Here is an interesting pair of short essays on the existence of God by Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins. I called it a debate first, but then read the intro more closely, and found that the two pieces were written independently of each other. Still, they provide a good picture of the mental dilemma in which a great many people of our time find themselves. Addressing the question “Where does evolution leave God?”, they agree more than they disagree in seeing little (Armstrong) or no (Dawkins) place for him.
I don’t know a great deal about Karen Armstrong, except that she is an ex-Catholic and popular author of books that, as best I can tell, are roughly in the spiritual-but-not-religious vein. That impression is supported by the present piece, and also by the Wikipedia article about her. She was apparently supposed to be representing the pro-God side in this exchange, a fact which says a lot about the journalists who commissioned it, as she certainly doesn’t seem to believe in God in the sense that most people would mean “God” and “belief.” It’s all pretty fuzzy, but she seems to follow many quasi-Christians in treating religion as a branch of literature or psychology, or as a mixture of the two.
Armstrong does not, on the basis of this piece, seem to be very good at reasoning. This sentence, for instance, strikes me as making no sense at all: “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, Darwin showed that there could be no proof for God's existence.” And what makes her think that the problem of evil somehow became decisive only after Darwin? The death of a child here and now is far more troubling to me than the knowledge that a species of lizard found millions of years ago is now extinct. Her view of the history of religion is peculiar, to say the least: at times she seems to be saying that before the 17th century (or so) no one very sensible believed in God except as a symbol.
One striking thing about these pieces is that, while presenting themselves as the latest thinking, they frame an essentially 19th century argument. Armstrong’s view is really not substantially different from Victorians who valued Christianity insofar as it fostered elevated thoughts and pure morals. And Dawkins, as usual, for all his knowledge of biology, still inhabits the philosophical world of a confident Victorian atheist. Bless his heart, he still doesn’t seem to grasp the concept of creation from nothing, or the import of the First Cause argument.
On the whole, though, I prefer Dawkins, at least on the basis of these two pieces. Though his vision is oppressively narrow, he does at least hold himself accountable to facts and logic, and shares with Christians the understanding that a God who is essentially only a phenomenon of the human mind is, literally, no God at all.
Together the two essays form a dismal picture of the sundering of the soul that is a characteristic of our times: a yearning for meaning that is unable to find any foothold in the world of fact, and a materialism which glories in fact and denies the possibility of meaning.
Light On Dark Water 
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