Monday, May 18, 2009

...A little bit louder and a little bit worse

(via Onegoodmove)

Stanly Fish, New York Times WAHmbulance chaser, in part 2 of an ongoing spat against the primitive, unthinking nature of atheism:

If there is no thought without constraints (chains) and if the constraints cannot be the object of thought because they mark out the space in which thought will go on, what is noticed and perspicuous will always be a function of what cannot be noticed because it cannot be seen. [...]


Pking gets it right. “To torpedo faith is to destroy the roots of . . . any system of knowledge . . . I challenge anyone to construct an argument proving reason’s legitimacy without presupposing it . . . Faith is the base, completely unavoidable. Get used to it. It’s the human condition.” (All of us, not just believers, see through a glass darkly.) Religious thought may be vulnerable on any number of fronts, but it is not vulnerable to the criticism that in contrast to scientific or empirical thought, it rests on mere faith.


The first quote is absolutely meaningless. He utilizes a run-on sentence to wind a blathering thread around the pointless sophistry of theology.
The second is a declaration that reason and logic, without a pre-requisite acknowledgment that God is responsible for them, are no more helpful or valid than any nebulous opinion.

Don't read the rest of the article, there's not enough advil in close proximity, I assure you. Stanley Fish is old hat, and a blathering egotist. He wraps the article by linking to an op-ed saying that Fish is smarter than Richard Dawkins.

One more thing. A number of readers chided Eagleton and me for daring to enter the lists against the superior intellects of Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. E.R. Wood predicts that “if Fish debated Dawkins, Fish would lose by KO in every round.”

It would be hard to reply to that without seeming either defensive or boastful, so I’m happy to leave it to someone else. I refer you to a piece by syndicated columnist Paul Campos, which begins by asking, “Why is Stanley Fish so much smarter than Richard Dawkins?” Darned if I know.


Guy's a special kind of dick-suck, neh?

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