Man vs. God Response

1. Dawkins
Thesis: God did not exist and is now an irrelevant concept because evolution effectively explains the awe-striking brilliance and complexity that is life, something commonly attributed to a benign creator.

a. Evolution makes the God concept obsolete.
b. Life exists in harmony with the laws of physics and nature.
c. It can be deduced that all life in the universe emerged in a similar Darwinian fashion.
d. Life starts simple and grows to complex.
e. Existence shan't be denounced as unimportant in attempts to save the concept of God.

2. Armstrong
Thesis: The point of God lies not within its actual existence in objective reality, but rather in the purposes the concept serve.

a. Evolution does indeed challenge the idea of an omnipotent being.
b. God is needed to help us understand our emotions and comprehend our lives and social structure.
c. Purpose of God is not to supply rational explanations, but to help people cope with life.

3. I found one of the most telling statements to be Armstrong's quote "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 ease solutions and find an interior heaven of peace;..." I interpreted this as such: religion was never supposed to be used as evidence for anything however it has been warped by modern theologians into a set of non provable hard facts. For example, as Armstrong mentions, Greek myths generally held no basis in actuality, but they were used as a way to convey moral and emotional teachings in an relate-able medium relative to the audience. So, this made me think, does the survival of religion truly rely upon the actual existence of God? I believe that in this day, yes, if god was proven to be non existent, then religion would collapse as an institution and be stripped down to those few truly spiritual people.

4. The existence of God was derived from the metaphysical portion of knowledge, however both authors agree that it has been challenged by new analytical knowledge (evolution) brought about through scientific studies resulting in empirical knowledge. Armstrong uses a combination of metaphysical and analytical knowledge when she makes the point that God helps us understand society. Metaphysical being the portion of God's presence and analytical being the deduction of how it works in relation to human understanding. Dawkins basis most of his article on analytical knowledge, especially when talking about the possibility of other life in the universe. He analytically knows how all life would come about; that all life would be formed in the same Darwinian manner as earth.