The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

He preferred the classic solution that God is greater than human beings can conceive and that his ways are not our ways. God may be incomprehensible, but people have the option of putting their trust in this ineffable God and affirming a meaning, even in the midst of meaninglessness.

Another Auschwitz story shows people doing precisely that. Even in the camps, some of the inmates continued to study the Torah and to observe the festivals, not in the hope of placating an angry deity but because they found, by experience, that these rituals helped them to endure the horror. One day a group of Jews decided to put God on trial. In the face of such inconceivable suffering, they found the conventional arguments utterly unconvincing. If God was omnipotent, he could have prevented the Shoah; if he could not stop it, he was impotent; and if he could have stopped it but chose not to, he was a monster. They condemned God to death. The presiding rabbi pronounced the verdict, then went on calmly to announce that it was time for the evening prayer. Ideas about God come and go, but prayer, the struggle to find meaning even in the darkest circumstances, must continue.

The idea of God is merely a symbol of indescribable transcendence and has been interpreted in many different ways over the centuries. The modern God—conceived as powerful creator, first cause, supernatural personality realistically understood and rationally demonstrable—is a recent phenomenon. It was born in a more optimistic era than our own and reflects the firm expectation that scientific rationality could bring the apparently inexplicable aspects of life under the control of reason. This God was indeed, as Feuerbach suggested, a projection of humanity at a time when human beings were achieving unprecedented control over their environment and thought they were about to solve the mysteries of the universe. But many feel that the hopes of the Enlightenment also died in Auschwitz. The people who devised the camps had imbibed the classical nineteenth-century atheistic ethos that commanded them to think of themselves as the only absolute; by making an idol of their nation, they felt compelled to destroy those they viewed as enemies. Today we have a more modest conception of the powers of human reason. We have seen too much evil in recent years to indulge in a facile theology that ...

In his later years, Wittgenstein changed his mind. He no longer believed that language should merely state facts but acknowledged that words also issued commands, made promises, and expressed emotion. Turning his back on the early modern ambition to establish a single method of arriving at truth, Wittgenstein now maintained that there were an infinite number of social discourses. Each one was meaningful—but only in its own context. So it was a grave mistake “to make religious belief a matter of evidence in the way that science is a matter of evidence,”46 because theological language worked “on an entirely different plane.”47 Positivists and atheists who applied the norms of scientific rationality and common sense to religion and those theologians who tried to prove God’s existence had all done “infinite harm,”48 because they implied that God was an external fact—an idea that was intolerable to Wittgenstein. “If I thought of God as another being outside myself, only infinitely more powerful,” he insisted, “then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.”49 Religious language was essentially symbolic; it was “disgusting”50 if interpreted literally, but symbolically it had the power to manifest a transcendent reality in the same way as the short stories of Tolstoy. Such works of art did not argue their case or produce evidence but somehow called into being the ineffable reality they evoked. But because the transcendent reality was ineffable—”wonderful beyond words”51—we would ...

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger had no time for the modern, personalized God but saw Sein (“Being”) as the supreme reality. It was not a being, so bore no relation to any reality that we knew; it was wholly other and should more accurately be called Nothing. And yet, paradoxically, Being was seiender (“being-er”), more complete than any particular being. Despite its utter transcendence, we can gain some understanding of it—but not through the aggressive thrust of scientific investigation. Instead, we had to cultivate what Heidegger called “primordial thinking,” a listening, receptive attitude characterized by silence. This was not a logical process, and it was not something that we did. Instead, it was something that happened within us, a lighting up—almost a revelation.

Theologians, Heidegger believed, had reduced God to a mere being. God had become Someone Else and theology a positive science.

Europeans had lost the sense that their doctrines were mere gestures toward transcendence. Their literalist approach showed a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of myth, which is “not to present an objective picture of the world as it is. … Myth should be interpreted not cosmologically but … existentially.”56 Biblical interpretation could not even begin without personal engagement, so scientific objectivity was as alien to religion as to art.

The “idea that the human mind is a perpetual manufacturer of idols is one of the deepest things which can be said about our thinking of God,” Tillich remarked. “Even orthodox theology is nothing other than idolatry.”

