The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

This activity in our own minds is a pale reflection of the Spirit, the bond of love between Father and Son. As in God, the three different faculties—memory, understanding, and love—constitute “one life, one mind, and one essence” within ourselves.

Jewish exegetes had never seen the sin of Adam in this catastrophic light, and the Greek Christians, who were not affected by the barbarian scourge, have never accepted the doctrine of Original Sin. Born in grief and fear, this doctrine has left Western Christians with a difficult legacy that linked sexuality indissolubly with sin and helped to alienate men and women from their humanity.

People who engaged in acrimonious discussion of religious truth were simply in love with their own opinions and had forgotten the cardinal teaching of the Bible, which was the love of God and neighbor.

He used the pseudonym Denys the Areopagite, Saint Paul’s first Athenian convert,

Religious people are always talking about God, and it is important that they do so.

As Denys pointed out, in the Bible God is given fifty-two names.70 God is called a rock and is likened to the sky, the sea, and a warrior. All that is fine, as far as it goes. Because God is always pouring itself into creatures, any one of them—even a rock—can tell us something about the divine. A rock is a very good symbol of God’s permanence and stability. But because a rock is not alive, it is obviously worlds apart from the God that is life itself, so we will never be tempted to say that God is a rock.

But the more sophisticated attributes of God—Ineffability, Unity, Goodness, and the like—are more dangerous, because they give us the false impression that we know exactly what God is like. “He” is Good, Wise, and Intelligent; “He” is One; “He” is Trinity.

When we listen to the sacred text read aloud during Mass and apply this method to the readings, we start to understand that even though God has revealed these names to us, we have no idea what they can mean. So we have to deny them, one after the other, and in the process make a symbolic ascent from earthly modes of perception to the divine. It is easy to deny the physical names: God is plainly not a rock, a gentle breeze, a warrior, or a creator. But when we come to the more conceptual descriptions of God, we find that we have to deny these too. God is not Mind in any sense that we can understand; God is not Greatness, Power, Light, Life, Truth, Imagination, Conviction, Understanding, Goodness—or even Divinity.74 We cannot even say that God “exists” because our experience of existence is based solely on individual, finite beings whose mode of being bears no relation to being itself: Therefore … God is known by knowledge and by unknowing; of him there is understanding, reason, knowledge, touch, perception, opinion, imagination, name and many other things, but he is not understood, nothing can be said of him, he cannot be named. He is not one of the things that are, nor is he known in any of the things that are; he is all things in everything and nothing in anything.75

Denys’s spiritual exercise took the form of a dialectical process, consisting of three phases. First we must affirm what God is: 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 second phase, we deny each one of 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: God is therefore not placeless, mindless, lifeless, or nonexistent. In the course of this exercise, we learn that God transcends the capability of human speech and “is beyond every assertion” and “beyond every denial.”76 It is as inaccurate to say that God is “darkness” as to say that God is “light;” to say that God “exists” as to say that God does “not exist,” because what we call God falls “neither within the predicate of existence or non-existence.”77 But what can this mean? The exercise leads us to apophasis, the breakdown of speech, which cracks and disintegrates before the absolute unknowability of what we call God.

we have become strangers to our former ways of thinking and speaking.

Like Moses at the top of the mountain, we embrace the darkness and experience no clarity, but know that, once we have rinsed our minds of inadequate ideas that block our understanding, we are somehow in the place where God is.

At key moments they would be able to “hear” the silence of the ineffable other that lay beyond the limits of speech.

Erigena insisted that God is “Nothing” because he does not possess “being” in any sense that we could understand. But God is also “Everything,” because every single creature that God informs becomes a theophany, a manifestation of God. Erigena

Instead of being educated in the niceties of doctrine, Western Christians were introduced to their faith as a practical way of life. By the end of the century, there was a marked rise in commitment among the laity, and Europeans had begun to forge a new and distinctively Western Christian identity.

