Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:59:53 +0000

Oral Roberts was the kind of evangelist who turned me off, so I don’t know that much about him. He was born in Bebee, California on January 24, 1918 and was named Granville Oral Roberts. He was healed, miraculously, so he said, of tuberculosis at the age of 17 and his ministry started then. He founded Oral Roberts University in 1963.

No one has ever explained to me why he used his middle name Oral rather than Granville or why in the world anyone would name a kid Oral. I’ve always thought it was a misspelling of the name Orel that means golden. Like born-again former Dodger pitcher Orel Hersheiser. But I don’t know.

The one thing I remember about Oral Roberts is, in 1987 he announced to the world that if he did not receive $8 million bucks from his donors by March 31, God would call him home. The weird logic of the threat must have made sense to a lot of his devotees because he got the money.

Nevertheless, twenty-two years later on October 15, 2009 when Granville Oral Roberts was 91, God called him home.

Posted by: Nick Valvo | October 23, 2006 7:18 AM

I am going to defend Eagleton, a writer and critic I respect and admire in much the same way as most of you respect Dawkins. I knew this was coming as soon as I read the article; I even drafted but didn't send PZ a link to this article earlier today. I suspected his thoughts would be close to what they were. I contend, with the maximum possible respect, PZ, that you've totally missed the point. I know this is the wrong venue to defend this critique; I guess I will just trust that you guys are as into open discussions as you claim to be. I read (and enjoy) this weblog regularly, but you guys can be pretty dogmatic at times. Since I'm positioning myself against my audience, I'd better do so out in the open. I'm an academic; I work on eighteenth-century English lit. I am an atheist, methodologically working in Marxism, psychoanalysis, historicism, and the problems of philosophical materialism.

I will say this. Some of you in the comments are exposing yourselves as not having understood Eagleton's argument (notable exceptions: Arun, Scott Hatfield, Clayton, Andrew Brown, maybe Joel Sax); this is not really surprising, either. The point is that the subtler brand of philosophically-interesting Christianity has never been a mass-phenomenon; critiquing megachurch Christianity on epistemological grounds is like me critiquing the research methodology of high school students' bio labs and taking Biology to task. Get this: I'm pretty sure Eagleton would say that the Creationists don't understand theology either. The mass might as well be in Latin. A lot of these people believe whatever James Dobson tells them to, because the content of the belief is not so much the point as a kind of quixotic oppositionism in the name of a past tradition that may not have ever existed.

I suspect you guys also think that academic theologians are generally believers. This is not always true. I know a few who are not, but who find the rich medieval philosophical tradition interesting.

I've read maybe three or four of Eagleton's books and numerous articles, and you guys (some of whom seem to think he's a Christian?!? Huh?) may be surprised to learn that he, one of the greatest Marxist literary critics of the previous generation, is almost certainly an atheist, just an atheist with a fair amount of historical sensitivity. JasonN callously and cluelessly takes Terry Eagleton to task for being both one of the most consistent and incisive critics of "cultural theory" since the mid-80s and for simultaneously being identified as a cultural theorist on Wikipedia (he is famous for his debates in the pages of the New Left Review with Fredric Jameson about the question of Postmodernism: Eagleton is not a fan, on basically Marxist grounds). What a scandal!

There's something that historians of science call triumphalism. It is a theoretical error, in writing the history of science (or other intellectual history) without empathy, without any attempt to understand why past scientists or natural philosophers thought as they did. In other words, telling the history of science from the point of view of modern science makes the past into "the prehistory of now," in a phrase of Georg Lukacs', and ignores ways that knowledge serves contemporary needs.

With statements like GH's "who exactly would be better suited to discuss an invisible entity?" you give yourselves away as not having any insight into the very real and palpable entity that had been actually under discussion: theology. You just know that this God thing they keep talking about does not jibe with the current state of natural science. Needless to say, it has occurred to theologians for the past several millennia that God is not visible -- his verifiability is not really up for discussion. And you are welcome to join me in disbelieving in Him. Religion, however, is a very real thing, one with real social consequences for good and ill, and demonizing the entire institution is going to get you absolutely nowhere. It's about as tedious as demonizing "Science" as if it were a self-consistent entity.

