HOMO RELIGIOSUS: A Review of Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God
In The Case for God (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2009) Karen Armstrong presents an informed, balanced and nuanced argument for religion in post-modernity. Her argument is cumulative and does not rely on supernatural support. Those who have read her earlier books, especially A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (1993) or The Battle for God (2000) will already be familiar with her general approach. Here she traces the development of our ideas of God, starting with the cave paintings in the underground caverns of Lascaux, in southwestern France, going from the Paleolithic age to the present time, describing humanity’s continuing quest to apprehend the sacred.
In the Introduction Armstrong challenges our conventional ideas about God, observing that our scientific and technological accomplishments have outstripped our religious thinking which still tends to be undeveloped and sometimes primitive. The opening paragraph sets the tone for what follows:
We are talking far too much about God these days, and what we say is often facile. In our democratic society, we think that the concept of God should be easy and that religion ought to be readily accessible to anybody. “That book was really hard!” readers have told me reproachfully, shaking their heads in faint reproof. “Of course it was!” I want to reply.”It was about God.” But many find this puzzling. Surely everybody knows what God is: the Supreme Being, a divine Personality, who created the world and everything in it. They look perplexed if you point out that it is inaccurate to call God the Supreme Being because God is not a being at all, and that we really don’t understand what we mean when we say that he is ‘good,’ ‘wise,’ or ‘intelligent.’ People of faith admit in theory that God is utterly transcendent, but they seem sometimes to assume that they know exactly who “he” is and what he thinks, loves, and expects. We tend to tame and domesticate God’s “otherness.” (author’s italics)
Armstrong demonstrates how easily these uncritical and superficial ideas of God fall prey to attack by the “New Atheists,” who first posit an extremely literalist notion of God and then adopt a reductionist approach. This, too, is a type of fundamentalism. She writes:
This type of reductionism is characteristic of the fundamentalist mentality. It is also essential to the critique of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris to present fundamentalism as the focal core of the three monotheisms. They have an extremely literalist notion of God. For Dawkins, religious faith rests on the idea that “there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence, who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it.” Having set up this definition of God as Supernatural Designer, Dawkins only has to point out that there is in fact no design in nature in order to demolish it. But he is mistaken to assume that this is “the way people have generally understood the term God.” He is also wrong to claim that God is a scientific hypothesis, that is, a conceptual framework for bringing intelligibility to a series of experiments and observations. It was only in the modern period that theologians started to treat God as a scientific explanation and in the process produced an idolatrous God concept. (author’s italics)
If earlier scientists including Copernicus and Galileo, needed God to complete their systems, by the 18th century this was no longer the case. The Marquis Pierre Simon de Laplace, the leading mathematician and astronomer of his day, nonplused Napoleon by saying, “Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.”
Armstrong argues that the “New atheists” are shallow and often historically inaccurate. Atheistic fundamentalism, no less than religious fundamentalism, is a 20th century phenomenon. Furthermore, fundamentalism, whether religious or secular, is essentially a defensive position. The current exponents of naturalism and scientism are perturbed by the resurgence of religion worldwide. They consider this development irrational and also very dangerous. They target the Creationists and the proponents of Intelligent Design who oppose the teaching of the theory of evolution in the public schools. Religious conservative likewise feel threatened by the prevailing Western scientific and technological world view and the secularism that accompanies it. Both sides are intransigent: they are determined to defend their positions to the utmost.
Armstrong makes a distinction between logos and mythos, maintaining that the current crisis of faith stems from the confusion of two very different types of discourse. Logos refers to dialectics, reasoned, logical and scientific thought; mythos denotes narrative that is timeless and conveys meaning.
Armstrong submits that our conventional notions of God come from the Age of Reason. They are rational constructs that belong to a particular political and religious context, namely, the aftermath of the Wars of Religion. They were shaped by the rise of early modern science in the 17th century. Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736) and William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) were both written to counter this type of rationalism but with limited success.
