[PAA-Discuss] Man vs. God

[Ron and Kris Graham]

I found this article on internet news and thought it was interesting.

 

Kris

 

*	The Wall Street Journal

*	LIFE
<http://online.wsj.com/public/search?article-doc-type=%7BLife+%26+Style%7D&H
EADER_TEXT=life+%26+style>  & STYLE
*	SEPTEMBER 12, 2009


Essays 


Man vs. God 


We commissioned Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins to respond independently
to the question "Where does evolution leave God?" Neither knew what the
other would say. Here are the results.


Karen Armstrong says we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence


Richard Dawkins has been right all along, of course-at least in one
important respect. 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. The fossil record reveals a natural history of pain, death and
racial extinction, so if there was a divine plan, it was cruel, callously
prodigal and wasteful. 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. No wonder so many fundamentalist Christians
find their faith shaken to the core.

[GOD_cov2]Nippon Television Network 


Richard
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574405030643556324.h
tml#U10156404922R1E>  Dawkins argues that evolution leaves God with nothing
to do 


But Darwin may have done religion-and God-a favor by revealing a flaw in
modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance,
our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped-even primitive. In
the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers
understood that what we call "God" is merely a symbol that points beyond
itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved
but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate
lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart. 

But by the end of the 17th century, instead of looking through the symbol to
"the God beyond God," Christians were transforming it into hard fact. Sir
Isaac Newton had claimed that his cosmic system proved beyond doubt the
existence of an intelligent, omniscient and omnipotent creator, who was
obviously "very well skilled in Mechanicks and Geometry." Enthralled by the
prospect of such cast-iron certainty, churchmen started to develop a
scientifically-based theology that eventually made Newton's Mechanick and,
later, William Paley's Intelligent Designer essential to Western
Christianity.

But the Great Mechanick was little more than an idol, the kind of human
projection that theology, at its best, was supposed to avoid. God had been
essential to Newtonian physics but it was not long before other scientists
were able to dispense with the God-hypothesis and, finally, Darwin showed
that there could be no proof for God's existence. This would not have been a
disaster had not Christians become so dependent upon their scientific
religion that they had lost the older habits of thought and were left
without other resource. 

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WSJ Illustration 

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Symbolism was essential to premodern religion, because it was only possible
to speak about the ultimate reality-God, Tao, Brahman or
Nirvana-analogically, since it lay beyond the reach of words. Jews and
Christians both developed audaciously innovative and figurative methods of
reading the Bible, and every statement of the Quran is called an ayah
("parable"). St Augustine (354-430), a major authority for both Catholics
and Protestants, insisted that if a biblical text contradicted reputable
science, it must be interpreted allegorically. This remained standard
practice in the West until the 17th century, when in an effort to emulate
the exact scientific method, Christians began to read scripture with a
literalness that is without parallel in religious history. 

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. Some
cosmologies taught people how to unlock their own creativity, others made
them aware of the struggle required to maintain social and political order.
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, though-as we can see in the Bible-some of
the exiles preferred a more aggressive cosmology. 

There can never be a definitive version of a myth, because it refers to the
more imponderable aspects of life. To remain effective, it must respond to
contemporary circumstance. In the 16th century, when Jews were being
expelled from one region of Europe after another, the mystic Isaac Luria
constructed an entirely new creation myth that bore no resemblance to the
Genesis story. But instead of being reviled for contradicting the Bible, it
inspired a mass-movement among Jews, because it was such a telling
description of the arbitrary world they now lived in; backed up with special
rituals, it also helped them face up to their pain and discover a source of
strength.

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. 

-Ms. Armstrong is the author of numerous books on theology and religious
affairs. The latest, "The Case for God," will be published by Knopf later
this month.


Richard Dawkins argues that evolution leaves God with nothing to do


Before 1859 it would have seemed natural to agree with the Reverend William
Paley, in "Natural Theology," that the creation of life was God's greatest
work. Especially (vanity might add) human life. Today we'd amend the
statement: Evolution is the universe's greatest work. Evolution is the
creator of life, and life is arguably the most surprising and most beautiful
production that the laws of physics have ever generated. Evolution, to quote
a T-shirt sent me by an anonymous well-wisher, is the greatest show on
earth, the only game in town.

