Eagleton is a treat to read, although some past professors of mine have been kind of hostile to him.
He's dead wrong on Dawkins, too.
How so? I'm pretty anti-Dawkins, but I haven't read enough to really defend my opinion - just that I tend to like a lot of his enemies from radically different disciplines, like Eagleton and Stephen Jay Gould. And I hate Hitchens, with whom he is often lumped (fairly or not) and have since before he was calling for Kissinger's head.
Richard Dawkins, for some reason, inspires a lot of backlash. Unfortunately, a lot of it is based on a distorted view of his arguments, based on no more than his use of the word "selfish" to describe the "motives" of a gene, with the false logical leap that he must think that selfishness is natural and good and how we ought to be. Quite to the contrary, although he points out that we can't ignore the role genes have in shaping us, he argues that we human beings really shouldn't give a rat's ass what our genes want. Because we're not them.
If I were you, I'd read his book
River Out of Eden, which is a brief introduction to his thoughts on evolution. I'd recommend
The Blind Watchmaker or
Unweaving the Rainbow next. The controversy with Gould was many-faceted, and I can't pretend to understand all of it. Most of it seems to boil down to emphasis-- do you think that it is better to view evolution from the perspective of the replicator (Dawkins) or the animal/species (Gould)?
As far as his views on religion, Dawkins at no point suggests that the study of religion as a social institution is wrong. He does not slight the fantastic contributions religion and religious people have made to culture. He acknowledges that is may very well be true that we'd have a better society if everyone were Episcopalian. None of that is germane to his argument, which is that religion is false.
(Yes yes, actually that it's extremely unlikely and as we haven't seen any evidence for it we should act as though it were as false even though you can never be certain of anything)I've read Eagleton's essay against
The God Delusion, as well as listened to his lecture series on theology (available free through iTunes U). I actually have a lot in common with Eagleton in that I'm a non-believer who finds a lot of religious writings, particularly Catholic theology, to be very interesting. I am also disgusted by uninformed dismissals of religion, and religious people. But Eagleton is going after a straw man. Dawkins has well thought-out reasons for the approach he takes.
Basically, I think Dawkin's analogy that you don't need to address the arguments of fairy-ology in order to dismiss the likelihood of the existence of fairies is correct. Theology is all about what you do to understand God after you've taken the plunge. The sophisticated thinkers Eagleton likes to mention don't do a better job of demonstrating the existence of God in the first place than your standard apologetics texts. Eagleton seems to think very highly of the view that "God is the reason why there is something rather than nothing" or that "God is the necessary condition for existence." But he is attacking Dawkins for failing to see the explanatory power or elegance of an idea that he sees no reason to accept in the first place. That Eagleton himself does not subscribe to! (Not to mention that in my view that such "explanations" simply add a step (Why does God exist rather than not? Why can't the universe itself be self-justifying? Etc.), and that I've read secular thinkers attack the problem in an extraordinary rigorous way (there's a great chapter in Nozick's
Philosophical Investigations, for instance) that belies any assumption that these are questions suitable only for mystics).
In the end, I think Eagleton is so taken with the beauty of some theological ideas (like the admittedly wonderful "radical superfluity of existence" argument) that he's a bit annoyed when someone like Dawkins comes around to remind him that they're not actually true. From this and from reading his writings on literary theory, I believe that Eagleton is just
into recherché conceptual frameworks for their own sake. This approach is totally alien to a scientist like Dawkins, who at least fancies himself ready to move on from a theory without remorse once it's been disproved.
Finally, Dawkins rejects all supernatural claims, not just Christianity. Would Eagleton think that Dawkins must become a Koranic scholar before he can be a complete atheist?
edit:
I can't believe I just spent a half hour composing a message board post.