squeers:

>> Who says Dawkins is “inventing his own targets"?

either you or eagleton or both. what else is the point of using the term "straw man"?

dawkins' target may be "stereotypical" and only the stereotypical, but if so it is still ridiculous to trivialise his target, to pretend it is not a hugely important target. you may be wary of stereotyping, but the simple fact of the matter is that the majority of the world's religious adherents believe the kind of nonsense which dawkins (at minimum) attacks.

if they look like ducks, quack like ducks, forgive my stereotyping them as ducks.

>> Dawkins is also an authority for positivism.

huh? i'm not using dawkins as an authority for anything?

>> How is that different to a fundamentalist critique of Darwinism?

if you look at darwinism, any science, a little, you see a little of how and why it works. if you look a little at miracles, at god as guy-in-sky-with-beard, you see nothing.

science works. people see science works. and life is short. i don't have time to investigate every supernatural belief. if you have evidence that religious thought works, in any sense, then produce it.

>> Eagleton doesn’t get into the nuts and bolts of theology, so I’m not going to

fine, but don't expect me to prove a negative. if the claim is that dawkins has thrown some gorgeous baby out with the undeniably dirty bathwater, then it's up to someone to show me the baby.

squeers, despite what it may seem, i'm not an overwhelming fan of dawkins. BUT, what gets up my nose is intellectual religious types who smugly and fact-freely dismiss him and his book as amateurish.

dawkins was gratuitously introduced into this thread. he supposedly believes or believed nonsense, he supposedly makes crass mistakes. he supposedly ignores the brilliant gifts of religious thought. maybe all are true. but i want someone to argue it, not simply claim it.

the 100 or so posters here that deny the obvious and come up with ridiculous pseudo science certainly proves that a Creator is still by far the most rational explanation for this world. what puny minds the rebellious get caught in.

I invite commentators to re-read my article and come up with some material closer to the point. As it is we have had the same old bluster from those opposed and those for "religion". My article was really about the usefulness of Trinitarian theology in solving theological problems inherited from early modernity. In particular, the problem of how God acts in the world. If commentators could get over their own particular hobby horses and try to see what the real issues I am trying to engage are then we may get somewhere. The theology of the early church mapped out a language about God that is robust even to withstand the assaults of modern science. Part of the problem is that the theology we find in most churches is not Trinitarian in its roots but, as I keep repeating, more Greek, owing much to Aristotle and Plato. This mix between Athens and Jerusalem has always been a problem in the church and even more so now that the blowtorch of modernity has been applied to it.
The only hope for contemporary theology is to retrieve, in a radical fashion, the Trinitarian formulations. My frustration with the comments is that no one has wanted to discuss the Trinity!
Peter Sellick

The Trinity,
A 4th Century concept completely alien to Jewish theology instituted under Constantine to account for the conflicting opinions about the nature of the god concept at the time.
Largely irrelevant to any serious discussion about anything.

Dear Relda,

I am not sure what Jewish identity is. Christians are different from one another, and Jews are different from one another. Much of my identity has nothing to do with being Jewish. What is your Christian identity?

At the Queensland Mycological Society I don't believe religion or ethnicity has ever come up. I was talking with Yiyan Wang. She remarked, "You're very light for a Jew." My Jewish identity had been in her mind but not in mine until she said that.

Buber made dichotomies. Whether those dichotomies exist is moot. eg “I-It” and the "I-Thou". Relations with other humans are not that simple. One might think of a relationship with the person at the supermarket checkout counter as an “I-It” relationship. Yet occasionally one exchanges a few words with that person unrelated to our transaction, and we become 'thous' to each other. I love my wife. However, in some of our interactions we are 'its'. Anyone might have done these actions. I think real human interactions are in general a combination of “I-It” and "I-Thou". The greater the proportion of “I-It” the more one is divorced from humanity. The greater the proportion of “I-thou” one spends less time simply getting on with the business of life. Too much “I-thou”, and one becomes a pain in the ass. The optimum combination of “I-It” and "I-Thou" is different for different people. When Buber wrote his books he was either engaging in inductive thinking which is just an ego process or "I" or engaging in internal discussions which are "I-I".

Louis Brandeis and the Marx Brothers are a great combination. However, combining them because of their Jewishness objectifies them because one characteristic cloaks all others. Brandeis was in the legal world, and the Marx Brothers the showbiz world. However, Groucho was a complex fellow and enjoyed a correspondence with T. S. Eliot. They apparently found something in common. Groucho and Brandeis might also have corresponded. As far as I know they didn't. If they did it might have had nothing to do with them both being Jewish.

Bushbasher,
I have no taste for this. I find myself on the wrong team. However.
I actually said, "let's not throw the "bathwater" out with the baby".
I don't believe in a God, but I am persuaded that there is a real mystery around the whole human obsession with mysticism--for want of a better word. And while I acknowledge, indeed regularly champion, the determined impartiality of scientific method, it can be a little credulous in its "faith" in its own empirical foundations.
Dawkins' critique is most definitely "amateurish". While I agree that he's doing us all a service railing against junk-religion---I don't "pretend otherwise"---I'm not convinced that the "majority of the world's religious adherents" are necessarily deluded--though they're definitely fanciful in their rationalisations. And here is an important point; mystical experience is indiscriminate; it knows no class or educational barriers, and it is rife! The recipients of this experience will in all likelihood rationalise it according to their intellectual means, or particular bent. Since modern life is systematised and commodified, as never before, is it any wonder that the experience (the bath water) should manifest itself as apparently homogenous (popular)? Without the sceptical wherewithal to interrogate the experience, is it surprising that the majority enlist in one denomination or another by default? Of course this leaves the question, "was the experience genuinely mystical? Or was it delusion?"
Science has no patience with such a question; it was delusional, of course! But I would argue that the experience is too common to be dismissed out of hand as mass credulousness—see William James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience”. Could Catholicism have exerted such hegemony if there had been no “apparent” substance to its extravagant threats?
I have read three books by Dawkins and greatly admire his incisive intellect (and accessible prose). “I” haven’t belittled him; but I agree with Eagleton, his critique is simplistic. Indeed it reinforces modern censorship of religious experience—tantamount to religious censorship of reason, though not as bloodthirsty.
I’m on your side BB, but it’s not so black and white for me—or Eagleton.