A Tale of Two Atheists

Observer
Observer's picture
Posts: 63
Joined: 2008-09-17
User is offlineOffline
A Tale of Two Atheists

Found this from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY. Kind of interesting. www.sbts.edu.

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.

The paper's "Weekend Journal" section front page for the September 12-13, 2009 edition featured articles by Richard Dawkins and Karen Armstrong set in opposing columns.  The paper headlined the feature as "Man vs. God: Two Prominent Thinkers Debate Evolution, Science, and the Role of Religion."  Well, the feature at least looked interesting.

Dawkins, after all, is probably the world's most famous atheist.  At the same time (and not coincidentally, he would insist) he is also the world's foremost defender of Darwin and evolutionary theory.  Karen Armstrong is a popularizer of works on world religion.  She takes a basically benign view of religion, arguing that the different religions of the world are avenues toward the same quest for meaning.  A former nun, she has written several books on themes and figures related to Islam, and she is a critic of what she terms "fundamentalist" religion.  She is a critic of "fundamentalism" on whom the media can depend for comment.

The paper presented the articles by Dawkins and Armstrong in an interesting format.  The article by Dawkins is headlined, "Evolution Leaves God with Nothing to Do."  Armstrong's essay is headlined, "We Need to Grasp the Wonder of Our Existence."

Predictably, Dawkins begins his article with Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution.  Evolution, Dawkins claims, has simply displaced God.  "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," he asserts.  Quoting a T-shirt, Dawkins insists that evolution "is the greatest show on earth, the only game in town."

As for God, evolution just renders deity a useless and vacuous concept.  "Where does that leave God?," Dawkins asks.  "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, he continues (presumably less kindly), "is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip."  God, who never existed in the first place, has now been fired.

Demonstrating the point that this exchange is really not a meaningful debate, Karen Armstrong begins her essay with this amazing statement:  "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."

Furthermore, she asserts that 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."

And yet, Armstrong insists that Darwin really did God a favor by forcing us to give up our "primitive" belief in his actual existence -- thus freeing us to affirm merely a "God beyond God" who exists only as a concept.

Along the way, Armstrong offers a superficial and theologically reckless argument that comes down to this:  Until the modern age, believers in God were not really believers in a God who was believed to exist.  Then along came Sir Issac Newton and the "modern" belief that God must exist in order to be God.  When Darwin came along to show "that there could be no proof for God's existence," he was doing God a favor -- allowing his survival as a mere symbol.

She makes statements that amount to elegant nonsense.  Consider this:  "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."  So she would have us to believe that, in centuries past, cosmology was merely therapy.  She simply makes the assertion and moves on.  Will anyone believe this nonsense?

Armstrong calls for the emergence of "a more authentic notion of God."  Her preferred concept of God would be about aesthetics, not theology.  "Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form," she intones.

Interestingly, it is Dawkins, presented as the unbeliever in this exchange, who understands God better than Armstrong.  In fact, Richard Dawkins the atheist rightly insists that Karen Armstrong is actually an atheist as well.  "Darwin's Rottweiller" sees through Armstrong's embrace of a "God beyond God."

He writes:  "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."

Clearly, this "certain class of sophisticated modern theologian" refers to those theologians who embrace theological non-realism.  Dawkins clearly lumps Karen Armstrong in the same category of deluded theologians.

"Well, if that's what floats your canoe, you'll be paddling it up a very lonely creek," Dawkins warns.  "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."

We should at least give Dawkins credit here for knowing what he rejects.  Here we meet an atheist who understands the difference between belief and unbelief.  As for those, like Armstrong, who try to tell believers that it does not matter if God exists --  Dawkins informs them that believers in God will brand them as atheists.  "They'll be right," Dawkins concludes.

So the exchange in The Wall Street Journal turns out to be a meeting of two atheist minds.  The difference, of course, is that one knows he is an atheist when the other presumably claims she is not.  Dawkins knows a fellow atheist when he sees one. Careful readers of The Wall Street Journal will come to the same conclusion.


HisWillness
atheistRational VIP!
HisWillness's picture
Posts: 4100
Joined: 2008-02-21
User is offlineOffline
That's really similar to the

That's really similar to the dichotomy I often present between the nonsensical god-thing, and the clear picture of gods that just make no sense. Armstrong is latching on to the nonsensical god-thing pretty hard, for what seems to be no reason.

In Dawkins' case, he can see what Armstrong is saying, which is exactly nothing. To make an assertion regarding what the ancients "really" believed is so unfounded as to be useless, for one thing. For another, if this notion of God is strictly a subjective superego, then why waste time discussing the concept otherwise? There's not much else to say, there.

Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence


Hambydammit
High Level DonorModeratorRRS Core Member
Hambydammit's picture
Posts: 8657
Joined: 2006-10-22
User is offlineOffline
 Quote:And yet, Armstrong

 

Quote:
And yet, Armstrong insists that Darwin really did God a favor by forcing us to give up our "primitive" belief in his actual existence -- thus freeing us to affirm merely a "God beyond God" who exists only as a concept.

