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Dawkins, Armstrong Debate Evolution and God In the Wall Street Journal

By Howard M. Friedman

Under the caption Man vs. God, today's Wall Street Journal publishes a lengthy and interesting exchange between biologist Richard Dawkins and religious historian Karen Armstrong on evolution and the existence of God. Here is an excerpt from Dawkins article:

Making the universe is the one thing no intelligence, however superhuman, could do, because an intelligence is complex?statistically improbable ?and therefore had to emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings: from a lifeless universe?the miracle-free zone that is physics....

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.

Here is an excerpt from Armstrong's response:

Most cultures believed that there were two recognized ways of arriving at truth. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary, each with its own sphere of competence. Logos ("reason") was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to function effectively in the world and had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. But it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggle. For that people turned to mythos, stories that made no pretensions to historical accuracy but should rather be seen as an early form of psychology; if translated into ritual or ethical action, a good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity.

In the ancient world, a cosmology was not regarded as factual but was primarily therapeutic; it was recited when people needed an infusion of that mysterious power that had?somehow?brought something out of primal nothingness: at a sickbed, a coronation or during a political crisis..... The Genesis creation hymn, written during the Israelites' exile in Babylonia in the 6th century BC, was a gentle polemic against Babylonian religion. Its vision of an ordered universe where everything had its place was probably consoling to a displaced people....

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?

Full post as published by Religion Clause on September 12, 2009 (boomark / email).