In the latest “new atheist” duel, the Wall Street Journal recently featured essays about evolution and religion by Richard Dawkins and Karen Armstrong. Armstrong:

Darwin may have done religion—and God—a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped—even primitive. In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call “God” is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.

Dawkins:

Well, if that’s what floats your canoe, you’ll be paddling it up a very lonely creek. The mainstream belief of the world’s peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists. If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They’ll be right.

In my interview with Terry Eagleton this month, he said that he was, for a time, slated to face off against Dawkins. He had this to say about it all:

Dawkins and I were recently asked to write articles for the front page of the Wall Street Journal, if you can believe it. I don’t know what the rationale behind this is, or even if it will come off. I said that I would do so, provided that my last sentence would be, “Jesus Christ would never have been given a column in the Wall Street Journal.” It is indicative of the strangeness and intensity of this debate that it crops up in the most peculiar places. It crops up at the very temples of Mammon. But, you see, I think that’s because these people really do think it’s just about a set of ideas, of propositions. That’s a pretty comfortable debate. But the point I try to make when I enter on these forums is that it’s not just that. It has a strong political subtext.

Read the full Dawkins/Armstrong exchange at the Wall Street Journal.