This gives the impression that before one can have any comprehension of the loyalty and trust of faith, one must first force one’s mind to accept blindly a host of incomprehensible doctrines. Anselm is saying something quite different: religious truth made no sense without practically expressed commitment. Perhaps a better translation is “I involve myself in order that I may understand.”

For the monks of medieval Europe, lectio (“reading”) was not conducted simply to acquire information but was a spiritual exercise that enabled them to enter their inner world and there confront the truths revealed in scripture to see how they measured up.

Even revelation could not tell us anything about God; indeed, its task was to make us realize that God was unknowable.

Thomas’s huge output can be seen as a campaign to counter the tendency to domesticate the divine transcendence.

Having made this crucial apophatic proviso, Thomas briefly— indeed, somewhat perfunctorily—sets forth his five “ways” of arguing from creatures to “what people call God.”35 These five arguments are not original.

Why does something exist rather than nothing? All the five “ways” argue in one way or another that nothing can come from nothing.36 At the conclusion of each proof, Thomas rounds the argument off with a variant on the phrase quod omnes dicunt Deum: the Prime Mover, the Efficient Cause, the Necessary Being, the Highest Excellence, and the Intelligent Overseer are “what all people call God.” It sounds as though everything is done and dusted, but no sooner has Thomas apparently settled the matter than he pulls the rug from under our feet.

But because God’s attributes are identical with his essence, he has no qualities. He is not “good,” he is goodness. We simply cannot imagine an “existence” like this, so “we cannot know the ‘existence’ of God any more than we can define him,” Thomas explains, because “God cannot be classified as this or that sort of thing.” We can get to know mere beings because we can categorize them into species—as stars, elephants, or mountains. God is not a substance, the “sort of thing that can exist independently” of an individual instance of it. We cannot ask whether there is a God, as if God were simply one example of a species. God is not and cannot be a “sort of thing.”38

The question “Why something rather than nothing?” is a good one; human beings keep asking it, because it is in our nature to push our minds to an extreme in this way. But the answer—”what everybody calls ‘God’ “—is something that we do not, indeed cannot, know.

Pushed to the limit, reason turns itself inside out, words no longer make sense, and we are reduced to silence. Even today, when they contemplate the universe, physicists pit their minds against the dark world of uncreated reality that we cannot fathom. This is the unknowable reality that Thomas is asking his readers to confront by pushing their intellects to a point beyond which they cannot go. Thomas would say that we know that we are speaking about “God” when our language stumbles and fails in this way. As a modern theologian has pointed out, “This reduction of talk to silence is what is called ‘theology.’ “40 Unknowing was not a source of frustration. As Thomas indicates, people can find joy in this subversion of their reasoning powers. Thomas did not expect his students to “believe” in God; he still uses credere to mean trust or commitment and defines faith as “the capacity of the intellect to recognize (assentire) the genuineness of the transcendent,”41 to look beneath the surface of life and apprehend a sacred dimension that is as real as—indeed more real than—anything else in our experience. This “assent” did not mean intellectual submission: the verb assentire also meant “to rejoice in” and was related to assensio (“applause”).42 Faith was the ability to appreciate and take delight in the nonempirical realities that we glimpse in the world.

Historians used to think that the Reformation was primarily a reaction to the corruption of the Church, but there seems to have been a spiritual revival in Europe at this time, especially among the laity, who now felt empowered to criticize abuses that had previously passed without comment. As society changed, ideas and rituals that had been religiously viable before the advent of modernity became suddenly abhorrent.24 Instead of giving people a sense of life’s transcendent possibilities, they caused only anxiety. Luther memorably expressed this alienation from older practices. Although I lived a blameless life as a monk, I felt that I was a sinner with an uneasy conscience before God. I also could not believe that I had pleased him with my works. … I was a good monk, and kept my order so strictly that if ever a monk could get to heaven by monastic discipline, I was that monk. All my companions in the monastery would confirm this. … And yet my conscience did not give me certainty, but I always doubted and said, “You didn’t do that right. You weren’t contrite enough. You left that out of your confession.”25 In the past, the monastic life had encouraged a spirituality that was essentially communal. Monks had listened to the scriptures together during the liturgy. Lectio divina had been a ruminative, unanxious, and even enjoyable method of appropriating the truths of religion. But the new emphasis on the individual made Luther so obsessed with his own spiritual performance th...

