Whenever I read something crazy in the Times – usually by Brooks – I bookmark it with the intention to blog my reaction. I have a whole backlog of Brooks columns to comment on and half-written posts brim full of bile.

More often though, I’ll run across someone else who did  better tear down than I could ever write.

Read Taibblog’s – more than half crazy himself – tear down of Stanley Fish’s nonsense review of Terry Eagleton’s new book. He captured both the points that annoyed me so – and then some.

First, Fish’s/Eagleton’s claim that God is not a knowable thing:

Eagleton:

For one thing, of course, God differs from Unidentified Flying Objects or the Yeti or the Tooth Fairy in not being even a possible object of cognition… it’s not just we cannot see Him, it is as it were that our not seeing him is inherent to God Himself, which is presumably not true of the Yeti.

Taibblog:

Got that? It’s not that we can’t see God — it’s that God is inherently unseen! Take that, atheists!

Second is the claim that science doesn’t have all the answers therefor we need religion.

Eagleton:

Reason dismisses faith because faith lacks the certainty of knowledge.

But, reason alone has been proven to be completely inadequate to solve the problems of the world, and has proven especially feeble at providing man with the answers to his questions about the nature of existence.

Therefore, reason was wrong about faith.

Taibblog:

The whole premise recalls Woody Allen’s famous syllogism: “Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.”