"The God Delusion" (Richard Dawkins) vs. "The Case for God" (Karen Armstrong).
Toss a coin?
Sometimes I think: "Why bring "God" into anything anyway?"
An interesting point is this:
Karen Armstrong makes clear that she can't prove that God exists; and Richard Dawkins makes clear that he can't prove that God doesn't exist.
There are lots of other important things to be said but I was just making this simple point.
Karen Armstrong's book would be more appropriately titled "The Story of Religion" as it doesn't really present a case for belief in God but is more of a cultural history of religion. The achievements of religious thought in themselves in no way constitute an argument for religious belief. This book did not convince me of the existence of God and was not meant to. It is an excellent book however.
Richard Dawkins book is not totally appropriately titled either, for it makes a case for the extreme unlikelihood of the existence of God on scientific and logical grounds - not that God is a "delusion" as such. "Delusion" is a dubious word for it could be thought of as giving succour to the pseudoscience of psychiatry. A belief is not an illness.
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I personally have been a believer at various points in my life. I think that my belief in God was always instinctive and cultural at the same time. It was never achieved by intellectual argument.
So Karen Armstrong is right when she asserts that God is something we can believe in but which we can't or shouldn't really understand.
I would say that belief in God is not necessarily important but that COMPASSION and the GOLDEN RULE definitely are important.
I hope that religion takes a turn away from dogmatic insistence on correct beliefs about God and towards compassion.
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