Armstrong contends that attempts to make religion conform to the criteria of scientific rationalism were misguided and inimical to faith. Reducing faith to reason made religion vulnerable to attack on purely rationalistic grounds. In The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) the German philosopher and founder of critical philosophy Immanuel Kant exposed the pretensions of metaphysics and speculative philosophy. He showed that the traditional arguments for the existence of God were unsound and, in the case of the Ontological Argument, even specious. Kant later published Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793). Religion was to be confined to the limits of reason and logic. Metaphysics was now off-limits.
In the 19th century the French philosopher and social theorist Auguste Comte delineated the development of human society in three stages: the theological, the metaphysical and the positive. The metaphysical stage superseded the theological stage only to be succeeded by the positivist.
The German philosopher and anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity (1846) contended that God was simply a human projection. For Karl Marx religion reflected existing economic and social and structures. In volume 1 of Capital (1867) he opined that Protestantism and Deism were the forms of religion best suited to early modern capitalism and the rising bourgeoisie. Because their presuppositions were materialistic and atheistic, these thinkers tended to be reductionist and dismissive of religion.
Armstrong cites the later Wittgenstein to the effect that philosophers who have applied the norms of rationality and common sense to religion have done it “infinite harm.” It is a grave mistake “to make religious belief a matter of evidence in the way that science is a matter of evidence.” God is not a fact to be verified or falsified empirically after the manner of the Logical Positivists. Religious language is necessarily symbolic. It works “on an entirely different plane.” Religious discourse is “meaningful in its own context.” This insight was important because it acknowledged the legitimacy of religious language.
Armstrong shows how traditional ideas of God became increasingly problematic in the modern period. Reason and faith, science and religion, were placed in opposition to each other. They were considered antithetical: If one is held to be true, then, the other must necessarily be false. She writes:
The idea of God is merely a symbol of indescribable transcendence and has been interpreted in many different ways over the centuries. The modern God—conceived as powerful creator, first cause, supernatural personality realistically understood and rationally demonstrable—is a recent phenomenon. It was born in a more optimistic era than our own and reflects the firm expectation that scientific rationality could bring the apparently inexplicable aspects of life under the control of reason. This God was indeed, as Feuerbach suggested, a projection of humanity at a time when human beings were achieving unprecedented control over their environment and thought they were about to solve the mysteries of the universe. But many feel that the hopes of the Enlightenment also died at Auschwitz. The people who devised the camps had imbibed the classical nineteenth-century atheistic ethos that commanded them to think of themselves as the only absolute; by making an idol of their nation, they felt compelled to destroy those they viewed as enemies. Today we have a more modest conception of the powers of human reason. We have seen too much evil in recent years to indulge in a facile theology that says—as some have tried to say—that God knows what he is doing, that he has a secret plan that we cannot fathom, or that suffering gives men and women the opportunity to practice heroic virtue. A modern theology must look unflinchingly into the heart of a great darkness and be prepared, perhaps, to enter into the cloud of unknowing.
Since the mid-20th century philosophers and theologians have had to cope with this dilemma. Sometimes they turned to the older, pre-modern thinkers in order to find other ways of speaking about God, for example, the 6th century mystical theologian Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite or the medieval German theologian and preacher Meister Eckhart.
Armstrong explains how earlier philosophers and theologians were generally very reticent in speaking about God. They were reluctant to attribute human attributes to God who transcends the limits of human reason and language. They preferred apophatic or “negative” theology to the use of analogy. She cites the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides as an example: ”Maimonides developed an apophatic spirituality that denied any positive attributes to God, arguing that we could not even say that God was good or existed. A person who relied on this kind of affirmation would make God incredible, he warned in his Guide to the Perplexed, and “unconsciously loses his belief in God.”
Armstrong notes how Jewish exegetes, like Philo of Alexandria, and Christian theologians, like Origen and St. Augustine, interpreted the Scriptures allegorically and thereby avoided the difficulties that literalism occasions. Augustine interpreted the opening chapters of Genesis allegorically. Their approach to the scriptures was very different from ours. The ancient monastic practice of lectio divina, the slow, deliberate, meditative study of the sacred texts, was followed.