For centuries, symbols such as “God” or “providence” enabled people to look through the ebb and flow of temporal life to glimpse Being itself. This helped them to endure the terror of life and the horror of death, but now, Tillich argued, many had forgotten how to interpret the old symbolism and regarded it as purely factual. Hence, these symbols had become opaque; transcendence no longer shone through them. When this happened they died and lost their power, so when we spoke of these symbols in a literal manner, we made statements that were inaccurate and untrue. That was why, like so many premodern theologians, Tillich could state without qualification: “God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.”61 This was not, as many of his contemporaries believed, an atheistic statement: We can no longer speak of God easily to anybody, because he will immediately question: “Does God exist?” Now the very asking of that question signifies that the symbols of God have become meaningless. For God, in the question, has become one of the innumerable objects in time and space which may or may not exist. And this is not the meaning of God at all.62 God could never be an object of cognition, like the objects and people we see all around us. To look through the finite symbol to the reality—the God beyond “God” that lies beyond theism—demands courage; we have to confront the dead symbol to find “the God who appears whe...

Tillich liked to call God the ground of being. Like the atman in the Upanishads, which was identical with the Brahman as well as being the deepest core of the individual self, what we call “God” is fundamental to our existence. So a sense of participation in God does not alienate us from our nature or the world, as the nineteenth-century atheists had implied, but returns us to ourselves.

People did not come to know what God was by solving doctrinal conundrums, proving God’s existence, or engaging in an abstruse metaphysical quest, but by becoming aware of the workings of their own nature. Rahner was advocating a version of what the Buddha had called “mindfulness.” When we struggle to make sense of the world, we constantly go beyond ourselves in our search for understanding. Thus every act of cognition and every act of love is a transcendent experience because it compels us to reach beyond the prism of selfhood. Constantly, in our everyday experience, we stumble against something that takes us beyond ourselves, so transcendence is built into the human condition.

Rahner stressed the importance of mystery, which was simply an aspect of humanity. The transcendent is not an add-on, something separate from normal existence, because it simply means “to go beyond.” When we know, choose, and love other beings in this world, we have to go outside ourselves; when we try to get beyond all particular beings, we move toward what lies beyond words, concepts, and categories. That mystery, which defies description, is God. Religious doctrines were not meant to explain or define the mystery; they were simply symbolic. A doctrine articulates our sense of the ineffable and makes us aware of it. A dogmatic statement, therefore, is “merely the means of expressing a being referred beyond itself and anything imaginable.”

Continually we find that something eludes us: it urges us to move on further if we wish to become wise. In all cultures, humans have been seized by the same imperatives—to be intelligent, responsible, reasonable, and loving, and, if necessary, to change. All this pulls us into the realm of the transcendental, the Real and Unconditioned, which in the Christian world is called “God.” But this demonstration of the ubiquity of God does not force acceptance.

In 1962, the American intellectual Thomas Kuhn (1922–96) published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which criticized Popper’s theory of the systematic falsification of existing scientific theories but also undermined the older conviction that the history of science represented a linear, rational, and untrammeled progress toward an ever more accurate achievement of objective truth. Kuhn believed that the cumulative testing of hypotheses was only part of the story. During “normal” periods, scientists did indeed research and test their theories, but instead of reaching out toward new truth, they were, in fact, simply seeking confirmation of the scientific paradigm of the day. Teachers and texts all worked to support the prevailing orthodoxy and tended to ignore anything that challenged it; they could advance no farther than the current paradigm, which thus acquired a conviction and rigidity not unlike theological dogma. But then—as had occurred during the 1920s—the “normal” period was succeeded by a dramatic paradigm shift. The accumulating uncertainties and puzzling results of experiments became irresistible, and scientists contended with one another to find a new paradigm. This was not a rational process; it consisted of imaginative and unpredictable flights into the unknown, all influenced by metaphors, imagery, and assumptions drawn from other fields. Kuhn seemed to suggest that aesthetic, social, historical, and psychological factors were also involved, so that t...

In Knowing and Being, Michael Polyani (1891–1976), a chemist and philosopher of science, argued that all knowledge was tacit rather than objectively and self-consciously acquired. He drew attention to the role of practical knowledge, which had been greatly overlooked in the modern emphasis on theoretical understanding. We learn how to swim or dance without being able to explain precisely how it is done. We recognize a friend’s face without being able to specify exactly what it is that we recognize. Our perception of the external world is not a mechanical, straightforward absorption of data. We integrate a vast number of things into a focal awareness, subjecting them to an interpretive framework that is so deeply rooted that we cannot make it explicit. The speed and complexity of this integration easily outstrips the relatively ponderous processes of logic or inference. Indeed, knowledge is of little use to us until it has been made tacit. Once we have learned how to drive a car, “the text of the manual is shifted to the back of the driver’s mind and transported almost entirely to the tacit operations of a skill.”65 When we learn a skill, we literally dwell in the innumerable muscular actions we perform without fully knowing how we achieve them. All understanding, Polyani claimed, is like this. We interiorize a language or a poem “and make ourselves dwell in them. Such extensions of ourselves develop new faculties in us; our whole education operates in this way; as each of ...