Indeed, evolution is probably the greatest show in the entire universe. Most
scientists' hunch is that there are independently evolved life forms dotted
around planetary islands throughout the universe-though sadly too thinly
scattered to encounter one another. And if there is life elsewhere, it is
something stronger than a hunch to say that it will turn out to be Darwinian
life. The argument in favor of alien life's existing at all is weaker than
the argument that-if it exists at all-it will be Darwinian life. But it is
also possible that we really are alone in the universe, in which case Earth,
with its greatest show, is the most remarkable planet in the universe. 

[GOD_cov1]Bettmann/CORBIS 

Charles Darwin

What is so special about life? It never violates the laws of physics.
Nothing does (if anything did, physicists would just have to formulate new
laws-it's happened often enough in the history of science). But although
life never violates the laws of physics, it pushes them into unexpected
avenues that stagger the imagination. If we didn't know about life we
wouldn't believe it was possible-except, of course, that there'd then be
nobody around to do the disbelieving!

The laws of physics, before Darwinian evolution bursts out from their midst,
can make rocks and sand, gas clouds and stars, whirlpools and waves,
whirlpool-shaped galaxies and light that travels as waves while behaving
like particles. It is an interesting, fascinating and, in many ways, deeply
mysterious universe. But now, enter life. Look, through the eyes of a
physicist, at a bounding kangaroo, a swooping bat, a leaping dolphin, a
soaring Coast Redwood. There never was a rock that bounded like a kangaroo,
never a pebble that crawled like a beetle seeking a mate, never a sand grain
that swam like a water flea. Not once do any of these creatures disobey one
jot or tittle of the laws of physics. Far from violating the laws of
thermodynamics (as is often ignorantly alleged) they are relentlessly driven
by them. Far from violating the laws of motion, animals exploit them to
their advantage as they walk, run, dodge and jink, leap and fly, pounce on
prey or spring to safety.

Never once are the laws of physics violated, yet life emerges into uncharted
territory. And how is the trick done? The answer is a process that, although
variable in its wondrous detail, is sufficiently uniform to deserve one
single name: Darwinian evolution, the nonrandom survival of randomly varying
coded information. We know, as certainly as we know anything in science,
that this is the process that has generated life on our own planet. And my
bet, as I said, is that the same process is in operation wherever life may
be found, anywhere in the universe.

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WSJ Illustration 

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What if the greatest show on earth is not the greatest show in the universe?
What if there are life forms on other planets that have evolved so far
beyond our level of intelligence and creativity that we should regard them
as gods, were we ever so fortunate (or unfortunate?) as to meet them? Would
they indeed be gods? Wouldn't we be tempted to fall on our knees and worship
them, as a medieval peasant might if suddenly confronted with such miracles
as a Boeing 747, a mobile telephone or Google Earth? But, however god-like
the aliens might seem, they would not be gods, and for one very important
reason. They did not create the universe; it created them, just as it
created us. 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.

To midwife such emergence is the singular achievement of Darwinian
evolution. It starts with primeval simplicity and fosters, by slow,
explicable degrees, the emergence of complexity: seemingly limitless
complexity-certainly up to our human level of complexity and very probably
way beyond. There may be worlds on which superhuman life thrives, superhuman
to a level that our imaginations cannot grasp. But superhuman does not mean
supernatural. Darwinian evolution is the only process we know that is
ultimately capable of generating anything as complicated as creative
intelligences. Once it has done so, of course, those intelligences can
create other complex things: works of art and music, advanced technology,
computers, the Internet and who knows what in the future? Darwinian
evolution may not be the only such generative process in the universe. There
may be other "cranes" (Daniel Dennett's term, which he opposes to
"skyhooks") that we have not yet discovered or imagined. But, however
wonderful and however different from Darwinian evolution those putative
cranes may be, they cannot be magic. They will share with Darwinian
evolution the facility to raise up complexity, as an emergent property, out
of simplicity, while never violating natural law.

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. 

-Mr. Dawkins is the author of "The Selfish Gene," "The Ancestor's Tale,"
"The God Delusion." His latest book, "The Greatest Show on Earth," will be
published by Free Press on Sept. 22.

 

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