The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

Religion, therefore, was not primarily something that people thought but something they did. Its truth was acquired by practical action. It is no use imagining that you will be able to drive a car if you simply read the manual or study the rules of the road. You cannot learn to dance, paint, or cook by perusing texts or recipes. The rules of a board game sound obscure, unnecessarily complicated, and dull until you start to play, when everything falls into place. There are some things that can be learned only by constant, dedicated practice, but if you persevere, you find that you achieve something that seemed initially impossible. Instead of sinking to the bottom of the pool, you can float. You may learn to jump higher and with more grace than seems humanly possible or sing with unearthly beauty. You do not always understand how you achieve these feats, because your mind directs your body in a way that bypasses conscious, logical deliberation. But somehow you learn to transcend your original capabilities. Some of these activities bring indescribable joy. A musician can lose herself in her music, a dancer becomes inseparable from the dance, and a skier feels entirely at one with himself and the external world as he speeds down the slope. It is a satisfaction that goes deeper than merely “feeling good.” It is what the Greeks called ekstasis, a “stepping outside” the norm.

It is no use magisterially weighing up the teachings of religion to judge their truth or falsehood before embarking on a religious way of life. You will discover their truth—or lack of it—only if you translate these doctrines into ritual or ethical action.

It is a pity that Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris express themselves so intemperately, because some of their criticisms are valid. Religious people have indeed committed atrocities and crimes, and the fundamentalist theology the new atheists attack is indeed “unskillful,” as the Buddhists would say. But they refuse, on principle, to dialogue with theologians who are more representative of mainstream tradition. As a result, their analysis is disappointingly shallow, because it is based on such poor theology. In fact, the new atheists are not radical enough. 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. In our talkative and highly opinionated society, however, we seem to have lost sight of this important tradition that could solve many of our current religious problems.

From the very beginning, it seems, religious life was rooted in acknowledgment of the tragic fact that life depends upon the destruction of other creatures.

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.

Almost every culture has developed a myth of a lost paradise from which men and women were ejected at the beginning of time. It expressed an inchoate conviction that life was not meant to be so fragmented, hard, and full of pain. There must have been a time when people had enjoyed a greater share in the fullness of being and had not been subject to sorrow, disease, bereavement, loneliness, old age, and death. This nostalgia informed the cult of “sacred geography,” one of the oldest and most universal religious ideas.

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. The story of the lost paradise was a myth, not a factual account of a historical event. People were not expected to “believe” it in the abstract; like any mythos, it depended upon the rituals associated with the cult of a particular holy place to make what it signified a reality in the lives of participants.

quest. 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.

Today, because the modern West is a society of logos, some people read the Bible literally, assuming that its intention is to give us the kind of accurate information that we expect from any other supposedly historical text and that this is the way these stories have always been understood. In fact, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, until well into the modern period, Jews and Christians both insisted that it was neither possible nor desirable to read the Bible in this way, that it gives us no single, orthodox message and demands constant reinterpretation.

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, when these stories were committed to writing, rather than the period in which they are set.

There have been several well-intentioned attempts to prove that this story can be explained by a tsunami or the flash flooding that was common in the region. But this entirely misses the point, because the story has been deliberately written as a myth. As we know, there were many tales in the ancient Middle East about a god splitting a sea in two to create the world, but this time what is brought to birth was not a cosmos but a people.

The story shows how impossible it is to seek a single, consistent message in the Bible, since a directive in one book is likely to be countermanded in another. The editors did not eradicate potentially embarrassing early teachings that clashed with later doctrines.

In a Socratic dialogue, therefore, the “winner” did not try force an unwilling opponent to accept his point of view. It was a joint effort. You expressed yourself clearly as a gift to your partner, whose beautifully expressed argument would, in turn, touch you at a profound level.

The Academy was nothing like a department of philosophy in a modern Western university. It was a religious association; everybody attended the daily sacrifice to the gods performed by one of the students, who came not only to hear Plato’s ideas but to learn how to conduct their lives.

Like Plato and Aristotle, Stoics and Epicureans both regarded science primarily as a spiritual discipline.

Stoics also discovered that meditating on the immensity of the cosmos revealed the utter insignificance of human affairs, and that this gave them a saner perspective. They saw the whole of reality as animated by a fiery vaporous breath that Zeno called Logos (“Reason”), Pneuma (“Spirit”), and God. Instead of railing against his fate, the philosopher must align his life to this Spirit and surrender his entire being to the inexorable world process. Thus he himself would become an embodiment of Logos.

Like the rabbis, the Christians used midrashic techniques to enable Jews to move forward.28 The authors of the four gospels later attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were Jewish Christians who wrote in Greek, read the Bible in its Greek translation, and lived in the Hellenistic cities of the Near East.29 Mark was written in about 70; Matthew and Luke in the 80s; and John in the late 90s. The gospels were not biographies in our sense but should, rather, be seen as commentaries on the Hebrew Bible.

When he gave Jesus the title “lord,” Paul did not mean that he was God. The careful wording of the hymn made it clear that there was a distinction between the kyrios and God. Even though Paul and the evangelists all called Jesus the “son of God,” they were not making divine claims for him. They would have been quite shocked by this idea. For Jews, a “son of God” was a perfectly normal human being who had been raised to special intimacy with God and had been given a divine mandate. Prophets, kings, and priests had all been called “sons of God;” indeed, the scriptures saw all Israelites as the “sons of God” in this sense.33 In the gospels, Jesus called God his “father,” but he made it clear that God was the father of his disciples too.

But in the ancient world, “miracles” were quite commonplace and, however remarkable and significant, were not thought to indicate that the miracle worker was in any way superhuman.

In the ninth century BCE, the prophets Elijah and Elisha had both performed miracles similar to Jesus’s, but nobody ever suggested that they were gods.

Islam was a way of life (din). The fundamental message of the Qur’an was not a doctrine but an ethical summons to practically expressed compassion:

This is also true of the first “pillar,” the declaration of faith: “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is his prophet.” This is not a “creed” in the modern Western sense; the Muslim who makes this shahadah “bears witness” in his life and in every single one of his actions that his chief priority is Allah and that no other “gods”—which include political, material, economic, and personal ambitions—can take precedence over his commitment to God alone.

The Qur’an is simply a “confirmation” of the previous scriptures.97 Nobody must be forced to accept Islam, because each of the revealed traditions had its own din; it was not God’s will that all human beings should belong to the same faith community.98 God was not the exclusive property of any one tradition; the divine light could not be confined to a single lamp, belonged neither to the East nor to the West, but enlightened all human beings.

Like any religious tradition, Islam would change and evolve. Muslims acquired a large empire, stretching from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas, but true to Qur’anic principles, nobody was forced to become Muslim. Indeed, for the first hundred years after the Prophet’s death, conversion to Islam was actually discouraged, because Islam was a din for the Arabs, the descendants of Abraham’s elder son, Ishmael, just as Judaism was for the sons of Isaac and Christianity for the followers of the gospel.

“The Word became human that we might become divine,” Athanasius wrote in his treatise On the Incarnation; “he revealed himself through a body that we might receive an idea of the invisible Father.”18 When we looked at the man Jesus, therefore, we had a partial glimpse of the otherwise unknowable God, and God’s Spirit, an immanent presence within us, enabled us to recognize this. Unfortunately, Constantine, who had no understanding of the issues, decided to intervene and summoned all the bishops to Nicaea in Asia Minor on May 20, 325. Athanasius managed to impose his views on the delegates, and the council issued a statement that Christ, the Word, had not been created but had been begotten “in an ineffable, indescribable manner” from the ousia of the Father—not from nothingness like everything else. So he was “from God” in an entirely different manner from all other creatures.19 The paradoxical terminology of the Nicene statement revealed the new emphasis on the absolute unknowability of the “ineffable, indescribable” God.

Paradoxical as it might sound, the purpose of revelation was to tell us that we knew nothing about God. And the supreme revelation of the incarnate Logos made this clearer than ever. After all, we have to be told about something we do not know or we would remain completely unaware of it.

Today religious experience is often understood as intensely emotional, so Evagrius’s prohibition of “sensations” may seem perverse. In all the great traditions, however, teachers have constantly proclaimed that far from being essential to the spiritual quest, visions, voices, and feelings of devotion could in fact be a distraction. The apprehension of God, Brahman, Nirvana, or Dao had nothing to do with the emotions. Christians had been aware of this from the very beginning; worship had often been noisy and unrestrained: under the inspiration of the Spirit, there had been speaking in strange languages, ecstatic trance, and spontaneous prophecy. But Saint Paul sternly and memorably told his Corinthian converts that these transports had to remain within due bounds and that by far the most important of the spiritual gifts was charity. In all the major traditions, the iron rule of religious experience is that it be integrated successfully with daily life. A disorderly spirituality that makes the practitioner dreamy, eccentric, or uncontrolled is a very bad sign indeed.

