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.

Click here to read the exchange between Richard Dawkins and Karen Armstrong in the Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574405030643556324.html

Radio Host and President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Albert Mohler Dubbs the Armstrong-Dawkins Exchange "A Tale of Two Atheists"

The Wall Street Journal may be an unusual venue for theological debate, but this past weekend's edition featured just that -- a theological debate of sorts. The "of sorts" is a necessary qualifier in this instance, because The Wall Street Journal's debate was not, as advertised, a debate between an atheist and a believer. Instead, it was a debate between two different species of atheists.

http://www.albertmohler.com

Dallas Willard Describes How Modern Day Deism Has Devolved to Functional Atheism
The Half-Believer: Deism

"It is, of course, with reference to just such interventions and presence that Hume and others, such as (famously) Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine in the American context, along with a great deal of what is now called "liberal" Christianity, part company with "mere Christianity." For reasons to which we now turn, intervention into human affairs through events that lie outside the normal course of nature has been rejected by many people who nevertheless say they believe in the "laws of nature and nature's God." The term that has for centuries been applied to those who believe in "God, but no more" and that is accepted enthusiastically by them today is "deists." "Deist" and "deism" are words that emerged into the English usage in the course of philosophical controversies in Europe during the seventeenth century. Those controversies and the accompanying terminology continue to be influential today.

"Deist" derives from the Latin term for "God," and theist" from the Greek term for "God." Deists and theists both believe in the existence of a personal God. The deist, Immanuel Kant said, believes in a God, but theists believe in a living God, an acting God, such as is seen in the familiar biblical stories, while deists do not. So with regard to the intervention and presence of God in human life, deists believe much as atheists do---except old-fashioned deists often held the belief that God has a moral claim upon human lives and even that "in the end" they would stand before his judgment. In practical terms, however, contemporary deists are indistinguishable from atheists. The often rather intense moral interest of earlier deists has now vanished.

There can be little doubt about the primary impulse behind deism, which, again, it shares with much to be found in atheism and in many theologically liberal writers today. That is resistance to the claims of human beings to be able to speak and act for God and with God. Of course, such claims are central to biblical religion as well as to most of Christian history and to "mere Christianity." But it naturally calls forth resistance, because it seems to single out people in that tradition as having a "special place" with God and therefore a special authority among human beings.

Many people past and present have found this to be ominous or at least unwelcome. It naturally leads to resentment, anger, and rejection on the part of those "left out" or of those who claim a knowledge of God with a different content. Thus the earliest opponents of Christianity in the Roman world, such as Celsus, Prophyry, and Julian, responded to Christian claims of special actions by God with an objection that seems curiously contemporary. They said that Jesus himself was really a mere human whose disciples projected upon him the imaginary status of a divine being and thought up the miraculous events or conditions--such as his claims to be divine, his various miracles, and especially his resurrection--to support their projection.

Faithful to this approach is a modern definition of deism from the contemporary World Union of Deists: "Deism is the recognition of a universal creative force greater than that demonstrated by humankind, supported by personal observation of laws and designs in nature and the universe, perpetuated and validated by the innate ability of human reason coupled with the rejection of claims made by individuals and organized religions of having received special divine revelation." Many people of high standing in the field of New Testament scholarship today are essentially deistic or atheistic in their views, and they accordingly try to treat the central teachings of Christianity as human constructions requiring no events of miraculous intervention in human affairs to account for Christian history. This is no secret."

Dallas Willard
Knowing Christ Today

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism--the New American Religion

When Christian Smith and his fellow researchers with the National Study of Youth and Religion at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill took a close look at the religious beliefs held by American teenagers, they found that the faith held and described by most adolescents came down to something the researchers identified as "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism."

As described by Smith and his team, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism consists of beliefs like these: 1. "A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth." 2. "God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions." 3. "The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself." 4. "God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem." 5. "Good people go to heaven when they die."

That, in sum, is the creed to which much adolescent faith can be reduced. After conducting more than 3,000 interviews with American adolescents, the researchers reported that, when it came to the most crucial questions of faith and beliefs, many adolescents responded with a shrug and "whatever."

Albert Mohler

http://www.amazon.com/Soul-Searching-Christian-Smith/dp/B0010XZUXI

Sandy's Corner - Building A Relationship with Your Child

Have you ever noticed that when one person gives you a suggestion or says something, you get really upset or irritated? And when someone else says the exact same thing it doesn’t bother you at all? The difference is probably the quality of your relationship with that person.

In Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families, Covey talks about making emotional deposits to your child’s bank account. There will be times when parents make poor decisions and make withdrawals, but it won’t be as hurtful to the relationship/ emotional bank if there are enough positive deposits.

Examples of Deposits:
- Say your sorry
- Follow through on your promises
- Empathize with your child’s frustrations
- Be loyal to those not present
- Listen
- Model honesty, integrity, humility (or everything else you do is meaningless)

Later articles in this series will address discipline ideas. I am starting with relationship building because this will decrease the number of times you will have conflicts with your child.

Positive Self-Tapes
When your child does something positive, give them a specific complimentary phrase, not just "good boy." You ask your child to clean his room and it seems he has picked up everything. You say, "You cleaned your room. Good boy."

Two pitfalls here: First, maybe next time he doesn't clean up everything. Last time, you said "good boy." This time is he thinking he's a bad boy? Most of us have a messy garage but it would be ridiculous to assume we are bad people. Secondly, the child might have stuffed a few things under the bed so the child knows the word good doesn't apply to this situation and he is being falsely praised.

Try instead: You walk into the room and notice a few things stuffed under the bed. But he picked up the books and he hung up one shirt. You say, "I see the books back on the book shelf and the blue shirt hanging in the closet. That is what I call organization." He can take this success in organization and build on it.

Specific compliments can also be helpful:
"You picked up your brother's bottle. That is called being helpful."
"You waited for us to go to the park. That was very patient."

Send your letter to the editor to feedback@tothesource.org.