God and the New Atheism

There is an article over at Slate that I found interesting. The writer, Steve Paulson, is the executive producer of Wisconsin Public Radio's nationally syndicated program "To the Best Of Our Knowledge." In the Slate article Paulson interviews John Haught, who is the author of a forthcoming book entitled God and the New Atheism.

Here are some Haught quotes from the interview.

From the beginning of the modern world, science decided quite rightly that it wasn't going to tackle such questions as purpose, value, meaning, importance, God, or even talk about intelligence or subjectivity. It was going to look for purely natural, causal, mechanical explanations of things.

After Darwin, after Einstein -- just as after Galileo and Copernicus -- we can't have the same theological ideas about God as we did before.

Darwin's thought seems to be more important intellectually and culturally than it's ever been. My view is that theology, instead of ignoring or closing its eyes to it, should look it squarely in the face. It has everything to gain and nothing to lose by doing so. In my view, Darwin's thought is a gift to theology.

Why does the universe not stand still? there's a restlessness, a tendency of the cosmos to go beyond itself.

Science is simply not equipped to deal with the dimensions of purposefulness, love, compassion, forgiveness -- all the feelings and experiences that accompanied the early community's belief that Jesus is still alive.

Read the whole thing here.