The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a time that historians call the early modern period, Western people began to develop an entirely new kind of civilization, governed by scientific rationality and based economically on technology and capital investment. Logos achieved such spectacular results that myth was discredited and the scientific method was thought to be the only reliable means of attaining truth. This would make religion difficult, if not impossible. As theologians began to adopt the criteria of science, the mythoi of Christianity were interpreted as empirically, rationally, and historically verifiable and forced into a style of thinking that was alien to them. Philosophers and scientists could no longer see the point of ritual, and religious knowledge became theoretical rather than practical. We lost the art of interpreting the old tales of gods walking the earth, dead men striding out of tombs, or seas parting miraculously. We began to understand concepts such as faith, revelation, myth, mystery, and dogma in a way that would have been very surprising to our ancestors. In particular, the meaning of the word “belief” changed, so that a credulous acceptance of creedal doctrines became the prerequisite of faith, so much so that today we often speak of religious people as “believers,” as though accepting orthodox dogma “on faith” were their most important activity.

Historically, atheism has rarely been a blanket denial of the sacred per se but has nearly always rejected a particular conception of the divine. At an early stage of their history, Christians and Muslims were both called “atheists” by their pagan contemporaries, not because they denied the reality of God but because their conception of divinity was so different that it seemed blasphemous. Atheism is therefore parasitically dependent on the form of theism it seeks to eliminate and becomes its reverse mirror image. Classical Western atheism was developed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, whose ideology was essentially a response to and dictated by the theological perception of God that had developed in Europe and the United States during the modern period. The more recent atheism of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris is rather different, because it has focused exclusively on the God developed by the fundamentalisms, and all three insist that fundamentalism constitutes

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is “nothing” out there; in making these assertions, their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God’s transcendence.

But there are a few clues to aid our understanding. A remarkable picture, dated to about 12,000 BCE, in a cave at Lascaux known as the Crypt because it is even deeper than the other caverns, depicts a large bison that has been eviscerated by a spear thrust through its hindquarters. Lying in front of the wounded beast is a man, drawn in a far more rudimentary style than the animals, with arms outstretched, phallus erect, and wearing what seems to be a bird mask; his staff, which lies on the ground nearby, is also topped by a bird’s head. This seems to be an illustration of a well-known legend and could have been the founding myth of the sanctuary. The same scene appears on an engraved reindeer horn at nearby Villars and on a sculpted block in a cliff shelter at Roc de Sers near Limoges, which is five thousand years older than the Lascaux painting.7 Fifty-five similar images in the other caves and three more Palaeolithic rock drawings in Africa have been found, all showing men confronting animals in a state of trance with upraised arms.8 They are probably shamans.

Like art, religion is an attempt to construct meaning in the face of the relentless pain and injustice of life. As meaning-seeking creatures, men and women fall very easily into despair. They have created religions and works of art to help them find value in their lives, despite all the dispiriting evidence to the contrary.

As the German scholar Walter Burkert explains, it is pointless to look for an idea or doctrine behind a rite. In the premodern world, ritual was not the product of religious ideas; on the contrary, these ideas were the product of ritual.

In about 9000 BCE, when human beings developed agriculture and were no longer dependent on animal meat, the old hunting rites lost some of their appeal and people ceased to visit the caves.

Human beings are so constituted that periodically they seek out ekstasis, a “stepping outside” the norm. Today people who no longer find it in a religious setting resort to other outlets: music, dance, art, sex, drugs, or sport. We make a point of seeking out these experiences that touch us deeply within and lift us

momentarily beyond ourselves. At such times, we feel that we inhabit our humanity more fully than usual and experience an enhancement of being.

the ancient Aryan tribes, who had lived on the Caucasian steppes since about 4500 BCE, revered an invisible, impersonal force within themselves and all other natural phenomena. Everything was a manifestation of this all-pervading “Spirit” (Sanskrit: manya).

Brahman had an infinitely greater degree of reality than mortal creatures, whose lives were limited by ignorance, sickness, pain, and death.33 You could never define Brahman, because language refers only to individual beings and Brahman was “the All;” it was everything that existed, as well as the inner meaning of all existence.

finally broke down and people became vividly aware of the ineffable, the other. The challenger asked an enigmatic question, and his opponent had to reply in a way that was apt but equally inscrutable. The winner was the contestant who reduced his opponents to silence—and in that moment of silence, when language revealed its inadequacy, the Brahman was present;

The Chinese called it the

Dao, the fundamental “Way” of the cosmos. Because it comprised the whole of reality, the Dao had no qualities, no form; it could be experienced but never seen; it was not a god; it predated heaven and earth, and was beyond divinity.

A popular image, found in many cultures, imagined this fructifying, sacred energy welling up like a spring from these focal places and flowing, in four sacred rivers, to the four quarters of the earth.

This brings us to the second principle of premodern religion. Religious discourse was not intended to be understood literally because it was only possible to speak about a reality that transcended language in symbolic terms.

One of the earliest and most universal of the ancient cosmologies is particularly instructive to us today. It was thought that one of the gods, known as the “High God” or “Sky God” because he dwelt in the farthest reaches of the heavens, had single-handedly created heaven and earth.39 The Aryans called him Dyaeus Pitr, the Chinese Tian (“Heaven”), the Arabians Allah (“the God”), and the Syrians El Elyon (“Most High God”). But the High God proved to be an unviable deity, and his myth was jettisoned.

This mythos encapsulated an important truth: we are at our most creative when we do not cling to our selfhood but are prepared to give ourselves away.

They imagined they were unique and special and clung to these particularities—often with extreme anxiety and expenditure of effort. But in reality these qualities were no more durable than rivers that flowed into the same sea. Once they had merged, they became “just the ocean,” and no longer asserted their individuality by insisting “I am that river,” “I am this river.” “In exactly the same way, son,” Uddalaka persisted, “when all these creatures reach the Existent, they are not aware that: ‘We are reaching the Existent.’ “ Whether they were tigers, wolves, or gnats, they all merged into Brahman.

The truths of religion are accessible only when you are prepared to get rid of the selfishness, greed, and self-preoccupation that, perhaps inevitably, are ingrained in our thoughts and behavior but are also the source of so much of our pain. The Greeks would call this process kenosis, “emptying.” Once you gave up the nervous craving to promote yourself, denigrate others, draw attention to your unique and special qualities, and ensure that you were first in the pecking order, you experienced an immense peace.

The Buddha, for example, had little time for theological speculation. One of his monks was a philosopher manqué and, instead of getting on with his yoga, constantly pestered the Buddha about metaphysical questions: Was there a god? Had the world been created in time or had it always existed? The Buddha told him that he was like a man who had been shot with a poisoned arrow and refused medical treatment until he had discovered the name of his assailant and what village he came from. He would die before he got this perfectly useless information. What difference would it make to discover that a god had created the world? Pain, hatred, grief, and sorrow would still exist.

One of the first people to make it crystal clear that holiness was inseparable from altruism was the Chinese sage Confucius (551–479 BCE). He preferred not to speak about the divine, because it lay beyond the competence of language, and theological chatter was a distraction from the real business of religion.68 He used to say: “My Way has one thread that runs right through it.” There were no abstruse metaphysics; everything always came back to the importance of treating others with absolute respect.69 It was epitomized in the Golden Rule, which, he said, his disciples should practice “all day and every day”:70 “Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you.”71 They should look into their own hearts, discover what gave them pain, and then refuse under any circumstance whatsoever to inflict that pain on anybody else.

Some Western Christians read the story as a factual account of the Original Sin that condemned the human race to everlasting perdition. But this is a peculiarly Western Christian interpretation and was introduced controversially by Saint Augustine of Hippo only in the early fifth century. The Eden story has never been understood in this way in either the Jewish or the Orthodox Christian traditions.

