Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins square off for the WSJ in "Man vs. God"

[laconicsax]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574405030643556324.html

Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins. According to Dawkins' web site, the WSJ commissioned both to write on the question "Where does Evolution Leave God?" They both knew the other was involved, but not what the other would write.

Both sides are too long to post in entirety and instead of selectively quoting each side and paraphrase in the rest, I'll just post their conclusions in the order they appear in the original article:

First Armstrong

Religion was not supposed to provide explanations that lay within the competence of reason but to help us live creatively with realities for which there are no easy solutions and find an interior haven of peace; today, however, many have opted for unsustainable certainty instead. But can we respond religiously to evolutionary theory? Can we use it to recover a more authentic notion of God?

Darwin made it clear once again that—as Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas and Eckhart had already pointed out—we cannot regard God simply as a divine personality, who single-handedly created the world. This could direct our attention away from the idols of certainty and back to the "God beyond God." The best theology is a spiritual exercise, akin to poetry. Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form that, like music or painting, introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is different from the purely rational and which cannot easily be put into words. At its best, it holds us in an attitude of wonder, which is, perhaps, not unlike the awe that Mr. Dawkins experiences—and has helped me to appreciate —when he contemplates the marvels of natural selection.

But what of the pain and waste that Darwin unveiled? All the major traditions insist that the faithful meditate on the ubiquitous suffering that is an inescapable part of life; because, if we do not acknowledge this uncomfortable fact, the compassion that lies at the heart of faith is impossible. The almost unbearable spectacle of the myriad species passing painfully into oblivion is not unlike some classic Buddhist meditations on the First Noble Truth ("Existence is suffering"), the indispensable prerequisite for the transcendent enlightenment that some call Nirvana—and others call God.

And Dawkins.

Where does that leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.

Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: "Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists. Existence is such a 19th-century preoccupation! It doesn't matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me. If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant? Such arrogance! Such elitism."

Well, if that's what floats your canoe, you'll be paddling it up a very lonely creek. The mainstream belief of the world's peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists. If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They'll be right.

[DeSwiss]

1. I love me some Karen Armstrong.....

...because she is an excellent religious writer and theological/historical researcher. But of course she's wrong as hell here:

"Religion was not supposed to provide explanations that lay within the competence of reason..."

This is precisely what religion was in its beginnings. Yet over time, as religion could no longer make any viable claims of ownership to "the facts" its first reaction was to try and forcefully and irrevocably change the facts. However, the facts wouldn't be silenced and ultimately even force of arms wouldn't work. So they finally embarked upon the existing method(s) of obfuscation and outright bullshittery.

Those don't work quite as well (if one is to keep a straight face, that is), but religion found that with the majority of the "believers" out there, they're just looking for a way to believe that doesn't make them look too foolish (as compared to their fellows), not whether it makes any sense to believe, based upon any evidence to do so. So they found they needn't have worried.

- But sorry Karen, I ain't buying religion's innocent goodie two-shoes act either. Them days is over.......

K&R

[laconicsax]

2. I'm finding myself more and more appreciative of apophatic theology.

There's just something about a theology that prevents people from saying "God is on our side" or "God wants this/that." I'd be nice if it were the prevailing school of theistic thought.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. I can't accept Armstrong's claim that Aquinas didn't believe in a personal God

She claims:

"Darwin made it clear once again that—as Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas and Eckhart had already pointed out—we cannot regard God simply as a divine personality, who single-handedly created the world."

Aquinas explicitly stated God created the world:

Therefore it is necessary to go back to some first mover, which is itself moved by nothing---and this all men know as God.
...
Hence we must presuppose some first efficient cause---which all call God.
...
Hence there must be presupposed something necessarily existing through its own nature, not having a cause elsewhere but being itself the cause of the necessary existence of other things---which all call God.
...
Therefore there exists something that is the cause of the existence of all things and of the goodness and of every perfection whatsoever---and this we call God.
...
Therefore there is something intelligent by which all natural things are arranged in accordance with a plan---and this we call God.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/aquinas3.html

And he was a mainstream Christian. He believed Jesus was God. So he also believed in a personal God. As did (and do) all Christians, long before the 17th Century. That was (and is) what makes them 'Christians', rather than Muslims, Jews, or other monotheists.

[laconicsax]

4. She was probably trying to make a point that only she understands.

When you position is that a perfect God is impossible to fully comprehend much less accurately describe, most of the argument has to be left unstated.

[laconicsax]

5. The President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary chimes in:

http://www.crosswalk.com/blogs/mohler/11608516/

He's none too happy with Armstrong's apophatic theology, accusing her of offering "a superficial and theologically reckless argument."

Near the end, he writes.

Interestingly, it is Dawkins, presented as the unbeliever in this exchange, who understands God better than Armstrong. In fact, Richard Dawkins the atheist rightly insists that Karen Armstrong is actually an atheist as well. "God's Rotweiller" [sic] sees through Armstrong's embrace of a "God beyond God."

...

We should at least give Dawkins credit here for knowing what he rejects. Here we meet an atheist who understands the difference between belief and unbelief. As for those, like Armstrong, who try to tell believers that it does not matter if God exists -- Dawkins informs them that believers in God will brand them as atheists. "They'll be right," Dawkins concludes.

So the exchange in The Wall Street Journal turns out to be a meeting of two atheist minds. The difference, of course, is that one knows he is an atheist when the other presumably claims she is not. Dawkins knows a fellow atheist when he sees one. Careful readers of The Wall Street Journal will come to the same conclusion.

Neat how an atheist gets to be "God's Rottweiler" and someone who considers themselves to be Christian whose latest book is titled The Case for God gets called an atheist.