming the immigrant, protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not a ?religious? affair at all, and demands no special clothing, ritual behaviour or fussiness about diet.

It strikes one that all the positive elements of Eagleton's Dawkins-proof Christianity can be achieved without the cloak of religious belief, ritual, or mythology. Would Dawkin's object?

LRB | Terry Eagleton : Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching

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