The Adam and Eve story was almost certainly written by an anonymous author of the southern kingdom in the eighth century, when kings had started to commission epics for their royal archives. Eighteenth-century German scholars called him “J,” the “Jahwist,” because he used God’s proper name, “Jahweh” (“Yahweh”). At the same time, another writer known as “E” (because he preferred to use the more formal divine title, “Elohim”) was composing a similar saga for the Kingdom of Israel.

The JE chronicle is almost certainly a collection of tales recited at the old tribal festivals. Since about 1200 BCE, the confederation of tribes collectively known as “Israel” had congregated at a number of shrines in the Canaanite highlands— in Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethel, Shechem, Gilgal, and Shiloh—where they renewed the covenant treaty that bound them together. Bards would recite poems about the exploits of local heroes: the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; Moses, who led the people out of Egyptian captivity; and their great military commander Joshua. At first there was probably no master narrative, but when J and E brought all this local lore together, they wove it into the sustained epic that has become one of the founding stories of Western culture.15

In its final form, it relates how in about 1850 BCE, Yahweh had called Abraham to leave his home in Mesopotamia and settle in Canaan, promising that he would become the father of a mighty nation that would one day take possession of the land. Abraham, his son Isaac, and his grandson Jacob (also known as Israel) lived in the Promised Land as resident aliens, but during a famine, Jacob’s twelve sons, founders of the twelve tribes of Israel, were forced to migrate to Egypt. At first they prospered there, but eventually, threatened by their great numbers, the Egyptians oppressed and enslaved the Israelites until Yahweh commanded Moses to lead his people back to Canaan. With Yahweh’s miraculous help, they managed to escape Egypt and lived a nomadic life for forty years in the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. On Mount Sinai, Yahweh delivered his teaching (torah) to Moses and adopted the Israelites as his own people. Moses died on Mount Nebo on the threshold of the Promised Land, but finally, in about 1200 BCE, Joshua conquered Canaan and drove out the native inhabitants.

The excavations of Israeli archaeologists since 1967, however, do not corroborate this story. They have found no trace of the mass destruction described in the book of Joshua and no indication of a major change of population. They note that the biblical narratives reflect the conditions of the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries, whe...

Genesis shows that our glimpses of what we call “God” can be as partial, terrible, ambiguous, and paradoxical as the world we live in. As Abraham’s plight on Mount Moriyya shows, it is not easy to “see” what God is, and there are no simple answers to life’s perplexities.

The type of destruction described by the Deuteronomists is an infallible indication that a sacred symbol has become idolatrous.

A small circle of exiled priests began to construct an answer, reinterpreting old symbols and stories to build an entirely new spirituality. Scholars call this priestly layer of the Bible “P”: its most important sources were the Holiness Code (a miscellaneous collection of seventh-century laws)52 and the Tabernacle Document, the centerpiece of P’s narrative, which described the tent that the Israelites had built in the wilderness to house the divine presence.53

With these and other ancient oral traditions, P compiled the two legal books of Leviticus and Numbers, which reversed the aggressive theology of the Deuteronomists by creating a series of rituals based on the experience of exile and estrangement.

Socrates did not commit any of his teachings to writing, so we have to rely on the dialogues composed by his pupil Plato (c. 427–347) that claim to record these conversations. Socrates himself had a poor opinion of written discourse. People who read a lot imagined that they knew a great deal, but because they had not inscribed what they had read indelibly on their minds, they knew nothing at all.24 Written words were like figures in a painting. They seemed alive, but if you questioned them they remained “solemnly silent.” Without the spirited interchange of a human encounter, the knowledge imparted by a written text tended to become static: it “continues to signify just that very same thing forever.”25 Socrates did not approve of fixed, dogmatically held opinions. When philosophia was written down, it was easily misunderstood, because the author had not been able to tailor his discourse to the needs of a particular group. But a living dialogue could transform a person who took part in it, making him “as happy as any human being can be.”26

“I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything

worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.”

As he explained to the court that condemned him to death: “It is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living.”37

By the beginning of the third century BCE, six main philosophical schools had emerged: Platonism, Aristotelianism, Skepticism, Cynicism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism.