In the ancient world, people saw “reason” as a hinterland, bounded on the one hand by our powers of discursive rationality (ratio) and on the other by intellectus, a kind of pure intelligence, which in India was called buddhi.

That same year Alaric and his Visigoths invaded Greece, the first of the barbarian hordes that would bring the Roman Empire to its knees: in 410 Alaric sacked the city of Rome itself. The fall of Rome plunged Western Europe into a dark age that lasted some seven hundred years, its culture preserved only in isolated monasteries and libraries, bastions of civilization in a sea of barbarism. When Augustine died in 630, the Vandals had besieged Hippo and would burn the town to the ground the following year. This is the context of Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin, one of his less positive contributions to Western theology. He produced an entirely novel exegesis of the second and third chapters of Genesis, which claimed that the sin of Adam had condemned all his descendants to eternal damnation. Despite the salvation wrought by Christ, humanity was still weakened by what Augustine called “concupiscence,” the irrational desire to take pleasure in beings instead of God itself.

The specter of reason dragged down by the chaos of lawless sensation reflected the tragedy of Rome, source of order, law, and civilization, brought low by the barbarian tribes. Jewish exegetes had never seen the sin of Adam in this catastrophic light, and the Greek Christians, who were not affected by the barbarian scourge, have never accepted the doctrine of Original Sin. Born in grief and fear, this doctrine has left Western Christians with a difficult legacy that linked sexuality indissolubly with sin and helped to alienate men and women from their humanity.

Al-Ghazzali developed a spirituality that would enable every single Muslim to become aware of the interior dimension of Muslim law. They should deliberately call to mind the divine presence when they performed such ordinary actions as eating, washing, preparing for bed, praying, almsgiving, and greeting one another. They must guard their ears from slander and obscenity, their tongues from lies; they must refrain from cursing or sneering at others. Their hands must not harm another creature; their hearts must remain free of envy, anger, hypocrisy, and pride.25 This vigilance— similar to that practiced by Stoics, Epicureans, Buddhists, and Jains—would bridge the gap between outward observance and interior commitment; it would transform the smallest action of daily life into a ritual that made God present in the lives of ordinary men and women, even if they could not prove this rationally.

It has been said that al-Ghazzali was the most important Muslim since the Prophet Muhammad. After al-Ghazzali, one great philosopher after another—Yahya Suhrawardi (d. 1191), Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240), Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207–73), Mir Dimad (d. 1631), and his pupil Mulla Sadra (1571–1640)—insisted that theology must be fused with spirituality.

Like Sufism, Kabbalah was an unashamedly mythical and imaginative spirituality.

In the Muslim world, Jews, Christians, and Muslims were able to collaborate and learn from one another. But in Western Europe, during the last years of Anselm’s life, the first Crusades were launched against Islam.

As I explained at the outset, my aim is not to give an exhaustive account of religion in any given period, but to highlight a particular trend—the apophatic—that speaks strongly to our current religious perplexity. This was, of course, not the only strand of medieval piety, but it was not a minor movement; it was promoted by some of the most influential thinkers and spiritual leaders of the time. In the Eastern Church, it had been crafted by Athanasius, the Cappadocians, and Maximus, who were revered as heroes of Orthodoxy. In the West, we see it in both Augustine and Anselm, as well as in the towering figure of Thomas Aquinas (1225–74).

He immediately goes on to show that even though we can prove that “what we call God” (a reality that we cannot define) must “exist,” we have no idea what the word “exists” can signify in this context. We can talk about God as Necessary Being and so forth, but we do not know what this really means.37 The same goes for God’s attributes. God is Simplicity itself; that means that, unlike all the beings of our experience, “God is not made up of parts.” A man, for example, is a composite being: he has a body and soul, flesh, bones, and skin. He has qualities: he is good, kind, fat, and tall. But because God’s attributes are identical with his essence, he has no qualities. He is not “good,” he is goodness. We simply cannot imagine an “existence” like this, so “we cannot know the ‘existence’ of God any more than we can define him,” Thomas explains, because “God cannot be classified as this or that sort of thing.” We can get to know mere beings because we can categorize them into species—as stars, elephants, or mountains. God is not a substance, the “sort of thing that can exist independently” of an individual instance of it. We cannot ask whether there is a God, as if God were simply one example of a species. God is not and cannot be a “sort of thing.”38

Many conversos became committed Catholics, but there were rumors of an underground movement of dissidents who practiced their old faith in secret. The inquisitors were instructed to torture anybody who lit candles on Friday night or refused to eat pork, in order to force them to recant and to name other renegades. Not surprisingly, some of these “new Christians” were not only alienated from Catholicism but became skeptical about religion itself.

Nobody understood this strange story literally; like any creation myth, it was primarily therapeutic, speaking figuratively of a timeless rather than a historical reality. It became authoritative because it was such a telling description of the exiles’ experience, at the same time showing them that their tragedy was not unique but was in tune with fundamental laws of existence.

The three great Protestant reformers, Martin Luther (1483–1546), Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), and John Calvin (1509–64), all exemplified this vehement rejection of the immediate past. Like the Renaissance humanists, they had no time for the natural theology of the late scholastics and wanted a more personal and immediate faith.

As the Reformation proceeded, Protestantism began to morph into a bewildering number of sects, each with its own doctrinal bias, its own interpretation of the Bible, and each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on truth.

The Bible had nothing to say about astronomy. “He who would learn astronomy and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere,” Calvin instructed emphatically. Science was “very useful” and must not be impeded “because some frantic persons are wont boldly to reject whatever is unknown to them.”

But with the aid of theology, he, Kepler, would show that it was no accident that the universe took the form it did.59 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.

Today it is often assumed that modern science has always clashed with religion. Kepler, a mathematician of extraordinary genius, reminds us that early modern science was rooted in faith. These pioneering scientists had no desire to get rid of religion. Instead, they would develop a secular theology, written by and for laymen, because their discoveries made them think differently about God.

The first modern Western atheists, however, were not Christians who had been alienated by the terrible convictions of their clergy but Jews living in the most liberal country in Europe.

These remarks were included in Lessius’s most important work, Divine Providence and the Immortality of the Soul (1612), a treatise directed “against atheists and politicians.” There had been some concern in recent years about the emergence of “atheism,” though at this date the term did not yet mean an outright denial of God’s existence. It usually referred to any belief that the writer deemed incorrect. For Lessius, “atheism” was a heresy of the past: the only “atheists” he could name were the ancient Greek philosophers. 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.

When Voltaire wrote a letter of reproach to him in prison, Diderot replied that these were not his own opinions. “I believe in God,” he wrote, “but I live very well with the atheists.” Actually, however, it made very little difference to him whether God existed or not. God had become a sublime but useless truth. “It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley but to believe or not to believe in God is not important at all.”

Future scientists could easily find a natural explanation for the apparent “design” in nature, and then what would happen to a faith that depended on scientific theory?57 It was pointless to try to deduce God’s existence from nature, argued the physicist Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83), because our knowledge of the universe was incomplete: we could observe it only at a given moment of time. There was also plenty of natural evidence to suggest that far from being a loving Creator, God might in truth be willful and irresponsible.

Yet again American religion was proving to be a modernizing force but this time it supported the capitalist ethos while at the same time articulating a healthy criticism of the system. During the 1820s, Evangelicals threw themselves into moral crusades to hasten the coming of the Kingdom, campaigning against slavery, urban poverty, exploitation, and liquor, and fighting for penal reform, the education of the poor, and the emancipation of women. There was an emphasis on the worth of each human being, egalitarianism, and the ideal of inalienable human rights.

On December 27, 1831, Charles Darwin, naturalist on board the HMS Beagle, had embarked on a five-year scientific survey of South American waters to study the flora, fauna, and geology of Tenerife, the Cape Verde Islands, Buenos Aires, Valparaiso, the Galapagos, Tahiti, New Zealand, Tasmania, and finally the Keeling (Cocos) Islands. The evidence he gathered forced him to deny Paley’s argument from design. God had certainly not created the world exactly as we knew it. Instead, it seemed clear that the species had evolved slowly over time, as they adapted to their immediate environment.

Later, in The Descent of Man (1871), he suggested even more controversially that Homo sapiens had developed from the progenitor of the orangutan, gorilla, and chimpanzee. Human beings were not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation; like everything else, they had evolved by trial and error, and God had had no direct hand in their making.