Scientific rationalism consists largely of problem solving, an approach that does lead to systematic advance: after a problem has been solved, it can be laid aside and scientists can move on to tackle the next. But the humanities do not function in this way, because the problems they confront, such as mortality, grief, evil, or the nature of happiness, are not capable of a once-and-for-all solution. It can take a lifetime’s engagement with a poem before it reveals its full depth. This type of contemplation may function differently from ratiocination, but it is not for that reason irrational; it is like the “thinking” Heidegger prescribed: repetitive, incremental, and receptive.68 The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) distinguished between a problem, “something met which bars my passage” and “is before me in its entirety,” and a mystery, “something in which I find myself caught up, and whose essence is not before me in its entirety.”69 We have to remove a problem before we can proceed, but we are compelled to participate in a mystery—rather as the Greeks flung themselves into the rites of Eleusis and grappled with their mortality. “A mystery is something in which I am myself involved,” Marcel continued, “and it can therefore only be thought of as a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and its essential validity.”70 It is always possible—and perhaps a modern temptation—to turn a mystery into a problem and try ...

They tended still to think about God in the modern way, as an objective reality, “out there,” that could be categorized like any other being. During the 1950s, for example, I learned by heart this answer to the question “What is God?” in the Roman Catholic catechism: “God is the supreme spirit, who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections.” Denys, Anselm, and Aquinas were probably turning in their graves. The catechism had no hesitation in asserting that it was possible simply to draw breath and define, a word that literally means “to set limits upon,” a transcendent reality that must exceed all words and concepts.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) spoke of a God-shaped hole in human consciousness where the sacred had always been. The desire for what we call God is intrinsic to human nature, which cannot bear the utter meaninglessness of the cosmos. We have invented a God to explain the inexplicable; it is a divinized humanity. But even if God existed, Sartre claimed, it would be necessary to reject him, since this God negates our freedom. This was not a comfortable creed. It demanded a bleak acceptance of the fact that our lives had no meaning—a heroic act that brought an apotheosis of freedom but also a denial of an intrinsic part of our nature.

By the middle of the twentieth century, many found it impossible to imagine that getting rid of God would lead to a brave new world; there was no serene Enlightenment optimism in the rationality of human existence. Camus had embraced the state of unknowing. He did not know for certain that God did not exist; he simply chose to believe this. We have to live with our ignorance in a universe that is silent in the face of our questioning.

But despite its vehement rejection of the authoritarian structures of institutional religion, sixties youth culture was demanding a more religious way of life. Instead of going to church, the young went to Kathmandu or sought solace in the meditative techniques of the Orient. Others found transcendence in drug-induced trips, or personal transformation in such techniques as the Erhard Seminars Training (est). There was a hunger for mythos and a rejection of the scientific rationalism that had become the new Western orthodoxy. Much twentieth-century science had been cautious, sober, and highly conscious in a disciplined, principled way of its limitations and areas of competence. But since the time of Descartes, science had also been ideological and had refused to countenance any other method of arriving at truth. During the sixties, the youth revolution was in part a protest against the illegitimate domination of rational discourse and the suppression of mythos by logos. But because the understanding of the traditional ways of arriving at more intuitive knowledge had been neglected in the West during the modern period, the sixties quest for spirituality was often wild, self-indulgent, and unbalanced.

Whatever the pundits, intellectuals, or politicians thought, people all over the world were demonstrating that they wanted to see religion more clearly reflected in public life. This new form of piety is popularly known as “fundamentalism,” but many object to having this Christian term foisted on their reform movements. They do not in fact represent an atavistic return to the past. These are essentially innovative movements and could have taken root at no time other than our own. Fundamentalisms too can be seen as part of the postmodern rejection of modernity.

Islam has traditionally been a religion of success: in the past, Muslims were always able to surmount disaster and use it creatively to rise to new spiritual and political heights. The Qur’an assures them that if their society is just and egalitarian, it will prosper—not because God is tweaking history on their behalf but because this type of government is in line with the fundamental laws of existence.

Because fundamentalists feel under threat, they are defensive and unwilling to entertain any rival point of view, yet another expression of the intolerance that has always been part of modernity. Christian fundamentalists take a hard line on what they regard as moral and social decency. They campaign against the teaching of evolution in public schools, are fiercely patriotic but averse to democracy, see feminism as one of the great evils of the day, and conduct a crusade against abortion.

