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April 05, 2012
London Review Bookshop
Simon Critchley: The Faith of the Faithless
After religious and political disappointment comes philosophy. Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York and Chief Philosopher of the INS, will be at the shop to discuss the arguments of his new book The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology, and to share with us his thoughts on violence, non-violence and Slavoj Žižek, the latest stage in the ongoing debate between the two which began in the pages of the LRB.
Critchley will be in conversation with Dr Giles Fraser, the former canon chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral who resigned in October 2011 in protest at plans to forcibly remove Occupy protesters from its steps.
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"An order for those who cannot believe" — Simon Critchley on Ditchkins and books
Simon Critchley, in a wide-ranging interview in the New Statesman, discusses "theologically engaged atheism", Dawkins, Hitchens, John Gray, Obama, and what the future holds for Occupy.
Picking up on an argument he makes in his new book The Faith of the Faithless, Critchley rejects that dichotomy between secularism and "theistic quietism", and argues that,
We cannot decide a priori that we're not going to engage with religious questions, nor can we decide a priori that religious questions are going to be the answers to philosophical or political issues.
Commenting on what he calls the "secularist dogmatism" of figures like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, Critchley discusses the relationship between science and belief that characterizes the present moment,
I accept not a scientific conception of the world - that is far too grand - but I think that scientists in their various fields are doing fairly well. Yet I don't think you can explain practices like mathematics on a naturalistic view of the world. Naturalism, underpinned by a progressivist notion of history, underwritten by evolution, is a dogma that our age suffers from.
But I understand why people embrace it, because it seems to offer an answer to superstitious theodicy.
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