This morning, however, it falls down on the job, turning a "debate" about God over to two atheists (only one of them doesn't understand that's what she is).
Richard Dawkins and Karen Armstrong go at it. Dawkins completely has her number, but reading him is a sad window into the narrowing of the human mind.
Interestingly, both authors take Evolution as their starting point, which only shows that whatever its merits as an account for how things got here, its intellectual and cultural effect has been to dull men's minds to the point they can't think philosophically --there is no string on the violin that quivers to that frequency. He thinks the existence of the laws of physics disproves the existence of God! Aristotle had his number.
John Zmirak, in a column that predates this exchange, explains it perfectly, introducing a column on the virtue of diligence:
Procrastination isn't so much an art as a science, in the old sense of the word that predates Descartes, which means a quest for knowledge of the cosmos and one's self. (Since that high-strung Frenchman redefined "science" as the project of making man the "master and possessor of nature," we learned to sniff condescendingly at "knowledge work" that doesn't involve white coats, beakers, and electrified fetal pigs. That's how theology traded its crown as "Queen of the Sciences" for the little paper hat called "Religious Studies" and learned to ask, "You want Christ with that?"
That is precisely the nature of the exchange in this morning's WSJ. The man in the field of knowledge work has a polite little conversation with the professor of religious studies, both of them utterly missing the point.
