The Case for God
Review by John Cornwell
Published: July 20 2009 06:01 | Last updated: July 20 2009 06:01
The Case for God: What Religion Really Means
By Karen Armstrong
Bodley Head £20, 376 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16
WB Yeats wrote that our ideas about God are all “trash and tinsel”, like a tawdry wedding dress hiding the truth that lies beneath. Karen Armstrong, one of our best living writers on religion, agrees. But in her latest book, The Case for God, she argues that there was a time when people understood God better.
“The modern God resembles the High God of remote antiquity, a theology that was unanimously either jettisoned or radically reinterpreted because it was found to be inept,” she writes. In other words, our notion of God, whether we be atheists or believers, has regressed to the infantile.
The biggest offenders are those who treat God like an interventionist Superman problem-solver. Armstrong’s catalogue of inept culprits includes politicians who appeal to God to justify their policies, terrorists who invoke him to commit atrocities and scientists who fit God into a physical theory, even if just to debunk him.
Science, she argues, has had a deeply misleading influence on both believers and unbelievers. When Richard Dawkins attacks God, his target is an absurd super-designer, necessarily more complex than any of the complexities in nature. Moreover, there are believing scientists who see God as a kind of fine-tuning twiddler. In fact, modern notions of God, Armstrong says, are largely the fault of theologians who, from the 17th century onwards, attempted to exploit science as a prop for faith. This rational quest for God, she says, actually encouraged atheism.
She also points out that science-based theology is notoriously unreliable. When a theologian conjures up God to fill a gap in our knowledge, a new theory can then eject him. And the idea of God as an “it”, or a “being”, or an object in the world competing for attention with other objects, has undermined a deeper, more mysterious sense of God that had developed in all faiths over centuries.
Armstrong seeks to isolate what she sees as the crucial lost idea of God as the unknowable and unspeakable. Anything less than acknowledging the ineffable nature of God, she insists, leads to idolatry – worshipping a god of our own creation. By definition, there is no easy way to write about the unsayable.
One of her attempts, at the heart of the book, involves the teachings of Christian philosopher Denys the Areopagite, St Paul’s first convert. “First we must affirm what God is,” she writes. “God is a rock; God is One; God is good; God exists. But when we listen carefully to ourselves, we fall silent, felled by the weight of absurdity in such God-talk.”
In the next phase, we deny these attributes. “But the ‘way of denial’ is just as inaccurate as the ‘way of affirmation’. Because we do not know what God is, we cannot know what God is not, so we must then deny the denials ... ”
The final phase, if you’re still on board, is a state that mystics call the “dark night of the soul”, or the cloud of unknowing. Writing about God, she says, is hard. So is reading about him.
Yet just thinking about God won’t do; Armstrong insists that sensing God depends on prayer, ritual, scripture and silence; it is a process rather than a logical conclusion. Nor does any single faith have a monopoly on enlightenment. If only religions could return to true enlightenment we would be capable, she writes, quoting Keats, of handling “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.
What are the prospects for Armstrong’s call for a more enlightened understanding? Some religionists are beginning to turn towards a more imaginative, less scientific and dogmatic approach to faith. She believes a maturer understanding of God would lessen antagonism between science and religion; reduce religious-inspired violence; and bring about greater compassion.
Sadly history shows that most attempts to combat wounding elements within religion tend to provoke reactions from the extreme. Armstrong is aware of this; but this prodigiously sourced, passionately written book is a compelling plea to give it a try.
John Cornwell is author of ‘Darwin’s Angel: An Angelic Riposte to the God Delusion’ (Profile)
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
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