September 15, 2009

After reading Karen Armstrong's defense of theism in an age of Darwin, one is tempted to moan, "With friends like this, who needs enemies?" As it turns out, sometimes we do need enemies, honest enemies who see right through the meretricious hand-waving of contemporary theologians like Armstrong bent on dressing up self-defeat as victory. Richard Dawkins, our world-village atheist, turns out to be the hero of the debate, the unwitting witty champion of God. Bless Dawkins!—he at least knows a shoddy idol when he sees it tottering in front of him, and he destroys it with admirable verve.

The interesting thing about the pseudo-debate was that neither Armstrong nor Dawkins knew what the other would write. That makes Dawkins' flourish at the end even more delicious. After dismissing God, Dawkins dismisses the sophistry of sophisticated theologians who treat the annihilation of belief as a blessing:

"Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: 'Good heavens, of course we are not so naïve 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.'"

Dawkins couldn't have described Armstrong more accurately if he'd had her in front of him sitting for an intellectual portrait! As Dawkins rightly concludes, such sophistry is only suicide posing as progress. ("You can't kill me! I'm already dead! Hah!") It is also the creed of a very small sect. In Dawkins' stinging words, "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."

Dawkins, unlike Armstrong, at least has the merit of knowing what he doesn't believe. That is why he informs such sophisticated modern theologians that they are, in fact, really atheists.

What, then, did Armstrong say? And even more important, why did she say it? Here, a history lesson would help (especially as a corrective to Armstrong's erroneous historical account).

In the 17th century, reductionist materialism and modern atheism arose together as fast friends. The goal of the atheists was to describe the universe in such a way that God, the soul, and pesky religion could be systematically eliminated from the cosmos. Like their great, great, great, great grandson Richard Dawkins, the early Enlightenment atheists believed that God was a delusion, and a harmful one at that. For them, religion was not only false but the cause of bloody political conflict. If that weren't enough, it ruined our chances for a good time in this world by focusing our attentions solely on the next.

These materialist-atheists therefore asserted that nothing exists except lifeless, inert, mindless atoms randomly and eternally jostling about, and that's where everything came from. It gave them a God-proof cosmos. They defined both science and rationality accordingly. That is, to be scientific, you had to be a strict, card-carrying materialist; to be rational, meant you had to give up any and all belief that immaterial beings (God, the human soul, ghosts, etc.) existed.

Once this view of science and rationality became generally accepted as definitive (roughly, the 19th century, the century of Darwin), then one was faced with two choices: either give up belief in God as irrational and unscientific, or fashion one's theology so that one's religion was entirely irrational and unscientific. So it is no accident at all that the 19th century was filled with "sophisticated" attempts by theologians to create various versions of irrational and unscientific faiths. Most of them boiled down to saying that faith wasn't about objective facts (like the existence of God, the Incarnation, or the resurrection), but about subjective feelings. Redefining faith as a merely irrational internal feeling seemed a safe way to guard it against militant atheism that demanded that religion be entirely dismissed as unscientific and hence unworthy of the bright new age of Enlightenment.

Of course, it was not safe, but merely a laughable capitulation of theologians. It created an enviable win-win situation for the materialist atheist, the very situation that defines the Armstrong-Dawkins "debate." Dawkins has given up belief in God as irrational and unscientific, and Armstrong glories in refashioning her religion as entirely irrational and unscientific. As Dawkins cheerfully points out, Armstrong's glory is merely gussied up self-defeat.

So we are not surprised that Armstrong begins by thanking Richard Dawkins profusely for killing of the notion that God is an Intelligent Creator. She thinks it much better to accept that "life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection," and that human beings in particular are "not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation" but "like everything else, they evolved by trial and error and God had no direct hand in their making." Indeed, "Darwin may have done religion—and God—a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith."

