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Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate

Book by Terry Eagleton · 4 quotes · Religion, Bible, Christianity

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Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate Quotes

“For the liberal humanist legacy to which Ditchkins is in indebted, love can really be understood only in personal terms. It is not an item in his political lexicon, and would sound merely embarrassing were it to turn up there. For the liberal tradition, what seems to many men and women to lie at the core of human existence has a peripheral place in the affairs of the world, however vital a role it may play in the private life. The concept of political love, one imagines would make little sense to Ditchkins. Yet something like this is the ethical basis for socialism. It is just that it is hard to see what this might mean in a civilization where love has been almost wholly reduced to the erotic, romantic, or domestic. Ditchkins writes as he does partly because a legacy which offers an alternative to the liberal heritage on this question is today in danger of sinking without trace.”

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Book:Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
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“The quarrel between science and religion, then, is not a matter of how universe came about, or which approach can provide the best "explanation" for it. It is a disagreement about how far back one has to go, though not in the chronological sense. For theology, science does not start far back enough - not in the sense that it fails to posit a Creator, but in the sense that it does not ask questions such as why there is anything in the first place, or why what we do have is actually intellible to us. Perhaps these are phony questions anyway; some philosophers certainly think so. But theologians, as Rowan Williams has argued, are interested in the question of why we ask for explanations at all, or why we assume that the universe hangs together in a way that makes explanations possible. Where do our notions of explanation, regularity, and intelligibility come from? How do we explain rationality and intelligibility themselves, or is this question either superfluous or too hard to answer? Can we not account for rationality because to do so is to presuppose it? Whatever we think of such queries, science as we know it is possible only because the world displays a certain internal order and coherence - possible, that is to say, for roughly aesthetic reasons.”

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Book:Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate
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