(Terry Eagleston)
Stanley Fish here comments on Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections On the God Debate. Fish is quite a writer, as is Eagleton. Fish explains Eagleton's near-NOMA thesis, except that for Eagleton the magisteria are intertwined.
Fish: "Science, says Eagleton, “does not start far back enough”; it can run its operations, but it can’t tell you what they ultimately mean or provide a corrective to its own excesses. Likewise, reason is “too skin deep a creed to tackle what is at stake”; its laws — the laws of entailment and evidence — cannot get going without some substantive proposition from which they proceed but which they cannot contain; reason is a non-starter in the absence of an a prior specification of what is real and important, and where is that going to come from? Only from some kind of faith."I agree. Science qua science says nothing about value.
Fish writes that Eagleston is "angry, I think, at having to expend so much mental and emotional energy refuting the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins. I know just how he feels."
