Between realities: Dawkins vs. Voegelin

In this article the author considers life in the 21st century and postmodern concepts of God, particularly the theories of political philosopher Eric Voegelin and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. The author discusses the "war on religion" and the arguments in Dawkins' book "The God Delusion" that a supernatural creator does not exist and that belief in a god is a delusion. The author examines how Voegelin suggests how the divine can be oriented in modern civilization. The religious aspects of reality and evolution are also discussed. In "Conservatism and The Cultural Roots of Ordered Liberty" Prof. Dr. R.V. Young writes: Nothing is more crucial to our regard for personal freedom than our understanding of human nature and the human condition. In "Between Realities: Dawkins vs. Voegelin," Meins Coetsier applies the insights of one of conservatism's seminal twentieth-century thinkers to a perniciously reductive but widely and respectfully received account of mankind's origin and destiny. Coetsier maintains that Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, one of the chief polemics of an increasingly powerful "global atheism," depends upon ignoring what Voegelin terms the "flow of presence"--the experienced spiritual reality that permeates and transforms the world of meter readings and mathematical formulae, a world that only exists in terms of abstraction and mechanistic reduction that serve the convenience of human analysis and manipulation. When we see ourselves, however, as no more than a sum of such analytic elements, then we are neither worthy nor even capable of real liberty