science, magic, madness

[alice wellintown]

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the
subject is the *Book of British Birds*, and you have a rough idea of what
it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying
rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional
atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least
well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe
there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth
understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures
of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The
more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it
tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the
geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as
assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy
old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the
sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval
heyday.

Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed
eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida
for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than
a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively
charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an
essay on Hume from a student who had not read his *Treatise of Human Nature*.


http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching



On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:43 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> "...* applied science, purposeful and determined, and pure science,
> playful and freely curious, continuously support and stimulate each other.
> The great nation of the future will be the one which protects the freedom
> of pure science as much as it encourages applied science.*"
>
> http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2876.htm
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:40 AM, alice wellintown <
> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22105898
>>
>
>
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