If my eyes weren't attached in the back, they'd have rolled so far they came back around on the bottom.  With any other topic, discounting a theory means discounting a theory, but with God, it's really a victory, because now we can invent an even more useless theory... for some reason... or something.... 

Quote:
Along the way, Armstrong offers a superficial and theologically reckless argument that comes down to this:  Until the modern age, believers in God were not really believers in a God who was believed to exist.

Horse-shit.

Quote:
"Well, if that's what floats your canoe, you'll be paddling it up a very lonely creek," Dawkins warns.  "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."

Is it just me, or are postmodernists the only people who give a damn about postmodernism?  It just looks like faith for hippies to me.  Historically speaking, I think the people who have gotten the most done in the world are the ones who think the world really exists, and that existence matters.

Quote:
We should at least give Dawkins credit here for knowing what he rejects.  Here we meet an atheist who understands the difference between belief and unbelief.  As for those, like Armstrong, who try to tell believers that it does not matter if God exists --  Dawkins informs them that believers in God will brand them as atheists.  "They'll be right," Dawkins concludes.

Armstrong would do well to spend some time in traditional churches.  They aren't hard to find... all she has to do is NOT do an extensive search for the twelve other people in SoHo who agree with her, and pick any other church at random.  She would be thrown out of any respectable Southern Baptist Church as a heretic and atheist.  Sure, some Northeastern Catholics would accept her if she didn't prattle on about non-existence too much.  Catholics in America are happy to get any additions to the church rolls (and coffers) they can find, since Protestantism won the day somewhere around Kennedy's assassination.

I'm not trying to trivialize her position by pointing out its unpopularity.  I'm trying to prove it wrong because of it's unpopularity.  (Yeah...  I know.  Fallacy.)  The thing is, she's claiming that her version of a non-existing "artistic" God being the "next big thing" is belied by the facts.  It's NOT the next big thing.  It's a fringe belief among aging hippies.  Mainstream fundamentalist religion is stronger now in the U.S. than pretty much ever before.  The Muslim population is growing.  The common man in most of the world is not philosophically sophisticated, nor do they care about postmodern relativism.  Before this conception of "God beyond God" becomes anything more than academic claptrap, you'll need a world full of people who can at least tell you what postmodernism is.

 

 

Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin

http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism


HisWillness
atheistRational VIP!
HisWillness's picture
Posts: 4100
Joined: 2008-02-21
User is offlineOffline
Hambydammit wrote:Is it just

Hambydammit wrote:

Is it just me, or are postmodernists the only people who give a damn about postmodernism?

Considering everyone else makes fun of them and takes their lunch money, I'd say yeah.

Hamby wrote:
I'm not trying to trivialize her position by pointing out its unpopularity.  I'm trying to prove it wrong because of it's unpopularity.  (Yeah...  I know.  Fallacy.)

Not really, considering her assertion that gods were not popularly believed. She lets that one fly without apology.

Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence


Thomathy
Superfan
Thomathy's picture
Posts: 1861
Joined: 2007-08-20
User is offlineOffline
Hambydammit wrote: ...you'll

Hambydammit wrote:
...you'll need a world full of people who can at least tell you what postmodernism is.
And that, everybody, is the funniest joke ever made.

The article actually amazes me because neither knew what the other would be writing (though perhaps they knew that the other would be writing) and Dawkins actually retorted against Armstrong's very point.  If this postmodernist take on god is up and coming, it's only so at the forefront of the poor people (like us) who will be making arguments against it.  If she were rather making the case that most believers believe in believing, she might have my ear for a time, but even that's seemed a stretch for me to take seriously outside of most American believers.

BigUniverse wrote,

"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."


Hambydammit
High Level DonorModeratorRRS Core Member
Hambydammit's picture
Posts: 8657
Joined: 2006-10-22
User is offlineOffline
 The thing is, I'm not

 The thing is, I'm not unsympathetic to people like Armstrong, but sympathy isn't the same as acceptance.  I get that for people like her, it's almost impossible to step away from the idea of "meaning" and "purpose" long enough to see that you don't need God for either.  I think that's why the "agnostic" card is played so often by people who seem like they ought to be card carrying atheists.  We're all pretty damned impressed by the universe.  It's very impressive, and we're very small.  I understand the emotional wash where it just seems like all of this can't possibly be for nothing.  It's actually a big shift in perspective to be able to look at those emotions and see them in scale.  Humans aren't built for interacting with or comprehending the universe.  When we're faced with our own inability, and yet can look at the existence of the thing anyway... it's mind boggling.  

For me, I let my mind boggle for a minute and then get back to cooking lunch.  

I'm still not completely sure that this insistence on some kind of god-thingy isn't a passive agressive attempt at promoting humanity above the level of "just animals."  Some people seem so terrified at the idea that we're part of a natural system, and save for our intelligence, are not particularly special.  Me, I find that knowledge comforting.

 

Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin

http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism