The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

There were thus two rival versions of modernity: one open and tolerant, the other exclusive and coercive.

Secularization would be accelerated by three crucial and formative sixteenth-century movements: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.

The humanism of the Renaissance, for example, was deeply religious.

But this “objectivity” did not mean an abandonment of the transcendent: this “scientific art” achieved a numinous vision, just as early modern scientists sought a solution that was elegant, aesthetic, and redolent of the divine.

Petrarch (1304–74), who had argued that “theology is actually poetry, poetry concerning God,” effective not because it “proved” anything but because it reached the heart.

“theology is actually poetry, poetry concerning God,” effective not because it “proved” anything but because it reached the heart.

They were particularly drawn to the affective spirituality of Paul and Augustine, whom they revered not as doctrinal authorities, but as individuals like themselves, who had embarked on a highly personal and emotional quest.

Like the Renaissance humanists, they had no time for the natural theology of the late scholastics and wanted a more personal and immediate faith. Zwingli and Calvin, indeed, remained humanists throughout their lives, their religious reform largely inspired by the Renaissance zeitgeist.

The profound societal changes of early modernity caused many to feel disoriented and lost.

all the reformers emphasized the unqualified divine sovereignty that would not only characterize the modern God but also help to shape the Scientific Revolution.

“Faith,” he explained in one of his sermons, “does not require information, knowledge and certainty, but a free surrender and joyful bet on his unfelt, untried and unknown goodness.”

Lutheran churches maintained many of the customary vestments, paintings, altarpieces, and ceremonies; organ music and hymns survived, and the German Reformation would inspire a new tradition of church music that would reach its apogee in the work of J. S. Bach (1685–1750). It would give a transcendent dimension to the often prosaic words of the vernacular. But in the Calvinist tradition, pictures and statues vanished, church music was ruthlessly simplified, and ceremony was abandoned in favor of extempore worship.

Now the reformers declared that the Eucharist was “only” a symbol and the Mass no longer a symbolic reenactment of Calvary but a simple memorial.

Slowly, in tune with the new commercial and scientific spirit, a distinctively “modern” notion of religious truth as logical, unmediated, and objective was emerging in the Western Christian world.42

Inevitably, this orgy of acrimonious doctrinal debate would affect the traditional notion of “belief,” pushing intellectual orthodoxy to the fore.

Catholics were certainly drifting toward the new conception of “belief,” but they would never identify it so completely with doctrinal assent as Protestants.

The Protestant reformers may have demanded that Christians be free to read and interpret the Bible as they chose, but there was no toleration for anybody who opposed their own teachings.

As it entered the modern period, therefore, the West was torn between a frequently strident dogmatism on the one hand, and a more liberal humility that recognized the limits of knowledge on the other.

Shakespeare made his audiences aware that human beings were mysterious to themselves and others, and that it was disastrous and counterproductive to either attempt to manipulate them or expect them to act in a certain way.

Copernicus knew that most of the population would find the idea of a heliocentric, or sun-centered, universe impossible either to understand or to accept, so he did not publish his treatise but circulated the manuscript privately.

Looking back ad fontes to classical antiquity, he found that in the third century BCE, Aristarchus of Samos had suggested that the planets revolved around the sun and that the Earth revolved on its own axis.

Copernicus’s theory was roundly criticized, not because he could not prove it, but because it contravened basic principles of Aristotelian physics.

Augustine’s principle of accommodation,

Science was “very useful” and must not be impeded “because some frantic persons are wont boldly to reject whatever is unknown to them.”52

The universe was, therefore, a self-regulating machine and ran on the same principles that governed dynamics here on earth.57

Geometry was God’s language; like the Word that had existed with God from before the creation, it was identical with God.

60 So the study of geometry was the study of God, and by studying the mathematical laws that inform all natural phenomena, we commune with the divine mind.

Kepler, a mathematician of extraordinary genius, reminds us that early modern science was rooted in faith.

“To come to the knowledge you have not, you must go by a way in which you know not.”

many of whom were willing in these fearful times to trade the burden of freedom for the consolations of certainty.

All this, Galileo concluded, was proof positive of the Copernican hypothesis.

Instead of losing himself in mystical theories, the scientist should concentrate on an object’s measurable, quantitative characteristics—its size, shape, number, weight, or motion.

If a scientist’s conclusions left any room for doubt, they were not, in his view, scientific.

To his dying day, Galileo adhered to the traditional relationship of mythos and logos and insisted that his theories did not in any way contradict religion.

Science focused on the material world, theology on God.

But in cases where there was no conclusive proof, Galileo argued that we should bow to the authority of the Bible: “I have no doubt at all that, where human reason cannot reach, and where consequently one cannot have a science, but only opinion and faith, it is appropriate piously to conform absolutely to the literal meaning of scripture.”75

the task of theology was simply to organize doctrines into neat systems that could be marshaled effectively against the enemies of the Church.

Was Galileo’s insistence on absolute certainty another sign of the dogmatism of the age?

His apophatic delight in unknowing was being replaced by a strident lust for certainty and a harsh dogmatic intolerance.

Faith was beginning to be identified with “belief” in man-made opinions—and that would, eventually, make faith itself difficult to maintain.

There was as yet no notion in Europe of a “secular Jew,” and as an excommunicate da Costa was shunned by Jews and Christians alike; children jeered at him in the street.

The unhappy stories of Prado and da Costa show that the mythos of confessional religion is unsustainable without spiritual exercises.

When these fundamentals had shifted, how could anybody be certain of the truth?

His death, which shocked moderate Catholics and Protestants alike, sent a grim message: a policy of toleration had been tried but it had failed.

He was especially concerned about the “atomists”—Democritus, Epicurus, and the Roman poet Lucretius (c. 95–55 BCE)—who had believed that the universe had come into being by chance.

Thomas Aquinas had insisted that we could not learn anything about the nature of God from the created world;

the complexity that scientists were discovering in the universe had persuaded theologians that God must be an Intelligent Designer.

As he witnessed the war at first hand, he became convinced that it was essential to find a way out of the theological and political impasse that seemed to be destroying civilization itself;

Descartes turned Montaigne’s skepticism on its head and made the experience of doubt the foundation of certainty.

The internal experience of doubt itself revealed a certainty that nothing in the external world could provide.