Evolution: Armstrong vs Dawkins

Karen Armstrong is a prolific writer of history, religion, and theology.  Her books include; The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2000); Faith After September 11 (2002); The Spiral Staircase (2004); Muhammad: A Prophet For Our Time (2006); The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (2006); The Bible: A Biography (2007); The Case for God (2009) just to name a few.

In the Australia Newspaper several months ago, there were two articles addressing the question, “where does evolution leave God?”  The first was written by Karen Armstrong and second by Richard Dawkins.  Dawkins is a celebrated atheist whose book the God Delusion has become a bestseller.  Dawkins has also written several books on human biology the most noted being, The Selfish Gene, where he concluded that the genes that survive in human evolution are those that have the capacity to copy themselves, hence selfish.

 

The two articles are written from very different perspectives.  And in this context Dawkins is no match for Armstrong.  To put it simply Dawkins says that evolution has made God redundant.  God is out of a job, with nothing to do.  While Armstrong argues that what we call God is not simply a supernatural being that single-handedly created the world – what we name god is in fact that which is beyond naming.  And while that maybe not be satisfying for the scientists in Dawkins, it is what has moved poets, story-tellers, musicians and a myriad of other artists to insight and inspiration over the centuries.   

As you probably assumed I come down on Armstrong’s side of the argument but I hope because of the eloquence and content of her evidence.  Armstrong incorporates into her discussion both the history and the world of religion.   She doesn’t collapse her argument into the proofs for the existence of God popular with some religious writers.  Instead, she tells the story of the history of human descriptions of the encounter with the sacred with what we have named God while rejecting the 18^th and 19^th century views of God as the great architect and designer of the cosmos as  not relevant for the 21^st century.  For Armstrong the heart of religion is the heart.  She writes:

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 Dawkins experiences – and has helped me to appreciate – when he contemplates the marvels of natural selection.

We can be grateful to Richard Dawkins for putting religion and Darwinian evolution back onto the theological landscape.  The more I read about the process of evolution and particularly the evolution of the human brain and human consciousness, the more my notion of a God as a remote being, recedes, and is replaced with the God of wonder, awe, surprise, amazement and mystery.  And most importantly, the sense that I am in God and God is in me; that God is present in every moment and no longer needs to be beckoned to come. 

Perhaps that was the thing that frightened the religious people of Jesus’ day.  Jesus’ God was beyond the codifying and controlling methods of institutional religion.  Jesus also saw “religion” as dynamic and not static.  I think that fits well with modern evolutionary views.  Evolution shows us that nothing is static, everything is dynamic and changing.  Our bodies, our minds, our culture, our universe and what we call God, all is pulsating with life and new life.

Christopher