photo by Molinovski
This past weekend, The Wall Street Journal served up a debate of sorts between celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins and author Karen Armstrong, whose latest book is called “The Case for God.” The premise of the debate was simple: “Where does evolution leave God?”
It’s an odd little question, what with the theory of evolution now 150 years old, and with God still being very much among us. The answer seems, in a sense, both self-evident and, frankly, irrelevant. Nevertheless, both Dawkins and Armstrong felt the question compelling enough to answer.
Now, I personally find Dawkins to be one of the new atheist movement’s shrillest, snarkiest and, in many respects, least persuasive voices. But I didn’t find his essay half as disturbing as Armstrong’s — the voice representing all of us “believers” out here in the hinterlands.
The author, in attempting to keep God relevant in these scientific times, turned Him into an abstraction: A useful symbol to express our wonder and gratitude with the world around us.
I appreciated parts of her essay — when she writes, for instance, that “St. Augustine … insisted that if a biblical text contradicted reputable science, it must be interpreted allegorically.” This, I believe, is true. And I agree that theology is more art than science, and that God can’t be found through physics equations.
But she leads her article with this:
Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived. It tells us that there is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos, and that life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection, in which innumerable species failed to survive. … Human beings were not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation; like everything else, they evolved by trial and error and God had no direct hand in their making.
In short, the idea of an all-knowing, all-caring God — the sort of God we Christians tend to believe in — is woefully outdated. She goes on to say the only sort of god we should believe in these days is one built of abstraction and necessity. We must build myths to give our lives meaning, and if that means conjuring our own personal gods, so be it.
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. Some cosmologies taught people how to unlock their own creativity, others made them aware of the struggle required to maintain social and political order.
Dawkins, who did not read Armstrong’s essay before writing his own, nevertheless anticipated her tack and cuts through it brilliantly:
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.
The problem with this Wall Street Journal piece, in my opinion, is that it was built upon a faulty premise: It assumes that science and faith (as most of us understand it) are somehow locked in a primal death struggle, and it further assumes that faith (as most of us understand it) will lose. The paper, therefore, sought out a theologian who might salvage God (an interesting twist on Christianity’s themes of salvation) from irrelevance. And Armstrong tries to do so by turning God into a benign fairy tale.
The paper allows us only two options: A life without faith, or a faith without life.
Now, I share Armstrong’s love of myth, and I believe that stories often get closer to truth than science can. But for me to place faith in faith, it must be more than a set of imaginings that get me through my day. My beliefs can deal with paradox and uncertainty, but it’s pinned on a few central truths — and if those truths are not literally true, then I should be, as St. Paul says, pitied above all men. Given only two choices — Armstrong’s mythic theology and Dawkins’ atheism, I’d boldly, sadly, choose the latter.
Thankfully, we have more than two choices:
While Armstrong insists that the theory of evolution has “shaken to the core” the beliefs of many Christians, consider this: Darwin’s theory is 150 years old. In the 18th century, 100 years before Darwin, many thoughtful atheists assumed faith was on its last legs and we were nearing what they considered to be a glorious age of reason.
And yet centuries later, here we are, with most of the country, and most of the world, still stubbornly celebrating faith with awe and wonder. Many are scientists. Many are atheists newly returned to the fold. More people honor a Creator — and do good, charitable works in that Creator’s name — than at any time in our planet’s history.
Shaken to the core? Hardly. Faith, it seems, is not just surviving: It is thriving.
Religion endures not because we need it: It endures because, at its core, it speaks the truth: A truth both literal and literary, a truth that leaves telltale signs in math and music, science and poetry, nature and the supernatural. It is as tangible as the Rock of Gibraltar, as gossamer as a song. We do not need to settle for Armstrong’s pseudo-faith, for in our hands and hearts we hold the real thing.
