Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
By Terry Eagleton
Yale University Press £18.99, 200 pages
FT Bookshop price: £15.19

Terry Eagleton is that rare thing, a God-fearing Marxist. Given what Karl Marx had to say about religion, this is a little like being a Freudian who’s indifferent about his mother. To maintain such a stance takes a great subtlety of mind and a rather slippery idea of the difference between fact and fiction – both traits much on display in Eagleton’s new book Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate.

The book is pitched as a riposte to the overweening polemic of the New Atheists – in particular Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (collectively crowned “Ditchkins”). But Eagleton, a professor of literature at the universities of Lancaster and Galway, and one of Britain’s most venerable cultural critics, uses it to hold forth with characteristic wit and verve on the various contradictions of life under late capitalism.

His main contention is one he has aired publicly for some time: that with their critique of religion, “Ditchkins” are taking pot shots at a straw man; and that they are doing so from the swampy ground of their own unwarranted faith in reason and the march of progress. Eagleton’s criticisms, however, mostly shoot wide.

Dawkins and Hitchens, he argues, fail to tackle Christianity “at its most persuasive”. They show “truly shocking ignorance” of theology, comparable “to the arrogance of one who regards himself as competent to pronounce on arcane questions of biology on the strength of a passing acquaintance with the British Book of Birds”.

But this misses the point: the Ditchkins duo are not attempting to write about theology. It is the job of philosophy to examine whether the idea of a theistic God is credible; and it is the role of science to give us hypotheses we have reason to believe on the basis of the evidence.

Philosophers and scientists are frequently dismissive about what passes for serious thought in theology faculties because, they say, theologians are not engaged in the honest and open pursuit of truth; they are simply picking over their existing beliefs. They assume from the outset that God exists before going on to quarrel about issues such as just how holy Mary really is. Suggesting that Dawkins must digest two millennia of theology before taking a view on the existence of God is like suggesting he must do a PhD in witchcraft before judging whether Harry Potter is a work of fiction.

Eagleton’s attempts to put Ditchkins right on the real nature of God produce nothing better than the kind of mystical piffle that that pair are so good at demolishing. God, for example, is apparently “what sustains all things in being by his love”, he states, without explaining what this means.

Perhaps aware of the frailty of such claims, Eagleton throws in that science isn’t perfect either. Then, like a landed fish flapping for life, he claims that rationality is all relative anyway. In the final death throe of his argument, he asks “why discovering the truth should be considered so desirable in the first place”.

Eagleton is on firmer ground with his interpretation of the Christian message. He subscribes to a fiery brand of liberation theology, at the centre of which is Jesus as revolutionary. He rages, for example, at the hypocrisy of those Christians who are “horrified by the sight of a female breast, but considerably less appalled by the obscene inequalities between rich and poor”. It is a persuasive and exciting reading of the Gospel intended to provoke the “suburban well-to-do” from their moral complacency.

This is a bold and stylish book, guaranteed to provoke – in the best possible way – anyone who might read it. Eagleton is a gifted cultural critic, drawing his insights from the worlds he knows best – those of fiction and ideology. It is, however, in these categories that his views on God belong.

Stephen Cave is writing a book on immortality