Like evolution, abortion has become symbolic of the murderous evil of modernity. Christian fundamentalists are convinced that their doctrinal “beliefs” are an accurate, final expression of sacred truth and that every word of the Bible is literally true—an attitude that is a radical departure from mainstream Christian tradition.

Fundamentalists are swift to condemn people whom they regard as the enemies of God: most Christian fundamentalists see Jews and Muslims as destined for hellfire, and some regard Buddhism, Hinduism, and Daoism as inspired by the devil. Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists take a similar stance, each seeing their own tradition as the only true faith. Muslim fundamentalists have toppled governments, and some extremists have been guilty of terrorist atrocities. Jewish fundamentalists have founded illegal settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with the avowed intention of driving out the Arab inhabitants, convinced that they are paving the way for the Messiah; others throw stones at Israelis who drive their cars on the Sabbath.

In all its forms, fundamentalism is a fiercely reductive faith. In their anxiety and fear, fundamentalists often distort the tradition they are trying to defend. They can, for example, be highly selective in their reading of scripture. Christian fundamentalists quote extensively from the book of Revelation and are inspired by its violent End-time vision but rarely refer to the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus tells his followers to love their enemies, to turn the other cheek, and not to judge others. Jewish fundamentalists rely heavily on the Deuteronomist sections of the Bible and seem to pass over the rabbis’ injunction that exegesis should lead to charity. Muslim fundamentalists ignore the pluralism of the Qur’an, and extremists quote its more aggressive verses to justify violence, pointedly disregarding its far more numerous calls for peace, tolerance, and forgiveness. Fundamentalists are convinced that they are fighting for God, but in fact this type of religiosity represents a retreat from God. To make purely human, historical phenomena—such as “family values,” “the Holy Land,” or “Islam”—sacred and absolute is idolatry, and, as always, their idol forces them to try to destroy its opponents.

“In Paris, I saw Islam but no Muslims; in Egypt, I see Muslims but no Islam.” His point was that their modernized economies had enabled Europeans to promote conditions of justice and equity that came closer to the spirit of the Qur’an than was possible in a partially modernized society.

Western foreign policy has also hastened the rise of fundamentalism in the Middle East. The coup organized by the CIA and British Intelligence in Iran (1953) that displaced the nationalist, secular ruler Muhammad Mosaddeq (1880–1967) and put the exiled shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi (1878–1944) back on the throne left Iranians with a sense of bitter humiliation, betrayal, and impotence.

Western support for such rulers as the shah and Saddam Hussein, who denied their people basic human rights, has also tarnished the democratic ideal, since the West seemed proudly to proclaim its belief in freedom while inflicting dictatorial regimes on others. It has also helped to radicalize Islam, since the mosque was often the only place where people could express their discontent.

For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a “misfiring of something useful”;21 it is a kind of virus, parasitic on cognitive systems naturally selected because they had enabled a species to survive.

Gould had no religious ax to grind; he described himself as an atheistically inclined agnostic but pointed out that Darwin himself had denied he was an atheist and that other eminent Darwinians— Asa Gray, Charles D. Walcott, G. G. Simpson, and Theodosius Dobzhansky—had been either practicing Christians or agnostics. Atheism did not, therefore, seem to be a necessary consequence of accepting evolutionary theory, and Darwinians who held forth dogmatically on the subject were stepping beyond the limitations that were proper to science.

Gould also revived, in new form, the ancient distinction and complementarity of mythos and logos in what he called NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria). A “magisterium,” he explained, was “a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution.”23 Religion and science were separate magisteria and should not encroach on each other’s domain: The magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory)? The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry.24 The idea of an inherent conflict between religion and science was false. They were two distinct magisteria that “hold equal worth and necessary status for any complete human life; and … remain logically distinct and fully separate in lines of inquiry.”25

quisling.

Like all religious fundamentalists, the new atheists believe that they alone are in possession of truth; like Christian fundamentalists, they read scripture in an entirely literal manner and seem never to have heard of the long tradition of allegoric or Talmudic interpretation or indeed of the Higher Criticism. Harris seems to imagine that biblical inspiration means that the Bible was actually “written by God.”27 Hitchens assumes that faith is entirely dependent upon a literal reading of the Bible, and that, for example, the discrepancies in the gospel infancy narratives prove the falsity of Christianity: “Either the gospels are in some sense literal truth, or the whole thing is essentially a fraud and perhaps a moral one at that.”28

But as Dennett points out, the ID theorists have not devised any experiments or made any empirical observations that challenge modern evolutionary thinking. ID, he concludes, is therefore not science.30 ID is also theologically incorrect to make scientific statements.

