11.09.09
The Case for God
Since October 24, the Believers & Doubters group have been discussing Karen Armstrong’s most recently released book, The Case for God. Over the course of the group’s study I’ll occasionally post my interpretation and understanding of what she has to say and my reactions based on this understanding.
Just prior to starting in on The Case for God I finished reading Armstrong’s fascinating and informative memoir, The Spiral Staircase. It’s a record of Armstrong’s spiritual journey and is useful, if not indispensable, background to understanding the interpretative framework she employs in writing about religion generally and the subject of this study in particular. This book is quite timely coming at a time when books by prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have achieved best seller status.
Following is what I take away from my reading of the introduction to The Case for God. It sets the tone and framework for the chapters which follow.
1. Our talk about God today is often rather facile. Religion is complex. For one thing, it’s inaccurate to call God the Supreme Being, for he’s not a being at all, she says. People of God will admit that God is transcendent, but we scarcely know what this means. Sages preferred to say God was “Nothing”–a way for them to express the mystery that God is, the notion that God was not just another being. Armstrong says that because we modern people have access to written scriptures and other religious writings mystery is alien to us while premoderns found it quite hospitable.
2. Premodern cultures (i.e. prior to the 17th century) had two ways of thinking about, speaking or acquiring knowledge: mythos and logos (reason), as the Greeks referred to them. Logos was necessary for survival while mythos helped them cope with those aspects of the human predicament that were outside the capability of mythos. According to Armstrong, myth was not something primarily to be believed because it was true. Rather it was something to be acted out–a program of action. Put into practice, myths can tell us something profoundly true about ourselves as human beings.
3. Like myth, religion was not something that premodern cultures thought about but something they did. For Daoists, for example, religion was a “knack” that they acquired through constant practice. Like any knack or skill religion requires practice and as such some people will be better at it than others.
4. Religious knowledge became primarily theoretical beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries. This is when theologians began to adopt the criteria and methods of science applied to religion. The meaning of “belief” changes to become “credulous acceptance of creedal doctrines.”
5. This rationalized interpretive approach to religion has resulted in two distinctively modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. Fundamentalism, the literalistic reading of scripture, is an effort at producing rational, scientific faith.
6. Armstrong believes that the “new atheists” are reacting to a fundamentalist conception of religion, thereby weakening their critique, because fundamentalism is a “defiantly unorthodox form of faith.” These new atheists are not radical enough, Armstrong avers. In support of which she makes the remarkable statement that “Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and there is ‘nothing’ out there; in making these assertions, their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God’s transcendence.”
As I understand her position, Armstrong does not deny the reality of God. She in fact says that “If a conventional idea of God (which I take to include the concept of a personal God, which she doesn’t subscribe to) inspires empathy and respect for all others, it is doing its job…Because God is infinite, nobody can have the last word…Quarreling about religion is counterproductive…”
Religious as well as secular people have both lost sight of the value of unknowing, says Armstrong. Both need to take account of the long religious tradition of recognizing the limits of our knowledge and the value of reticence, silence and awe–a sentiment with which I heartily agree.