When Copernicus had presented his ideas in the Vatican, the pope had given his approval; ninety years later, De revolutionibus was placed on the Index. In 1605, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), counselor to King James I of England, had declared that there could be no conflict between science and religion. But that openness was giving way to dogmatism and suspicion. There would soon be no place in the new Europe for the skepticism of Montaigne or the psychological agnosticism of Shakespeare. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the notion of truth had begun to change. Thomas Aquinas would not have recognized his theology in its post-Tridentine guise. His apophatic delight in unknowing was being replaced by a strident lust for certainty and a harsh dogmatic intolerance. The spirituality of silence was giving way to wordy debate; the refusal to define (a word that literally means “to set limits upon”) was being superseded by aggressive definitions of ineffable dogma. Faith was beginning to be identified with “belief” in man-made opinions—and that would, eventually, make faith itself difficult to maintain.

The unhappy stories of Prado and da Costa show that the mythos of confessional religion is unsustainable without spiritual exercises. Reason alone can produce only an attenuated deism that is easily abandoned, as its God is remote, abstract, and ultimately incredible. And yet at the same time as the Jewish community in Amsterdam was being torn apart by these conflicts, the Christians of Europe had begun to develop their own form of deism; like Prado, they too would regard scientific rationality as the only route to truth and would seek a rational certainty that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers had long held to be impossible in matters of faith.

His goal was to find a truth on which everybody—Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, deists, and “atheists”—could agree so that all people of good will could live together in peace.

Descartes had been haunted by Montaigne’s challenge at the end of the “Apology of Raymond Sebond”: unless we could find one thing about which we were completely certain, we could be sure of nothing. In the poêle, Descartes turned Montaigne’s skepticism on its head and made the experience of doubt the foundation of certainty.

When we experience ourselves thinking and doubting, we become aware of our existence. The ego rose ineluctably from the depths of the mind by the disciplined ascesis of skepticism:14 “What then am I? A thing which thinks [res cogitans]. What is a thing that thinks? It is a thing which doubts, understands, conceives, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels.”15 Descartes’ famous maxim “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”) neatly reversed traditional Platonic epistemology: “I think, therefore there is that which I think.” The modern mind was solitary, autonomous, and a world unto itself, unaffected by outside influence and separate from all other beings. From this irreducible nub of certainty, Descartes went on to prove the existence of God and the reality of the external world. Because the material universe was lifeless, godless, and inert, it could tell us nothing about God. The only animate thing in the entire cosmos was the thinking self, and it was here that we should look for incontrovertible proof. Descartes was clearly influenced by Augustine and Anselm. Doubt reveals the imperfection of the thinker, because when we doubt we become acutely aware that something is missing. But the experience of imperfection presupposes a prior notion of perfection, because it is a relative term, comprehensible only in terms of its absolute. It was impossible that a finite being could by its own efforts conceive the idea of perfection, so it must follow “t...

God was absolutely necessary to Descartes’ philosophy and his science, because without God he had no confidence in the reality of the external world.20 Because we could not trust our senses, the existence of material things was “very dubious and uncertain.” But a perfect being was truth itself and would not allow us to remain in error on such a fundamental matter: On the sole ground that God is not a deceiver and that consequently He has not permitted any falsity to exist in my opinion which He has not likewise given me the faculty of correcting, I may assuredly hope to conclude that I have within me the means of arriving at the truth even here.21

Descartes, a devout Catholic all his life, had experienced his “method” as a Godgiven revelation and in gratitude—extraordinary as this may seem— vowed to make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Loreto. Yet Descartes’ philosophy was profoundly irreligious: his God, a clear idea in his mind, was well on the way to becoming an idol, and his meditation on the thinking self did not result in kenosis but in the triumphant assertion of the ego. There was no awe in Descartes’ theology: indeed, he believed that it was the task of science to dispel wonder. In the future people should look, for example, at the clouds, “in such a way that we will no longer have occasion to wonder at anything that can be seen of them, or anything that descends from them.”23

