The quotable Mister Feser

That would be Edward Feser, using his teaching gig in the philosophy department at Pasadena City College with the same aplomb that P.J. O'Rourke once brandished his own sheepskin from "second-tier" Miami University of Ohio.

Feser came again to my attention while gleefully skewering Mssrs. Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris (aka "The New Atheists") in his 2008 book, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism.

The Last Superstition is not for the faint of heart, but (as can be seen even in the pugnacious preface, which itself is worth the price of the book) it's a comprehensive and entertaining beatdown that amply rewards the patient reader.

What Feser calls the "last superstition" is secularism. While taking a sledge hammer to its pseudo-intellectual foundations, he sometimes keeps a martini at hand, and sometimes a Jolt cola (he's good about telling readers when they might want to do the same). One thing made glaringly apparent is that Feser is as impatient with some other apologists for traditional Christian viewpoints as he is with the atheists, but to his credit, he explains why-- he's impatient with anything that lacks intellectual rigor, including so-called "God of the Gaps" arguments.

Here's a taste of his logic and polemical style:

"How significant is Aristotle? Well, I wouldn't want to exaggerate, so let me put it this way: Abandoning Aristotelianism, as the founders of modern philosophy did, was the single greatest mistake ever made in the history of Western thought."

And later this:

"Here as elsewhere, Aquinas doesn't care, for the purposes of proving God's existence, how the universe got started or even whether it ever did. All that matters is that there are various causes here and now which are here and now directed to certain ends, and the argument is that these couldn't possibly exist at all if there were not a Supreme Intellect here and now ordering them to these ends. And this includes those causes operative in biological evolution. Nor is this a matter of "probability," but of conceptual necessity: it is not just unlikely, but conceptually impossible that there could be genuine final causation without a sustaining intellect."

Finally, one for the road from the old-school philosopher who read the "new atheists" so that the rest of us don't have to:

"If you think this is tedious, try plowing through Dennett's application of the methods of "evolutionary psychology" -- viz. the relentless piling of one sheer speculation upon another for hundreds of pages -- in the attempt to "explain" religion "naturalistically"; or Harris's flaky venture into Eastern meditation, which will leave you aching to get to the end of The End of Faith. If these guys don't believe in purgatory, they should read their own books."