How Not to Argue for God’s Existence

On Saturday the Wall Street Journal ran a piece called Man vs. God where the Darwinophile Richard Dawkins argued against the existence of God and the best-selling author Karen Armstrong argued for it. Dawkins argument is typical. Evolution is the greatest show on earth and disproves any antiquated notions of an intelligent creator. The special thing about life is that it never violates the laws of physics (and if it did, Dawkins reassures us, scientists would just find new laws). Life may push the boundaries of physics, but miracles never happen. In Dawkins’ thinking, evolution is God’s “pink slip.” It renders him redundant. There is nothing for God to do, which is good because he never was in the first place.

And how does Dawkins know that the universe is the product of evolutionary chance? Easy: “Making the universe is the one thing no intelligence, however superhuman, could do, because an intelligence is complex—statistically improbable —and therefore had to emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings: from a lifeless universe—the miracle-free zone that is physics.” Is it just me, or does this sound like circular reasoning to you, and of the vicious kind. “The universe can’t be created by an intelligent designer, because intelligence is complex. And everything complex comes from something simple. Therefore there is no innate complex, intelligent life.” Ok, unless a complex intelligence is the never-beginning, eternal source of all life. I don’t get it.

Anyway, the real disappointment is Armstrong’s “defense” of the existence of God. As an orthodox Christian (or orthodox believer of almost any faith) you know you are in trouble when Armstrong’s first line is this: “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 only gets worse from there. Armstrong argues that we should really go back to an earlier pre-enlightenment time when “Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call ‘God’ is merely a symbol that points beyond itself 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.” Armstrong’s “God” bears no resemblance to the Christian God. He (She? It?) is merely a symbol, an analogy like Tao, Brahman, or Nirvana, to describe the ultimate reality that lay beyond the reach of words.

Armstrong’s religion is not new. She is an advocate of an ahistorical, therapeutic religion that disavows a personal, knowable, objectively real Creator God to whom we must give account. In decrying the baleful effects of scientific rationality on religion, she ends up repeating the same tropes that have been standard fare among liberals since the Enlightenment: the Bible can’t be taken literally; religion is about myth not fact; there is no revelation from God, just man’s attempts to make sense of life’s imponderables.

For Armstrong, like Dawkins, evolution is the one unassailable fact in life and everything else must adjust accordingly. This leads Armstrong to offer a hopelessly mealy-mouthed pomo apologetic for the existence of God. “Darwin made it clear once again,” she writes “that—as Maimonides, Avicenna, Aquinas [really, Aquinas?!] and Eckhart had already pointed out—we cannot regard God simply as a divine personality, who single-handedly created the world. This could direct our attention away from the idols of certainty and back to the ‘God beyond God.’ 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.” It’s all well and good to argue that theology deals with mysteries and things not easily put into words. But when your idea of God is just that, an idea of God, a symbol for the unutterable transcendent somewhere out there, you are not defending anything like a Christian understanding of God, or for that matter a Jewish or Muslim understanding either.

Armstrong’s concluding argument focuses on the ubiquity of suffering that Darwinian natural selction uncovers (as if people didn’t understand suffering until 1859). It is in meditating on this suffering, she maintains, that the faithful learn to feel compassion, which leads us to something that some people might want to call God. Here’s the clincher: “The almost unbearable spectacle of the myriad species passing painfully into oblivion is not unlike some classic Buddhist meditations on the First Noble Truth (“Existence is suffering”), the indispensable prerequisite for the transcendent enlightenment that some call Nirvana—and others call God.”

Well, God-as-the-label-for-our-enlightenment is not exactly what gets 52 million Americans out of bed for church every Sunday or compels many Asian and some African Christians to risk their lives for their faith week after week. Why the Wall Street Journal had someone argue for the existence of God who doesn’t really believe in a God anything like the God almost all believers believe in is beyond me. Wouldn’t a pro-con with Tim Keller or Lee Strobel or Alvin Plantinga or even Anthony Flew have made for more interesting reading? The cynic in me says the only reason this piece was here in the first place is because both Dawkins and Armstrong have books coming out this month. Armstrong’s is called (gulp) The Case for God.

The irony in all this is that Dawkins understands theism better than Armstrong does. 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.”

Well, 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. 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. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They’ll be right.

At least Dawkins recognizes that almost everyone who believes in God believes that he really, objectively exists and not just as a symbol for higher consciousness or the inscrutabilities of life.

Please, Mrs. Armstrong, in all seriousness, it seems like you are well-read and are searching for something, but have you considered taking the Bible on its own terms and not reading it through the lens of German higher criticism? Have you considered that God, not evolution, might be the first unassailable truth? Have you considered the evidence for Jesus’ life, his teachings, his death and resurrection? At the very least have you considered that the God you argue for is not a God worth worshiping? He is not a God who could have possibly inspired billions of people to follow him and sacrifice in his name. And he is not anything remotely like the God in the Bible. He is, in the final analysis, not even a God that seems to exist.