When he dedicated his Meditations on First Philosophy to “The Most Illustrious Dean and Doctors of the Sacred Faculty of Theology in Paris,” Descartes made an astonishing claim: “I have always considered that the two questions respecting God and the soul were the chief of those that ought to be demonstrated by philosophical [i.e., “scientific”] rather than theological argument.”24 In the clear expectation that they would agree with him, Descartes calmly informed the most distinguished body of theologians in Europe that they were not competent to discuss God. Mathematics and physics would do the job more effectively.25 And the theologians were all too happy to agree. It was a fateful move. Henceforth, theology would increasingly be translated into a “philosophical” or “scientific” idiom that was alien to it.

The English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) was convinced that the religious intolerance that had rent Europe apart was simply the result of an inadequate idea of God. If people were allowed to use their rational powers freely, they would discover the truth for themselves, because the natural world gave ample evidence for God. There was no further need for revelation, ritual, prayer, or superstitious doctrines.

But the French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62), a passionately religious man, returned to the older idea that God was hidden in nature and that it was no use trying to find him there.29 In fact, the mechanical universe was godless, frightening, and devoid of meaning: When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.30 Certainty did not come from the rational contemplation of “clear” and “distinct” ideas but from the “heart,” the inner core of the human person.

Pascal could see that Christianity was about to make a serious mistake. Theologians were eager to embrace the modern ethos and make their teaching conform to the “clear and distinct” ideas currently in vogue, but how far should the new science impinge upon religion? A God who was merely “the author of mathematical truths and of the order of the elements” could bring no light to the darkness and pain of human existence. It would only cause people to fall into atheism.32 Pascal was one of the first people to see that atheism—meaning a radical denial of God’s existence—would soon become a serious option.33 A person who had not engaged himself with the rituals, exercises, and practices of religion would not be convinced by the arguments of the philosophers; for such a person, faith could only be a wager, a leap in the dark. Pascal had developed his rational powers more than most: by the age of eleven, he had worked out for himself the first twenty-three propositions of Euclid; at sixteen he had published a remarkable treatise on geometry; and he went on to invent a calculating machine, a barometer, and a hydraulic press. But he knew that reason could not produce religious conviction; “the heart” had its own reasons for faith.34

Spinoza’s God was the sum and principle of natural law, identical with and equivalent to the order that governs the universe. God was neither the Creator nor the First Cause, but was inseparable from the material world, an immanent force that welded everything into unity and harmony. When human beings contemplated the workings of their minds, they opened themselves to the eternal and infinite reality of the God active within them.

Like Descartes, Newton aspired to create a universal science capable of interpreting the whole of human experience.

For the first time, all the disparate facts observed in the cosmos had been brought together into a comprehensive theory.

At a stroke, Newton overturned centuries of Christian tradition. Hitherto leading theologians had argued that the creation could tell us nothing about God; indeed, it proved to us that God was unknowable. Thomas Aquinas’s “five ways” had shown that though one could prove that “what all men call God” had brought something out of nothing, it was impossible to know what God was. But Newton had no doubt that his Universal Mechanics could explain all God’s attributes. The Oxford orientalist Edward Pococke (1604–91) had told him that the Latin deus was derived from the Arabic du (“lord”).52 In the laws of gravity that held the universe together, Newton saw evidence of this divine “dominion” (dominatio), the overwhelming force that masters and controls the cosmos. It was the fundamental divine attribute: “It is the dominion of a spiritual being that constitutes a God.”53 But this domineering God was very different from Luria’s self-emptying En Sof or the kenotic God of the Trinity. Having established “Dominion” as the divine quality par excellence, it was possible to infer other attributes. A study of the universe proved that the God who created it must have intelligence, perfection, eternity, infinity, omniscience, and omnipotence: “That is, he continues from age to age, and is present from infinity to infinity; he rules all things and he knows what happens and what is able to happen.”54

Scientific rationalism, therefore, was what Newton called the “fundamental religion.” But it had been corrupted with “Monstrous Legends, false miracles, veneration of reliques, charmes, ye doctrine of Ghosts or Daemons, and their intercession, invocation & worship and other such heathen superstitions.”61 Newton was particularly incensed by the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, which, he argued, had been foisted on the faithful by Athanasius and other unscrupulous fourth-century theologians.