Oh really? What is that flaw? What is that favor? As it turns out—and this is all very sophisticated, mind you—the flaw is the belief that God exists. And apparently we have Darwin to thank for doing us the favor of disabusing us of that silly notion. By knocking God out of the cosmos, we may finally realize, with a sigh of relief, that "what we call 'God' is merely a symbol that points 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." In short (very short), religion is therapeutic. It is a handy symbol that somehow or other helps "us live creatively with realities for which there are no easy solutions and find an interior haven of peace;…" Away with "the idols of certainty and back to the 'God beyond God.' The best theology is a spiritual exercise, akin to poetry."

To quip from Dawkins, that is "so 19th-century." As with Armstrong, the capitulating theologians of the 19th-century thought they could find refuge from the acids of materialist-defined science, by lapsing into a kind of dogma-less romantic reverie of emotion, something that made them a little warmer in the cold, law-governed, meaningless cosmos of the materialists. They thus tended toward a kind of western-washed Buddhism that tried to deny any significance to the cold reality described by materialist scientists. So it was that they closed their eyes to reality and with a Buddha-like smile, turned inward to a safe and happy haven of subjective feeling. The problem with worshipping one's own irrational feelings, however, is that it makes one's own feelings into a God—and that is the worst and most dangerous idol of all.

What Armstrong should have done—what the 19th-century theologians should have done—was examine more critically the materialist-atheist presuppositions that defined the age, especially those that defined Charles Darwin's particular version of evolutionary theory. She (and they) might have discovered that both reason and science were much larger and more expansive than the shrunken editions proposed by reductionists bent on squeezing God out of the picture.

Responses to Apologetics at Saddleback:

Great article on what was certainly a great event. I must regrettably call attention to Norman Geisler's unfortunate statement about "predictions about the first coming in the Old Testament" that were fulfilled "literally." This, I believe, seriously misstates the actual relationship of what we Christians call "messianic prophecy" to the events of the Gospels. Many of the texts cited by the Gospels as "fulfilled" by Jesus were not in fact specific or literal predictions at all, not in the sense that one normally understands the term "predictions." Rather, they belonged to the larger biblical narrative of Israel's history and biblical commentary on that history, which contained various promises--pledges by God to act redemptively in keeping with his covenant with his people--that God fulfills as he keeps his word in actions that the Gospels narrate. To illustrate, yes, Jesus was literally born in Bethlehem (Matthew 2:1), and the prophet Micah did indeed speak of a shepherd for Israel who would come from Bethlehem (Micah 5:1, 3). But in Israel's scriptures Micah's words were a reiteration of a divine promise made generations before, that God would establish his rule through a coming son of David (2 Samuel 7:14ff). As the context Micah's statement illustrates, Micah gives not so much a prediction of the exact place of that one's birth as a reminder of God's promise to send the promised Davidic king. Counting this text as a prediction literally fulfilled actually overlooks its literal sense. For other, even more telling examples of this issue, one can look at the other passages cited as fulfilled by in Matthew 2, including Hosea 11:1, in context a reference to the Exodus; Jeremiah 31:15; and even a promise ascribed to "the prophets" that doesn't appear literally in the Old Testament (Matthew 2:23). Dr. Geisler is very correct in the larger sense: that if God has indeed acted as he pledged in bringing a solution to the problem of evil in Christ, then he will surely bring that to completion in the future. This line of reasoning happens to be very biblical as well (Romans 8:32). The idea that such texts must be literal predictions literally fulfilled actually obscures the larger point that Geisler rightly addresses: that the problem of evil is satisfactorily answered by Christian soteriology and eschatology, rightly understood. This helps us understand why Luke's gospel affirms that it's not simply 100 or so "predictions" that are fulfilled by Jesus but the entirety of Israel's Scriptures (Luke 24:44).. Christian apologetics suffers too often from right-headed discussion that misstates facts. This happens to be an example of such a misstatement. However, it should not obscure the larger good that events like this accomplish. - Jon Weatherly, PhD

