The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

Postmodernism is iconoclastic, therefore. As one of its early luminaries, Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98), explained, it can be defined as “the incredulity towards grand narratives (grands récits).” Top of the list of such récits is the modern “God,” who is omnipotent and omniscient and keeps watch over the world, working all things to his own purposes. But postmodernism is also averse to an atheism that makes absolute, totalistic claims. As Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) cautioned, we must also be alert to “theological prejudices” not only in religious contexts, where they are overt, but in all metaphysics—even those that profess to be atheist.55 Like any postmodern philosopher, Derrida was deeply suspicious of the fixed, binary polarities that characterize modern thought, and the atheist/theist divide was, he believed, too simple.