Thomas Aquinas’s contemplation of the cosmos had revealed the existence of a mystery. But Newton hated mystery, which he equated with sheer irrationality: “‘Tis the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion,” he wrote irritably, “ever to be fond of mysteries & for that reason to like best what they understand least.”

For the early modern rationalist, truth could not be obscure, so the God that was Truth must be as rational and plausible as any other fact of life.

During these anxious years, people saw “atheists” everywhere, but they were still using the term to describe anybody they disapproved of, regardless of his or her beliefs;

The doubter would find no support in the most advanced thought of the time, which insisted that the natural laws brilliantly uncovered by the scientists required a Lawgiver.67 Until there was a body of cogent reasons, each based on another cluster of scientifically verified truths, outright atheistic denial could only be a personal whim or passing impulse.

because they regarded reason as the most reliable path to truth.

His God was tangible: “There is no such thing as what men call the course of nature or the power of nature. [It] is nothing else but the will of God producing certain effects in a continued regular, constant and uniform manner.”73 God had become a mere force of nature. Theology had thrown itself on the mercy of science. At the time this seemed a good idea. After the disaster of the Thirty Years’ War, a rational ideology that could control the dangerous turbulence of early modern religion seemed essential to the survival of civilization. But the new scientific religion was about to make God incredible. In reducing God to a scientific explanation, the scientists and theologians of the seventeenth century were turning God into an idol, a mere human projection. Where Basil, Augustine, and Thomas had insisted that the natural world could tell us nothing about God, Newton, Bentley, and Clarke argued that nature could tell us everything we needed to know about the divine. God was no longer transcendent, no longer beyond the reach of language and concepts. As Clarke had shown, his will and attributes could be charted, measured, and definitively proven in twelve clear and distinct propositions. People were starting to become dependent upon the new science. But what would happen when a later generation of scientists found another ultimate explanation for the universe?

As Locke had argued, scientists had shown that the natural world gave sufficient evidence for a creator, so there was no further need for churches to force their teachings down the throats of their congregants. For the first time in history, men and women would be free to discover the truth for themselves.

These marvels all seemed to point to a supreme Intelligence, which could now be discovered by the extraordinary achievements of unaided human reason.

In both Europe and the American colonies, an elite group of intellectuals was convinced that humanity was beginning to leave superstition behind and was on the brink of a glorious new era. Science gave them greater control over nature than had ever been achieved before; people were living longer and felt more confident about the future. Already some Europeans had begun to insure their lives.6 The rich were now prepared to reinvest capital systematically on the basis of continuing innovation and in the firm expectation that trade would continue to improve. In order to keep abreast of these exciting developments, religion would have to change, so Enlightenment philosophers developed a new form of theism, based entirely on reason and Newtonian science, which they called Deism. It is not true that Deism was a halfway house to an outright denial of God.7 Deists were passionate about God and almost obsessed with religion. Like Newton, they believed that they had discovered the primordial faith that lay beneath the ancient biblical account. They spread their rational religion with near-missionary zeal, preaching salvation through knowledge and education. Ignorance and superstition had become the new Original Sins.

The Enlightenment was the culmination of a vision that had been long in the making. It built on Galileo’s mechanistic science, Descartes’ quest for autonomous certainty, and Newton’s cosmic laws, and by the eighteenth century, the philosophes believed that they had acquired a uniform way of assessing the whole of reality. Reason was the only path to truth. The philosophes were convinced that religion, society, history, and the workings of the human mind could all be explained by the regular natural processes discovered by science. But their rational ideology was entirely dependent upon the existence of God.