I read this book and then wondered if there could be a joke along the lines of "an atheist and a fundamentalist walk into a library arguing about God, the librarian gives them this book, they read it, and then they leave the library unable to say anything."

The idea behind this book (and behind the "joke" such as it is) is that the modern notion of God--whether held by believers or atheists--is not the same as the notion of God held by those who "formulated" the major religions.

For example, the idea that God has anything to do with nature, or "creation," is very much a hinge on the door of the argument between the atheist and the Biblical fundamentalist. Armstrong argues that the pre-modern notion of God didn't find this aspect of divinity to be particularly compelling, one way or the other. The states of the soul that concerned them lay outside of nature, and so must God.

Another example has to do with the way we understand the word "belief." Armstrong contends that modern "belief" consists of a set of doctrines to which we attach an intellectualized endorsement, unlike the premodern understanding, in which belief had more to do with trust in something beyond our ability to define. An important consequence of this shift, according to her, is a change from religion as a set of practices to religion as an ideology.

Any book that can make bedfellows of atheists and fundamentalists is bound to be worth reading.