“The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going end up challenging faith in the Bible.”
– David Brooks, The Neural Buddhists, NY Times, May 13, 2008.
Science undermines orthodoxy, not religion itself
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One response to “Science undermines orthodoxy, not religion itself”
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In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits….
It’s these “just cultural artifacts” that make possible those “universal human traits”. In fact, I would suggest that the presence of one necessarily means the presence of the other.
Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day.
Such a defense need not be necessary. Instead of a creating a defense, what might be offered is a re-interpretation of particular doctrines, particular biblical teachings, or particular ideas of a personal deity. (See Panikkar’s The Dawn of Christianness.)
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