Hello. I read the article. I'm familiar with Richard Dawkins, but hadn't previously been familiar with Karen Armstrong. At first I expected it to be a typical article with two opposing views, a typical journalistic technique. But, in the spectrum of belief about God, Karen Armstrong is close to the atheistic end near Richard Dawkins, and quite far from the end that believes in a divine creator who created the universe and human beings, and then gave people the Bible to explain why.
Karen Armstrong rejects the essential tenets of Christianity--
God who is a divine and eternal being, loving and righteous
God created the universe with a purpose
The Bible is a gift from God, and a divine revelation
Jesus Christ who is the "only name under heaven by which people can be saved"
If Ms Armstrong does not believe this, then what does she believe when she talks about "God"? Her article expresses it in this sentence:
Religion was not supposed to provide explanations that lay within the competence of reason but to help us live creatively with realities for which there are no easy solutions and find an interior haven of peace.
So to her, god has always been a creation of human beings, and her purpose seems to be to work to "update and revise" modern conceptions of god and religion, fitting with modern humanistic ideals. She says "God" but... measured by the Biblical standard, she's an atheist.
Perhaps WSJ is subtly implying that the only feasible alternatives are Richard Dawkins' ("God was never alive"), and Karen Armstrong's (religion needs a fashion make-over for modern times). But I and many others reject both, and continue to preach the old message: God is eternal, loving and rightous; He created the universe and human beings for a marvelous purpose; Jesus Christ died for our sins so that we may not die, but have eternal life.
So what about evolution? It will continue to be a lively debate as to how God did create the world, and what we can reliably understand from both the Bible and the scientific data. But science does pursue a naturalistic (excluding a need for a divine creator) explanation for life, and as such, evolution is the inevitable result of that approach. If there were not a naturalistic bias, how else could the data be interpreted?
Hello. I read the article. I'm familiar with Richard Dawkins, but hadn't previously been familiar with Karen Armstrong. At first I expected it to be a typical article with two opposing views, a typical journalistic technique. But, in the spectrum of belief about God, Karen Armstrong is close to the atheistic end near Richard Dawkins, and quite far from the end that believes in a divine creator who created the universe and human beings, and then gave people the Bible to explain why.
Karen Armstrong rejects the essential tenets of Christianity--
If Ms Armstrong does not believe this, then what does she believe when she talks about "God"? Her article expresses it in this sentence:
So to her, god has always been a creation of human beings, and her purpose seems to be to work to "update and revise" modern conceptions of god and religion, fitting with modern humanistic ideals. She says "God" but... measured by the Biblical standard, she's an atheist.
Perhaps WSJ is subtly implying that the only feasible alternatives are Richard Dawkins' ("God was never alive"), and Karen Armstrong's (religion needs a fashion make-over for modern times). But I and many others reject both, and continue to preach the old message: God is eternal, loving and rightous; He created the universe and human beings for a marvelous purpose; Jesus Christ died for our sins so that we may not die, but have eternal life.
So what about evolution? It will continue to be a lively debate as to how God did create the world, and what we can reliably understand from both the Bible and the scientific data. But science does pursue a naturalistic (excluding a need for a divine creator) explanation for life, and as such, evolution is the inevitable result of that approach. If there were not a naturalistic bias, how else could the data be interpreted?