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Reviewed here: Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, by Terry Eagleton; Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for the Cosmic Consciousness, by Victor J. Stenger

Religious belief has taken a beating on the bookshelves in the past few years, suffering the devastating one-two-three punch of bestsellers by atheists Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

Now, Terry Eagleton bravely steps into the ring to try a little literary jujitsu in defence of religion. And if he doesn't quite win the match, he does avoid the wilder swings of his huffing opponents, and even manages a throw or two.

• Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, by Terry Eagleton, Yale University Press, 185 pages, $31.50

If you think the fight metaphor is overwrought, you probably haven't been paying attention. Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens are brawlers, their arguments about the nature of science and belief laced with anti-religious invective. Religion, they say, is not only false, it's also ridiculous, hateful and harmful.

The trouble with Dawkins and Hitchens, Eagleton says (he doesn't take on Harris) is not that their views are outrageous or blasphemous, but that they are too conventional, too old-fashioned, too bourgeois, too ... suburban (ouch!).

Both men have fallen for the Enlightenment fallacy of human progress and are complacent about the problems that exist in our technological, capitalist society. They are also naive about the philosophical problems of belief. And when it comes to religion, both men seem to be completely ignorant of theology, Eagleton says. Their critiques of religion are directed at simplistic, fundamentalist versions of religion that he himself despises.

So he lays out a religious view that he thinks holds up better than fundamentalism. Eagleton, a literary critic and theorist and a professor at the University of Lancaster, is also a Marxist, and he outlines a left-wing Catholic theology he discovered while a student at Cambridge in the 1960s.

“ Eagleton is coy about whether he still subscribes to the beliefs he outlines, although he writes as though he does ”

Eagleton paints a picture of Jesus as a radical and a revolutionary who meant to usher in a kingdom of justice and fellowship, but who knew the change would require “a turbulent passage through death, nothingness, madness, loss, and futility.” Rather than bringing comfort, true Christianity offers an almost tragic view of the world and demands sacrifice and even a willingness to die from its followers.

God himself is not a giant being in the sky but more a condition of reality: “God for Christian theology is not a mega-manufacturer. He is rather what sustains all things in being by his love. ... God is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever.”

Eagleton is coy about whether he still subscribes to the beliefs he outlines, although he writes as though he does. The important point, he says, is that the atheists need to critique beliefs such as these that are not “stupid, vicious, or absurd.”

At the same time, he carefully undercuts any position from which to make a rational critique. An atheist's belief that reason is the best tool for understanding the world cannot be defended by an appeal to reason alone. Why should we value reason so highly in the first place?

Besides, the concept of God he advances does not seem to be amenable to reason. “Not being any sort of entity himself, he is not to be reckoned up alongside (other) things, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects,” Eagleton writes. Elsewhere he tells us that for the believer, the resurrection of Christ was a real, literal event – but not in the sense that you could have taken a picture of it occurring. Faced with paradoxes like these, a rationalist is likely to throw up his hands.

I'm happy to see the case made for sophisticated religious belief, if only to counteract the arrogance and condescension of Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens. I agree with them that God does not exist, and I think Dawkins especially does a good job of making the case. Unlike them, I don't believe that religion (and by extension religious believers) is stupid, ridiculous or hateful. At least, no more so than most other human institutions.

And Eagleton is an unconventional and entertaining thinker. His book is as much about capitalism, politics and literary criticism as it is about religion. (The index has almost as many references to Karl Marx as to Jesus Christ, and almost as many to postmodernism as to Christianity.)

The disappointment, in the end, is that while Eagleton lays out the details of one particular strand of Catholic belief, he never explains why he or anyone else should actually believe it. The religion he describes may be sophisticated, beautiful, even radical. But is it true? He would probably find the question bourgeois.

From the other end of the belief spectrum we get Quantum Gods, in which physicist and atheist Victor J. Stenger takes on pseudoscientific and spiritual beliefs that try to use quantum mechanics to justify their claims.

What Stenger calls “quantum spirituality” uses quantum mechanics to argue that the human mind can directly affect the material world. “Quantum theology” claims that quantum mechanics give God room to act in the world without violating natural laws.

• Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for the Cosmic Consciousness, by Victor J. Stenger, Prometheus, 292 pages, $33.95

In general, the quantum spiritualists claim that quantum mechanics has proved that there is some sort of cosmic mind, or that people somehow create their own reality with their thoughts. For instance, a popular claim is that putting out “positive energy” will somehow attract money, success or some other tangible benefit.

Quantum theologists, on the other hand, find a place for God to act on the world through the uncertainty principle. (The act of measuring one magnitude of a particle, whether mass, velocity or position, causes the other magnitudes to blur.) Because a God who tinkers with his universe would be observable to us, quantum theologians suggest that he works on the quantum scale, where quantum uncertainty guarantees that he would be undetectable. By exerting his influence only in small, undetectable ways, he can have a cumulative impact on the non-quantum world.

Stenger walks us through the basics of physics to refute these ideas. Quantum spiritualist ideas are mostly incoherent and based on a misunderstanding of the physics, he writes. A lot of these claims result from the misinterpretation of one of the oddest facts of quantum physics, that certain properties of particles don't exist until they are actually observed. But Stenger explains that an “observer” doesn't have to be a person; it can also be a passive measuring device. Even on the quantum level, our minds don't make things happen.

And quantum theology runs up against the fact that if God really is working on the quantum level, his work will either have a statistically measurable effect, in which case we will see him at work; or else it will have no measurable effect, in which case he might as well not bother. God can't hide his handiwork in the quantum world.

Stenger has written many books about God and science, and done it best in God: The Failed Hypothesis – How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. There, he argues convincingly that the universe we see behaves exactly as we would expect it to if there were no God.

Quantum Gods is less strong thematically, and wanders from topic to topic. Stenger ridicules a number of pseudoscientific beliefs in some chapters, and in others gives us quick lessons in the basics of physics, often referring us to other of his books where he has taken more time to explain the same things. The result feels scattered, more a series of afterthoughts than a book in its own right. Better to read Stenger's previous work.

Discussion about the existence and nature of God has been going on for thousands of years, and even the science-versus-religion debate is hundreds of years old. So it's been surprising and gratifying to see the topic climb to the top of the bestseller lists in recent years. These two books, though, are secondary works – one a rebuttal, the other a tying up of loose ends. They will be interesting to people already immersed in the topic. But they may also be a sign that the subject is playing itself out, at least in terms of mass-market publishing. I wonder if the day of the big God books isn't over, at least for now.

Kurt Kleiner is a Toronto-based writer who writes frequently about science and religion.