도킨스의 무신론에 대한 신학 변증 (Theological Apology against Dawkin's Atheism)

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초록

For most of human history God was the best explanation for the existence and nature of the physical universe. But during the last few centuries, scientists have developed explanations that are much more logical, more consistent, and better supported by evidence. Dawkins is an outspoken atheist and a prominent critic of religion, and has been described as a militant atheist. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that faith qualifies as a delusion − as a fixed false belief. The theory of evolution explains the variety of life forms on earth without any reference to God. It says that from very simple beginnings, processes of genetic variation and selection working for hundreds of millions of years, generated the range of plants and animals that exist today. These processes are not directed by any being, they are just the way the world works; God is unnecessary.
The church used God as a metaphysical deus ex machina, a God of the gaps that filled the holes of our knowledge. Bonhoeffer noticed that as secularism increasingly permeated the lives of modern people, this metaphysical God of the gaps was being pushed further away into irrelevance. The Church’s response was to stake out the inner life of the person for God, thus summoning up God to answer "ultimate" questions like death and guilt. For Bonhoeffer, this signaled a retreat into subjectivism, into the personal categories of sin, despair, and anxiety over against the objective work done by God in Jesus Christ. Moreover, it only affirmed a God found in weakness, not in strength, a God at the periphery of our existence, not the center. The purpose of the non-religious interpretation, then, was to allow the gospel to address humans in a secular age, and to do so without them having to become ‘religious’.
Atheism must mean for Paul Ricoeur the destruction of the moral God not only as the ultimate source of accusation but as the ultimate source of protection, as Providence. But if atheism is to have any religious significance, the death of the providential God should point toward a new faith, a tragic faith which would be to classical metaphysics what the faith of Job was to the archaic law of retribution professed by his pious friends.

영어초록

For most of human history God was the best explanation for the existence and nature of the physical universe. But during the last few centuries, scientists have developed explanations that are much more logical, more consistent, and better supported by evidence. Dawkins is an outspoken atheist and a prominent critic of religion, and has been described as a militant atheist. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that faith qualifies as a delusion − as a fixed false belief. The theory of evolution explains the variety of life forms on earth without any reference to God. It says that from very simple beginnings, processes of genetic variation and selection working for hundreds of millions of years, generated the range of plants and animals that exist today. These processes are not directed by any being, they are just the way the world works; God is unnecessary.
The church used God as a metaphysical deus ex machina, a God of the gaps that filled the holes of our knowledge. Bonhoeffer noticed that as secularism increasingly permeated the lives of modern people, this metaphysical God of the gaps was being pushed further away into irrelevance. The Church’s response was to stake out the inner life of the person for God, thus summoning up God to answer "ultimate" questions like death and guilt. For Bonhoeffer, this signaled a retreat into subjectivism, into the personal categories of sin, despair, and anxiety over against the objective work done by God in Jesus Christ. Moreover, it only affirmed a God found in weakness, not in strength, a God at the periphery of our existence, not the center. The purpose of the non-religious interpretation, then, was to allow the gospel to address humans in a secular age, and to do so without them having to become ‘religious’.
Atheism must mean for Paul Ricoeur the destruction of the moral God not only as the ultimate source of accusation but as the ultimate source of protection, as Providence. But if atheism is to have any religious significance, the death of the providential God should point toward a new faith, a tragic faith which would be to classical metaphysics what the faith of Job was to the archaic law of retribution professed by his pious friends.

참고자료

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