Armstrong is very good in her description and analysis of what Charles Taylor has called “the tacit background,” the unstated assumptions that underlie the debate between the religious fundamentalists and the “New Atheists. She is careful to distinguish between “belief” as trust and “belief” as intellectual assent to a set of propositions. In the past faith and belief were understood as being distinct. Today they are often confused: faith is equated with belief.
Armstrong recognizes that religion is broader than any given belief system. Originally religion was more about doing than thinking. Blaise Pascal recommended that people who wished to believe should begin by acting as if they believed already. When religious myths, rituals, images and symbols are replaced by abstract ideas religion tends to become otiose and to atrophy. Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) warned about the danger of myth being construed as history, reduced to fact and systematized as dogma: “For this is the way in which religions are wont to die out.” Indeed, fundamentalism portends the demise of particular belief systems. Harvey Cox in The Future of Faith (2009) ventures that modern religious fundamentalism is itself dying, hence its intolerance and extreme violence.
For many people living on the cusp of post-modernity and post-secularity, conventional concepts of God no longer work. They lack depth and emotional resonance. The” New Atheists” may yet render religion an unintended service by ridding it of outmoded concepts of God. Jews, Christians and Muslims may then reclaim their spiritual traditions. The alternative is lapsing into nihilism and despair.
Armstrong discusses the conflict between science and religion in Victorian England. She is critical of the conventional view of this struggle. She disputes the facts of the famous debate in June 1860 between William Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog.” She notes that many of the supporters of Darwin’s theory of natural selection were themselves convinced Christians and remained so even after Darwin published The Descent of Man (1876). Darwin himself became an agnostic in later life, but he was never an atheist. In his Autobiography (1876), he wrote: “The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic."
Armstrong also explains why Darwin’s theory took so long to be accepted.
First, William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) was still considered to be the standard and Darwin himself admired Paley. However, Darwin’s theory changed scientific discourse: British and American scientists stopped mentioning God in their publications.
Second, when On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection appeared in 1859, the Church of England was just beginning to encounter the German Higher Criticism of the Bible. In 1860 a group of progressive clergymen and scientists at Oxford and Cambridge published Essays and Reviews, a collection that included an article by the Oxford classicist and later Master of Balliol College, Benjamin Jowett. “On the Interpretation of Scripture” proposed that the Bible should be studied like any other ancient literary text, employing the same critical methods. This was a very novel idea in England, though not in Germany or France where critical study of the Bible was well established. The suggestion shocked the evangelical wing of the Church of England as well as some Anglo-Catholics. Essays and Reviews captured the interest of the general reading public in much the same way as John Robinson’s Honest to God did a century later. It also led to a number of personal crises of faith. In 1888 Mrs. Humphrey Ward published Robert Elsmere, describing how the Higher Criticism destroyed one clergyman’s faith. The novel became a best seller and even gained the admiration of Henry James For many thinking Victorians Essays and Reviews was unsettling because it called into question the authority of Scripture.
The Case for God is an important book, one that needs to be read and discussed widely. Armstrong is extremely knowledgeable. She has a marvelous gift for summarizing and explaining complex ideas without over-simplifying them. She focuses on Christianity, Judaism and Islam but she considers Buddhism, Hinduism and Chinese spiritualities as well. There is a very helpful glossary of terms from Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic and Chinese. The book is well researched and carefully documented. The endnotes are arranged with page numbers indicated to facilitate reference. There is a good index and a selected bibliography. The book is set in Granjon, named for the 16th century printer Robert Granjon, and this adds to the ease and pleasure of reading it.
In his review of The Case for God for The Observer (2009/07/19) Alain de Botton wrote: “[Armstrong] joins Richard Holloway and Charles Taylor as one of the most intelligent contemporary defenders of religion, making a case that scrupulously avoids reliance on the supernatural.”
I strongly recommend The Case for God. This is Armstrong’s best book to date.
© 2009 William Converse