Mythos and logos have different fields of competence, and, as we have seen, when they are confused you have bad science and inadequate religion.

This type of reductionism is characteristic of the fundamentalist mentality. It is also essential to the critique of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris to present fundamentalism as the focal core of the three monotheisms. They have an extremely literalist notion of God. For Dawkins, religious faith rests on the idea that “there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence, who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it.”31 Having set up this definition of God as Supernatural Designer, Dawkins only has to point out that there is in fact no design in nature in order to demolish it. But he is mistaken to assume that this is “the way people have generally understood the term” God.32 He is also wrong to claim that God is a scientific hypothesis, that is, a conceptual framework for bringing intelligibility to a series of experiments and observations.33 It was only in the modern period that theologians started to treat God as a scientific explanation and in the process produced an idolatrous God concept.

As Popper, Kuhn, and Polyani have argued, science itself has to rely on an act of faith. Even Monod acknowledged this. Dawkins’s hero Darwin admitted that he could not prove the evolutionary hypothesis but he had confidence in it nonetheless, and for decades, as we have seen, physicists were happy to have faith in Einstein’s theory of relativity, even though it had not been definitively verified. Even Harris makes a large act of faith in the ability of his own intelligence to arrive at objective truth—a claim that Hume or Kant would have found questionable.

They do not appear to consider the effect of such nihilism on people who do not have privileged lives and absorbing work.

It is surely characteristic of our humanity to take something basic and instinctual and transform it in such a way that it transcends the purely pragmatic. Cooking, for example, probably began as a useful survival skill, but we have gone on to develop haute cuisine. We acquired the ability to run and jump in order to get away from predators, and now we have ballet and athletics. We cultivated language as a useful means of communication and have created poetry.

many people who have little theological training have problems with the modern God.

Our world is already dangerously polarized, and we do not need another divisive ideology. The history of fundamentalism shows that when these movements are attacked, they nearly always become more extreme. The atheist assault is likely to drive the fundamentalists to even greater commitment to creationism, and their contemptuous dismissal of Islam is a gift to Muslim extremists, who can use it to argue that the West is indeed intent on a new Crusade.44

Typical of the fundamentalist mind-set is the belief that there is only one way of interpreting reality. For the new atheists, scientism alone can lead us to truth. But science depends upon faith, intuition, and aesthetic vision as well as on reason.

But the danger of this secularization of reason, which denies the possibility of transcendence, is that reason can become an idol that seeks to destroy all rival claimants. We hear this in the new atheism, which has forgotten that unknowing is a part of the human condition, so much so that, as the social critic Robert N. Bellah has pointed out: “Those who feel they are … most fully objective in their assessment of reality are most in the power of deep, unconscious fantasies.”48

They have learned that what seemed incontrovertible could be replaced overnight by an entirely different scientific model, and are at home with unknowing.

Thus the cosmologist Paul Davies speaks of his delight in science with its unanswered and, perhaps, unanswerable questions: Why did we come to exist 13.7 billion years ago in a Big Bang? Why are the laws of electromagnetism or gravitation as they are? Why these laws? What are we doing here? And, in particular, how come we are able to understand the world? Why is it that we’re equipped with intellects that can unpick all this wonderful cosmic order and make sense of it? It’s truly astonishing.53 Davies has confessed: “It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion, science offers a surer path to God than religion.”54 He is still asking the primordial question: Why is there something rather than nothing?

Human beings seem framed to pose problems for themselves that they cannot solve, pit themselves against the dark world of uncreated reality, and find that living with such unknowing is a source of astonishment and delight.

Postmodern thinking is heir to Hume and Kant in its assumption that what we call reality is constructed by the mind and that all human understanding is therefore interpretation rather than the acquisition of accurate, objective information. From this it follows that no single vision can be sovereign; that our knowledge is relative, subjective, and fallible rather than certain and absolute; and that truth is inherently ambiguous. Received ideas that are the products of a particular historical and cultural milieu must, therefore, be stringently deconstructed. But this analysis must not be based on any absolute principle, and there is no assurance that we will ever arrive at—or even approximate—a wholly accurate version of the truth. Fundamental to postmodern thought is the conviction that instead of ideologies mirroring external conditions, the world is profoundly affected by the ideology that human beings impose upon it. We are not forced by sense data to adopt a particular worldview, so we have a choice in what we affirm—as well as an immense responsibility.

Postmodernists are particularly suspicious of Big Stories.

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.