Dawkins has overstepped his training before, which may be the reason for some of Eagleton's snideness. During the right-wing fad for "sociobiology," he published a book called "The Selfish Gene," which I imagine you all know. It contained what I believe to have been a coinage of the term "meme," which has taken off among bloggish people. In an ill-considered argument, he suggests that, like genes, units of culture could also be considered as autonomous agents, so that the social world can also be considered as a genealogical system in which "better adapted" things survive. This idea was briefly interesting to some people. I haven't read the book in years, but it takes only a moment's reflection to realize that he has done away with, for example, any kind of theory of ideology or space for political critique. Why does it make more sense to argue from the point of view of the selfishness of the meme, rather than from the use of the cultural form to concrete historical actors (as in a garden-variety historicism)? In other words, even if (as one tends to find) the culture that is sustained is the culture that serves the interests of the people who get to make the decisions, Dawkins argues that this is somehow because it is better adapted. Better adapted to elite interests, I guess. He does not escape a humanism, because the selfishness of his memes (differently than his selfish genes) is set in an environment of real people fighting real struggles, not indifferent nature. In other words, because of the ambivalent nature of the selection pressure itself, the genealogical/iterative method of evolutionary thought needs serious modification to work. I don't see what it adds, and I do see what it distorts.

He has, in effect, naturalized cultural history. To pick a tendentious example, in what sense is the creationism "meme" "well adapted?" It does a poor job of describing the world, it doesn't help raise livestock or anything, it brands its advocates rednecks in the official culture. Creationism is best explained, I think we would all agree, as a cynical ploy to evoke a culture war that keeps a conservative electoral base, a majority in parts of the country, riled up to support a political party that offers them little of substantial value. Meme theory would reinterpret this from the point of view of Creationism, as if it weren't an obvious hobbled-together fake idea, insincerely held. It produces a certain frisson, and it allows people who have spent their whole lives getting picked on to enjoy defeating at the polls long-haired, smart-ass, left-wing nerds like me. I guess you could argue that this very viciousness is a kind of success. (Those who are actually interested in trying to make genealogical arguments about culture in a politically-responsible manner should consider the work of Mexican philosopher Manuel De Landa or the recent work of Franco Moretti.)

(Oh wow, this got long fast. I'm sorry, I'm somewhat drunk. I'll finish up as quick as I can.)

It may surprise some of you to encounter the notion that theology has only since the Protestant Reformation really taken on the sense as a set of facts to be believed (the way postmodern creationists "believe" the world is 6,000 years old). Remember, before the Reformation, the Mass was conducted in Latin, a language spoken only by elites. Scholastic argumentation -- the cultural tradition Eagleton defends -- did as much to preserve and incorporate pagan (read: Greek) knowledge as to defend orthodoxy. The rank-and-file Christian had faith, certainly, but it was not a faith in the same way that Evangelicals talk about faith today in terms of a personal relation to God, and a belief in specific tenets, etc. It was likely neither more nor less intellectual.

The natural sciences as we know them grew out of 17th century natural philosophy, which was a curious hybrid of empirical experiment (in England), Cartesian rationalism (in France), and Scriptural exegesis (pretty much everywhere). Even the Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century was not nearly so opposed to faith as has often been presented. Lots of people were accused of atheism, but nobody really was one yet. In the eighteenth century, it's something mean you say about someone you don't like. If anything, it is the nineteenth century that invents the Scientist as a figure opposed to faith. Before that, scientific enquiry and faith got along fine, and were even amazingly productive for a few centuries, inventing microscopes and steam engines and theorizing cells and the ideal gas law, all while believing in God.

Dawkins, in his zeal to pretend that science and religion are somehow incompatible, in the face of the historical evidence, instead of a (historically-coherent) Gouldian model, comes off as a bigot and gets everyone pissed off. So, when Dembski says that Dawkins is God's gift to Creationists, I see what he means.