Moreland - I graduated from Drew Theological Seminary in Madison, N.J. At that time biblical studies there were dominated by the ideas of Rudolph Bultman, who denied all biblical miracles. Bultman and my fellow students defended his denial of miracles with this statement: "God would not break the natural laws He created." I have a response to that statement that I have not heard used by any who are in debate with the atheists.. When you say that Jesus broke natural laws you are assuming that Jesus had to break them in order to heal. But, consider this. Maybe He did not. Maybe there are some natural laws known to Jesus that we have not yet discovered. In biblical times a display of an electric light bulb would have been called a miracle, but it broke no natural laws. Your reasoning is flawed if you assume you are fully informed as to Jesus' knowledge and practices. GEISLER - This gentleman gives a statement that explains why God allows evil and his statement is n a flat - this is it - style. I am constantly appalled by people who assume they know the mind of God. The truth is that we do nor know why God allows evil. Any explanation is a speculation. The quality (and accuracy) of the teachings of theologians, ministers and and teachers would be vastly elevated if they learned to say, "I do not know, but perhaps..............." Aside from those two points, I thought your series was excellent. Thanks for making it available. - Jean Furgal

Response to John White's Letter - Mr White writes: "I'm not at all convinced that this scientific knowledge is destructive to our faith." He is quite right. Knowledge from scientific research is not destructive. It is not the findings or knowledge that is destructive, it is the materialistic philosophy which guides the scientist which is destructive. I believe God uses science and scientific research to help us understand more fully His design in creation and we benefit from such findings. But if we accept the underlying philosophy of materialism, then we have adopted a secular worldview. - Pax Christi

Responses to A Good Bad Example:

Hello! I am a Canadian, a physician who has been licensed to practice in Ontario for the past 47 years. I still remember my astonishment and shock when I went to one of the northern states to attend an international meeting and walked though a predominantly black neighbourhood. Within a single block I saw three teenagers who quite obviously were suffering from hip dysplasia, a crippling condition that is easily diagnosed and usually corrected during infancy (at least in Canada and other "socialist" countries). In the next block I saw two more teenagers with the same problem. These black kids had lived for the whole of their lives with a crippling but potentially correctable condition, something that would have been treated during infancy if only they had managed to be born in Canada. What a waste of potential! I have been a member of the teaching faculty at the Queen's University medical school for 31 years, and a member of the Attending Staff in Oncology at the Kingston General Hospital for 20 of those years. I have seen a lot of elderly people die from cancer, many of whom were my own patients. However, not once did I see even the poorest patient denied any necessary treatment because of the expense, and we certainly had no "death panels" to finish off any terminally ill patients. Instead, we had palliative care to make them as comfortable as possible. Like any system, our Canadian health care system has defects. Defects can be fixed. However, even with its defects, I find that there is great comfort for me, as a Christian, in being able to give every cancer patient the best treatment available regardless of their ability to pay. In so doing I am obeying the command of Jesus to love your neighbour as yourself, and to do unto others what you would have them do unto you. I have very great difficulty in understanding the reasoning of Christians who oppose healing the sick and comforting the dying if they cannot pay for such help. The Apostle James put it very well. "What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. [James 2:14-17] The webpage at http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/692614 offers an interesting comparison of the American and Canadian healthcare systems. Since newspaper webpages may be rather ephemeral, I have included the article (see below). Please note that the author was a former executive with three insurance companies. - J.C. (Jim) Kennedy, MD, PhD Professor Emeritus, Department of Oncology Queen's University Kingston, Ontario CANADA

Benjamin Wiker holds a Ph.D. in Theological Ethics from Vanderbilt University, and has taught at Marquette University, St. Mary's University (MN), Thomas Aquinas College (CA), and Franciscan University (OH).

He is a full-time writer, husband, and father. Dr. Wiker is a Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute and a Senior Fellow at the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology.

Dr. Wiker has written seven books, his newest are Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins' Case Against God (Emmaus, co-authored with Scott Hahn), Ten Books that Screwed Up the World(Regnery), and his most recent publication is The Darwin Myth: the Life and Lies of Charles Darwin (Regnery).