Book Review: The Case For God

Scotland on Sunday

THE CASE FOR GOD: WHAT RELIGION REALLY MEANS

Karen Armstrong

Bodley Head, GBP 20

An attempt to unthrone the fundamentalist atheists does little to convince Stuart Kelly

KAREN Armstrong is one of the most perceptive and intelligent writers on religion, and I have both learned a great deal and enjoyed reading her previous books on the evolution of the Bible, the life of Muhammad and the "Great Transformation" - the astonishing and almost simultaneous emergence of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah.

As an anthropologist of religion she is superlative; however, in her new book, The Case For God, she turns apologist, and the results are markedly less successful. Her book seems both prompted and piqued by the rise of the "New Atheism" - those chart-topping books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens - but although she rightly points out some of their limitations, she fails in her wider task of making a valid case for theism.

An atheist, by definition, is someone who doesn't believe in God. Armstrong's two main arguments are that atheists don't know what God means, or what belief means. The Scottish poet Frank Kuppner has satirised this position wittily in his collection A God's Breakfast, with the lines "God is real, but not as we use the word 'real'. / Or, for that matter, as we use the word 'God'." In the first instance, she relies on what is technically called the apophatic tradition; in the second, she invokes the distinction between logos and mythos; or reason and myth.

The apophatic tradition, as exemplified by Denys the Areopagite, Moses Maimonides and Hamid al-Ghazzali, insists that God is beyond human reason and human language. It's the theological equivalent of saying "Shut up, shut up, you don't know what you're talking about". Adherents tend to concentrate on paradoxes (the Trinity or Buddhist koans) until language fails and they are filled with a sense of the ineffable. Personally, I find inarticulacy a very weak argument for the existence of a deity: if you push the argument to its extreme, a swift blow to the head, disrupting the brain's linguistic capacity, would hypothetically bring you closer to God.

In the past, Armstrong argues, people were aware of different kinds of knowing. Logos was the logical, analytical part of the mind, and mythos was the artistic, psychological part that allowed us to contemplate grief, joy and the meaning of life. Crucially, mythos was not something you "believed in"; it was linked to rites of passage and rituals that allowed for a therapeutic resolution and emotional response to the Big Questions. Again, it's a cripplingly subjective argument.

The subtitle is also problematic. If we do accept Armstrong's numinous, deliberately unbelievable God, what difference might it make to our reality? People tend to believe in "a" religion, not Armstrong's hyper-distilled, transcendent Religion. Those religions are historical, and the historical record, whether concerning Joshua's settlement of Israel, the nativity of Jesus, or Joseph Smith's discovery that White Men originally lived in America is demonstrably false. Armstrong pleads for us not to throw out the spiritual baby with the fairytale bathwater. God, perhaps, tailored its message to the technological and intellectual sophistication of each age, she argues. But how then do we tell the kernel of useful truth from the embellishments and errors? And why would such a deity feel the need to communicate in the first place?

There are, throughout this book, facts that merit pondering. The first modern atheists, for example, were Marranos Jews, whose faith was lost when, after developing their own ideas in exile, they were confronted with orthodox Judaism in the Netherlands.

Armstrong is good on how fundamentalism happens, and makes a canny comparison between the Dawkins-style atheists and contemporary religious fundamentalists. But, like Dawkins, she quotes to her own purpose. Hamid al-Ghazzani is an important writer, but he also introduced and codified many of the less admirable aspects of Islamic attitudes towards women. Heidegger's Seiender Sein fits her picture; his flirtation with Nazism does not. She accuses Dawkins of theological illiteracy, and creating opponents of straw: but he becomes a useful straw atheist for her to list at, while ignoring the more substantial arguments of Daniel Dennett, Michel Onfray or Slavoj Zizek.

Unwittingly, Armstrong has given atheism a real boost. Even if God does exist, it doesn't matter.

----

More book reviews

More book news

Copyright 2009 by Scotland on Sunday