Alex’s Heresies – embracing a physical reality

Conservative Christians fight back against the religion-lite of Karen Armstrong and other progressive Christians.

I mentioned previously that Richard Dawkins and Karen Armstrong contributed articles to the Wall Street Journal about God, evolution, and God’s new role, if any. Now Albert Mohler, Author, Speaker, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, agrees with Richard Dawkins that Karen Armstrong is an atheist in disguise. He further accuses her of being loose and dangerous with her theology.

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.”

Statements like these lead to Mohler’s assessment that 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.” And, later, he claims that, “she makes statements that amount to elegant nonsense.” Amusingly Mohler agrees with Dawkin’s statement that:

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.”

Like Dawkins, Mohler clearly puts Armstrong and other progressive theologians into this group of sophisticated modern theologians and comes to the conclusion that:

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.

Perhaps surprisingly, many atheists and other non-believers have sympathy with Mohler’s conservative view that progressives like Armstrong, Borg and Crossan are being ‘too clever by half’ in promoting a very benign, slippery non-god God.

Alex McCullie