Ran across an article, Man vs. God, in the Wall Street Journal who asked Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins to respond independently to the question of where evolution leaves God.

Are Christians gaining respect when they give up truth in order to enter the dialogue?  In this article, Dawkins expresses a more objective view of truth than Armstrong and advises theologians that God must exist for their argument to be sound. Just what will professing Christians give up in order to have a voice? Will we have anything left to say when we gain the platform?

Karen Armstrong writes:

Darwin made it clear once again that—as Maimonides, Avicenna, 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."

Now there are some valid points in what Armstrong says, that we should not over simplify the mystery of God. But she appears to sacrifice the ability of God to reveal Himself via logos (reason) and words at all:

Symbolism was essential to premodern religion, because it was only possible to speak about the ultimate reality—God, Tao, Brahman or Nirvana—analogically, since it lay beyond the reach of words.

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; today, however, many have opted for unsustainable certainty instead.

Compare this with atheist Richard Dawkins, who through the revelation of the laws of creation (though he would not profess it as such) finds more certainty in the world than Armstrong.

Never once are the laws of physics violated...

Such consistency, such confidence.  Yet, there is no mistaking what Dawkins' believes about God.

Where does that leave God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip. But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant. A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain. God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.

Dawkins' calls out the clever modern theologian for violating the reality of object truth...

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?

What is the rubric for Dawkins demand for consistency? Why logos of course, which he has studied enough through science to understand that is the way the world works.

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.

Humorous irony?

No.... sadness fills my heart.

Where is the Christian Mind? Where is the proclamation of bold truth?
Where is confidence in what can be known by the revelation of God?

Revelation is mutilated through the flattening of all religion to the history of myth in man's grasping for a god-like mysterious idea. In fairness, I have not read Armstrong or Dawkins, but if my perspective were limited to this single writing from both parties my conclusion would be that I have no idea what Armstrong really believes, and I know exactly what
Dawkins does.

If certainty is an idol, than faith is a sin and I stand condemned. For I know that God (the Father, Son and Spirit) is. And I know that in Him I move and live and have my being. I know that God became flesh entering the world He created (being fully God and fully man) in the
person of Jesus Christ, and that He died on a real cross. I know that He was the perfect and Holy sacrifice bearing the full wrath of God the Father for sin—a penalty that should have been mine. I know that I stand righteous before God only because of the righteousness of the
perfect man, Jesus Christ. And I know that Jesus—who is God—conquered death by rising victorious from the grave and ascending to heaven. I know that my life and future are now bound together with Him--as He lives, so I will live with Him for eternity.

Does it matter then that He exists? Does it matter that I am His creation? My very life depends on it.

Though Dawkins would not agree with my faith, he at least knows that my truth claims are false if God does not exist in reality. Be leary Christian of those who sacrifice logos itself in order to gain acceptance... for they may just be giving up The Logos.