The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

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.

Religious doctrines were not meant to explain or define the mystery; they were simply symbolic.

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.”

We interiorize a language or a poem “and make ourselves dwell in them.

Cappadocians’ insistence that the knowledge of God was acquired not merely cerebrally but by the physical participation in the liturgical tradition of the Church, which initiated people into a form of knowing that was silent and could not be clearly articulated.67

Because there is so much that cannot be proven, there will always be an element of what religious people call “faith” in science—the kind of faith that physicists showed in Einstein’s theory of relativity in the absence of empirical proof.

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.

mystery, “something in which I find myself caught up, and whose essence is not before me in its entirety.”

But the tradition of Denys, Thomas, and Eckhart had been so submerged during the modern period that most religious congregations were unaware of it. 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.

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.

But even if God existed, Sartre claimed, it would be necessary to reject him, since thi...

Camus showed that the abolition of God required a lifelong and hopeless struggle that it was impossible to rationalize.

He did not know for certain that God did not exist; he simply chose to believe this.

God was dead and that henceforth religion must center on humanity rather than a transcendent deity;

Atheism was no longer regarded as a term of abuse. As Nietzsche had predicted, the idea of God had simply died, and for the first time ordinary folk, who were not pioneering scientists or philosophers, were happy to call themselves atheists.

There is no Job who can sustain such suffering.

We must give up God and focus on Jesus of Nazareth, the liberator, who “defines what it is to be a man.”

This militant religiosity,

But it is essential for critics of religion to see fundamentalism in historical context. Far from being typical of faith, it is an aberration.

“In Paris, I saw Islam but no Muslims; in Egypt, I see Muslims but no Islam.”

But Islam was the last of the three monotheisms to develop a fundamentalist strain; it did not do so until the late 1960s, after the Arabs’ catastrophic defeat by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967,

Many forms of what we call “fundamentalism” should be seen as essentially political discourse—a religiously articulated form of nationalism or ethnicity.

have started to preach a militant form of atheism.

Monod maintained that it was not only intellectually but also morally wrong to accept any ideas that were not scientifically verifiable.

For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution.

Gould insisted that science was not competent to decide whether God did or did not exist, because it could work only with natural explanations.

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

claiming that religion has only been evil is inaccurate.

Theologians should try to present it in an attractive, accessible way to enable congregants to keep up with the latest discussions and the new insights of biblical scholarship, which rarely reach the pews.

which has forgotten that unknowing is a part of the human condition,

“Those who feel they are … most fully objective in their assessment of reality are most in the power of deep, unconscious fantasies.”

they are straining at the limits of scientific investigation, and these terms should carry an air of mystery because they name what cannot yet be investigated.

Davies has confessed: “It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion, science offers a surer path to God than religion.”

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.

A fixed and final denial of God on metaphysical grounds was for Derrida as culpable as any dogmatic religious “theology”

Derrida himself, a secularized Jew, said that though he might pass for an atheist, he prayed all the time, had a messianic hope for a better world, and inclined to the view that, since no absolute certainty is within our grasp, we should for the sake of peace hesitate to make declarative statements of either belief or unbelief.

it is a potential, something that we cannot see but that makes us aware that we may have to qualify or even unsay anything we say or deny of God.

He affirmed what he calls the “undeconstructible,” which is not another absolute, because it does not exist, and yet we weep and pray for it.

“The Force of Law” (1989), justice is an undeconstructible “something” that is never fully realized in the actual circumstances of daily life but that informs all legal speculation.

Justice is not what exists; it is wh...

It cal...

In his view, religion was present even when it seemed absent—so much so that he was criticized for allowing religion in his later work to be entirely swallowed up in other discourses.

Even though he believes that society will reembrace religion, he does not want to abandon secularization, because he regards the Church-state alliance set up by Constantine as a Christian aberration.

In the past, Vattimo recalls, religious truth generally emerged from people interacting with others rather than by papal edict.

So how does Caputo see God? Following Derrida, he would describe God as the desire beyond desire.

The question is not “Does God exist?” any more than “Does desire exist?” The question is rather “What do we desire?”

“What do I love when I love my God?”

he calls the event,

The name is a kind of provisional formulation of an event, a relatively stable, if evolving structure, while the event is ever restless, on the move, seeking new forms to assume, seeking to get expressed in still unexpressed ways.68