The Hellenistic era that followed the establishment of the empire of Alexander the Great (c. 356–323) and its subsequent disintegration was a period of political and social turbulence.75 Consequently, Hellenistic philosophy was chiefly concerned with the cultivation of interior peace.

Hillel (c. 80 BCE—30 CE), who had emphasized the importance of the spirit rather than the letter of Mosaic law. In a famous Talmudic story, it was said that Hillel had formulated a Jewish version of Confucius’s Golden Rule. One day, a pagan had approached Hillel and promised to convert to Judaism if Hillel could teach him the entire Torah standing on one leg. Hillel replied: “What is hateful to yourself, do not to your fellow man. That is the whole of the Torah and the remainder is but commentary. Go learn it.”3

The Christians got organized more quickly. The first of the four canonical gospels was written either shortly before or immediately after the destruction. We know very little about the historical Jesus, since all our information comes from the texts of the New Testament, which were not primarily concerned with factual accuracy. He seems to have been a charismatic healer and a man of ahimsa who told his followers to love their enemies.15 Like other prophets at this time, he preached the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God, a new world order in which the mighty would be cast down and the lowly exalted, the righteous dead would rise from their tombs, and the whole world would worship the God of Israel.

There must be no competition among you, no conceit; but everybody is to be self-effacing. Always consider the other person to be better than yourself, so that nobody thinks of his own interests first, but everybody thinks of other people’s interests instead.32

Unless they imitated Jesus’s kenosis in the smallest details of their own lives, they would not understand the mythos of the lord Jesus. Like all great religious teaching, Christian doctrine would always be a miqra that would make sense only when translated into a ritual, meditative, or ethical program.

The virgin birth is found only in Matthew and Luke—the other New Testament writers do not appear to have heard of it—but both trace Jesus’s lineage through Joseph, his natural father, in the normal way; Mark takes it for granted that

Joseph was Jesus’s father and that he had brothers and sisters who were well known to the earliest Christian communities;35 like the other evangelists, he sees Jesus primarily as a prophet.

Matthew was anxious to show that Jesus was the christos of the gentiles as well as the Jews, so he has the Magi come from the Far East to worship at the crib. Luke, on the other hand, always stressed Jesus’s mission to the poor and marginalized, so in his gospel a group of shepherds are the first to hear the “good news” of his birth.

We do not find this preoccupation with “belief” in the other major traditions. Why did Jesus set such store by it? The simple answer is that he did not. The word translated as “faith” in the New Testament is the Greek pistis (verbal form: pisteuo), which means “trust; loyalty; engagement; commitment.”42 Jesus was not asking people to “believe” in his divinity, because he was making no such claim. He was asking for commitment.

For the fathers of the Church, scripture was a “mystery” not because it taught a lot of incomprehensible doctrines, but because it directed the attention of Christians toward a hidden level of reality.

Scripture was not just a text but an “activity;” you did not merely read it— you had to do it.

Origen, a Platonist, believed that he could get to know God by contemplating the universe and had seen the Christian life as a Platonic ascent that would continue after death until the soul was fully assimilated to the divine. The Egyptian Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus (c. 205–70) believed that the universe emanated from God eternally, like rays from the sun, so that the material world was a kind of overflowing of God’s very being; when you meditated on the universe, you were, therefore, meditating upon God. But by the early fourth century, people felt that the cosmos was separated from God by a vast, almost unbridgeable chasm.

Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215) believed that the philosophical idea of an eternal cosmos was idolatrous, because it presented nature as a second coeternal god. Nothing could come from nothing, so the universe could only have been summoned out of the primal void by the God that was Life itself. Instead of “deifying the universe,” people needed to know that “the sheer volition of God is the making of the universe.”

Yet Christians did not feel that God was entirely unknowable. The man Jesus had been an image (eikon) of the divine and had given them an inkling of what the utterly transcendent God was like. They were also convinced that, in spite of everything, they had entered a hitherto-unexplored dimension of their humanity that in some sense enabled them to participate in the divine life. They called this Christian experience theosis (“deification”): like the incarnate Logos, they too had become the sons of God, as Paul had explained.