The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

suggested that the relative velocities of light from the sun were the same in the direction of the earth’s rotation as when opposed to it, which was entirely inconsistent with Newtonian mechanics.

The planets did not move in their orbits because they were drawn to the sun by gravitational force operating at a distance but because the space in which they moved was actually curved.

Subatomic phenomena were particularly baffling because they could be observed as both waves and particles of

Unknowing seemed built into the human condition.

“inner voice tells me that it … does not bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.”

This type of speculation was ill-conceived. Inured to their need for scientific proof, these apologists were still interpreting the ancient biblical symbols in too literal a manner.

We are confronted with something truly ineffable.

Not only was God beyond the reach of the human mind, but the natural world was also terminally elusive.

Scientific theory did not seem to depend wholly on ratiocination and calculation: intuition and a sense of beauty and elegance were also important factors.

“Whereof one cannot speak,” he said famously, “thereof one must be silent.”

This was a form of positivism, because Pentecostalists relied on the immediacy of sense experience to validate their beliefs.

Every single fundamentalist movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is rooted in profound fear.

They accused these biblical literalists of being in the pay of the Germans and compared them to atheistic Bolsheviks.

The conservatives responded in kind, retorting that, on the contrary, it was the pacifism of the liberals that had caused America to fall behind in the arms race;29 it was they who had been in league with the Germans, since the Higher Criticism that the liberals admired had caused the collapse of decent values in Germany.

In 1920 the Democratic politician William Jennings Bryan (1860— 1925) launched a crusade against the teaching of evolution in schools and colleges; almost single-handedly, Bryan was responsible for ousting the Higher Criticism from the top of the fundamentalist agenda and putting Darwinism in its place.

This “research” convinced Bryan that evolutionary theory heralded the collapse of morality and decent civilization.

The author Maynard Shipley argued that if the fundamentalists seized control of the denominations and imposed their bigoted views on the people, America would be dragged back to the Dark Ages.35

Subsequent history would show that when a fundamentalist movement is attacked, it almost invariably becomes more aggressive, bitter, and excessive.

But after Dayton, an unswerving biblical literalism became central to the fundamentalist mind-set and creation science became the flagship of the movement. It would become impossible to discuss the issue rationally, because evolution was no longer merely a scientific hypothesis but a “symbol,” indelibly imbued with the misery of defeat and humiliation.

But to blame the entire catastrophe on religion is simply—and perhaps even dangerously—inaccurate.

Science itself was implicated in the eugenic experiments carried out there.

Perhaps the Holocaust was not so much an expression as a perversion of Judeo-Christian values.

At the heart of the Nazi ideology was a romantic yearning for a pre-Christian German paganism that they had never properly understood, and a negation of the God who, as Nietzsche had suggested, put a brake on ambition and instinctual “pagan” freedom.

The extermination of the people who had created the God of the Bible was a symbolic enactment of the death of God that Nietzsche had proclaimed.

In Christian theology, hell had traditionally been defined as the absence of God, and the camps uncannily reproduced the traditional symbolism of the inferno: the flaying, racking, whipping, screaming, and mocking; the distorted bodies; the flames and stinking air all evoked the imagery of hell depicted by the artists, poets, and dramatists of Europe.

“Never shall I forget those moments,” he wrote years later, “which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.”

This story can also be seen as an outward sign of the death of God announced by Nietzsche.

Rubenstein is drawn to the self-emptying God of Isaac Luria, who had not been able to control the world he had brought into being.

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.

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.

A modern theology must look unflinchingly into the heart of a great darkness and be prepared, perhaps, to enter into the cloud of unknowing.

they implied that God was an external fact—an

“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.”

Religious language was essentially symbolic; it was “disgusting”50 if interpreted literally, but symbolically it had the power to manifest a transcendent reality in ...

If, Wittgenstein believed, he would one day be capable of making his entire nature bow down “in humble resignation to the dust,” then, he thought, God would, as it were, come to him.53

Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) insisted that God must be de-objectified and that the scriptures did not convey factual information but could be understood only if Christians involved themselves existentially with their faith.

Myth should be interpreted not cosmologically but … existentially.”

“power that constrains man to decision, who confronts him in the demand for good.”

The concept of a “Personal God,” interfering with natural events, or being “an independent cause of natural events” makes God a natural object beside others, an object among others, a being among beings, maybe the highest, but nevertheless, a being. This indeed is not only the destruction of the physical system but even more the destruction of any meaningful idea of God.59

A God who interfered with human freedom was a tyrant, not so different from the human tyrants who had wrought such havoc in recent history.

As recent history had shown, human beings were chronically predisposed to idolatry.

“God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.”

the God beyond “God” that lies beyond theism—demands courage; we have to confront the dead symbol to find “the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.“

Tillich liked to call God the ground of being.

Tillich also called God the “ultimate concern;”

he believed that we experience the divine in our absolute commitment to ultimate truth, love, beauty, justice, and compassion—even if it requires the sacrifice of our own life.

Rahner was advocating a version of what the Buddha had called “mindfulness.”

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.

transcendence is built into the human condition.