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<p class=MsoNormal><b><font size=2 color=black face="Comic Sans MS"><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:black;font-weight:
bold'>I found this article on internet news and thought it was interesting.<o:p></o:p></span></font></b></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><b><font size=2 color=black face="Comic Sans MS"><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:black;font-weight:
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style='font-size:11.0pt'><a
href="http://online.wsj.com/public/search?article-doc-type=%7BLife+%26+Style%7D&HEADER_TEXT=life+%26+style">LIFE
& STYLE</a><o:p></o:p></span></font></li>
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mso-list:l2 level1 lfo2'><font size=2 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:11.0pt'>SEPTEMBER 12, 2009<o:p></o:p></span></font></li>
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<!-- ID: SB10001424052970203440104574405030643556324 --><!-- TYPE: Life & Style --><!-- DISPLAY-NAME: --><!-- PUBLICATION: The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition --><!-- DATE: 2009-09-12 00:01 --><!-- COPYRIGHT: Dow Jones & Company, Inc. --><!-- ORIGINAL-ID: --><!-- article start --><!--
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<h5><b><font size=2 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:10.0pt'>Essays
<o:p></o:p></span></font></b></h5>
<h1><b><font size=4 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:14.0pt'>Man
vs. God <o:p></o:p></span></font></b></h1>
<p><a name=U10156404922YQD djw_tabid=article></a><font size=3
face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<h6><b><font size=1 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:7.5pt'>Karen
Armstrong says we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence<o:p></o:p></span></font></b></h6>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><img border=0 width=262 height=394 id="_x0000_i1030"
src="cid:image002.jpg@01CA37BB.E2B38BB0" alt="[GOD_cov2]"><st1:place w:st="on"><cite><i><font
face="Times New Roman">Nippon</font></i></cite></st1:place><cite><i><font
face="Times New Roman"> Television Network</font></i></cite> <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<h6><b><font size=1 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:7.5pt'><a
href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574405030643556324.html#U10156404922R1E">Richard
Dawkins argues that evolution leaves God with nothing to do</a> <o:p></o:p></span></font></b></h6>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>But <st1:City
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Darwin</st1:place></st1:City> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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 <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Newton</st1:place></st1:City>'s
Mechanick and, later, William Paley's Intelligent Designer essential to Western
Christianity.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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, <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">Darwin</st1:place></st1:City> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>View Full
Image<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><img border=0 width=262 height=174 id="_x0000_i1031"
src="cid:image003.jpg@01CA37BB.E2B38BB0" alt="GOD_jump2"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><cite><i><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>WSJ Illustration</span></font></i></cite> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><img border=0 width=19 height=19 id="_x0000_i1032"
src="cid:image004.gif@01CA37BB.E2B38BB0" alt="GOD_jump2"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><img border=0 width=553 height=369 id="_x0000_i1033"
src="cid:image005.jpg@01CA37BB.E2B38BB0" alt="GOD_jump2"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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"). <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">St Augustine</st1:place></st1:City>
(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. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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 <st1:place w:st="on">Babylonia</st1:place>
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. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><a name=U10156404922V2></a><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>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 <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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?<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>Darwin</span></font></st1:place></st1:City> 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. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p><a name=U10156404922R1E></a><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>But what of the pain and waste that <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">Darwin</st1:place></st1:City> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><cite><i><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>—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.</span></font></i></cite><o:p></o:p></p>
<h6><b><font size=1 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:7.5pt'>Richard
Dawkins argues that evolution leaves God with nothing to do<o:p></o:p></span></font></b></h6>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><img border=0 width=262 height=394 id="_x0000_i1034"
src="cid:image006.jpg@01CA37BB.E2B38BB0" alt="[GOD_cov1]"><cite><i><font
face="Times New Roman">Bettmann/CORBIS</font></i></cite> <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=targetcaption><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>Charles Darwin<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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!<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>View Full
Image<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><img border=0 width=262 height=174 id="_x0000_i1035"
src="cid:image007.jpg@01CA37BB.E2B38BB0" alt="GOD_jump1"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><cite><i><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>WSJ Illustration</span></font></i></cite> <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><img border=0 width=19 height=19 id="_x0000_i1036"
src="cid:image004.gif@01CA37BB.E2B38BB0" alt="GOD_jump1"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'><img border=0 width=553 height=369 id="_x0000_i1037"
src="cid:image008.jpg@01CA37BB.E2B38BB0" alt="GOD_jump1"><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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."<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>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. <o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><cite><i><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>—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.</span></font></i></cite><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><font size=2 color=black face="Comic Sans MS"><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Comic Sans MS";color:black;font-weight:
bold'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></b></p>
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