I appreciate that most of this has been within the bounds of civil discourse, honestly. And yeah, of course, I knew this would get people stirred up. Thanks especially to those who actually read the review and sought to respond thoughtfully, whether they agreed with any part of it or not.

A couple of points that may lend additional clarification:

1) I most certainly am not presenting an unqualified endorsement of Eagleton's position. As I say in the review, hardly anyone is likely to agree with all of it. But because I think he is very intelligent and his arguments worth considering in totality, I tried to do the best I could at ventriloquizing them.

2) I doubt very much that Eagleton is a Christian, at least not in any conventional use of that word. I am not either.

3) I believe the word "Judeo-Christian" is used carefully and sparingly, both in this article and in Eagleton's book, to indicate areas of substantial consonance and continuity between the Jewish and Christian traditions, e.g., on the idea that God cannot be classified as any sort of entity.

4) To the many, many posters who protest that the existence of God is unprovable and improbable and hence has no significance to science: Eagleton agrees with Dawkins on this. More to the point, he says that Thomas Aquinas agrees with Dawkins too, although of course one of them believes in God and the other does not.

5) Religious faith is specifically something that cannot be tested or verified or falsified by science. It feels real to those who experience it, but literally has *no meaning* for science, which may or may not signify -- depending on your orientation -- that it has no meaning at all.

One might say that philosophically that is the crux of the problem. Religion belongs to another area of human cognition or endeavor or consciousness. Science is of course free to attempt to define that realm as essentially nonexistent, as total bullshit or hallucination or not-yet-explained electrical impulses in the brain. But one could respond that such an unproven hypothesis itself smacks of theological argument. And at least so far, the purely mechanistic or behavioral-science definitions of consciousness do not seem to be entirely adequate. (One must be highly conditional about all such statements, and I claim no expertise.)

5a) Also, pragmatically, it's no good simply saying, oh well, religious faith, we've done away with that and we're moving on now. That shows no awareness of the history of human culture, and a belief in a theory of progress largely unsupported by the evidence. Funny thing for a scientist to believe, as a matter of fact.

6) Is Eagleton mean and unfair to Richard Dawkins? Yes, he absolutely is. (I'm not sure it's possible to be unfair to Christopher Hitchens.) But it's very funny. He derides what he considers Dawkins' commonsensical, anesthetic Oxonian middle-classness by observing that Dawkins would no doubt find the line "Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness" a damned funny way to describe a Grecian urn.

7) I did not do much to describe Eagleton's ideas about the clash between "civilization" and "culture," and what those terms mean. I'll just mention that when he says we need some sort of common faith in order to band together against a "metaphysical foe" (i.e., the craziest variants of Islam) I can promise you that he is not saying we need to get back to medieval Christianity or whatever.

8) As hardly anybody has noted in these comments, Eagleton ultimately concludes that his disagreements with Dawkins are *philosophical, political and aesthetic.* They might be about the usefulness of Some Notion Like God, rather than the existence of God. (Eagleton is agnostic on that question, in my judgment.) He is happy to agree that God is unprovable and may well not exist, and that belief or nonbelief should certainly play no role in scientific inquiry. As a matter of fact, the last two popes would agree with that second premise.

Rather, Eagleton thinks that the specific variety of liberal-humanist atheism professed by Dawkins is deeply flawed. It is produced by (and produces) a simplistic faith in progress. Nietzsche thought humanism was just as bad as religion, because it replaced God with a laughable, idealized notion of Man. Eagleton sees liberal humanism as a Pollyanna faith that fundamentally misunderstands human nature, that has repeatedly failed to live up to its professed convictions and that refuses to see the essentially cyclical, dialectical and tragic nature of human history. (Whereas Christian theology, while it may be hokum at heart, has always grasped that.) Disagree away, but it's not an easily dismissable argument.