The Case for God: What Religion Really Means by Karen Armstrong
The Bodley Head, £20
The title of this book suggests it is a riposte to the militant atheism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the most popular theologians around nowadays, judging by their sales figures. But it quickly becomes clear that Karen Armstrong is not trying to reach their followers after all, so she is left preaching – literally – to the converted. Or not so literally, depending on which end of her telescope you are looking through.
Armstrong says early on that God is beyond words, and she uses “ineffable” a lot, but then gives us 350 pages of words to ram that point home. Religion is hard work, she tells us, and if people don’t knuckle down to it they will seek other outlets such as “music, dance, art, sex, drugs or sport”. Attractive alternatives, I would have thought, although she doesn’t make them sound like it.
But she is right, of course, and God botherers know it. Yet atheists do not, and if we are to engage with them, we must start with the medium of words. It is not good enough to say that the experience of God cannot be articulated and then leave it at that, or to say that talk of God’s “existence” has no useful meaning, however true that may be. What The Case for God does not do is make the case for God. Which is a pity. I am a great fan of Karen Armstrong and gave her previous book, The Bible: A Biography, a glowing review in these pages last year. But her latest effort does not quite do it for me.
Atheists are nothing new, so those of us on the other side of the divine divide should have learned by now how to debate with them. The author tells us that as far back as 430BC Protagoras of Abdera was expelled from Athens after announcing that no god could impose his will on human beings and that the Olympians may not exist, anyway. Dawkins has probably got a picture of him hanging in his loo.
She gallops through theological thought and thinkers down the ages, and I do mean that Armstrong takes them at a run, with rarely more than a few paragraphs devoted to each. But, even so, it is familiar territory.
As for the opposition, there is Karl Marx and his complaint that religion is “the opium of the people” and Sigmund Freud calling it a neurosis bordering on insanity rooted in the child’s veneration for the father. This allows Armstrong to get all Freudian herself, wondering “whether Freud’s rejection of God did not spring from an unconscious hostility to his own father?” So up yours, Siggy.
Atheism is a faith, too, in the sense that it is a belief. The atheist cannot be sure there is no God any more than the theist can know that there is. The best either can say is that what they believe is beyond reasonable doubt, which means they are prepared to take important decisions about their lives based on whichever position they hold. It does not mean no doubt, either in a court of law or in this context.
And I’m up there at the barricades with the author when she says that both sides should reject fundamentalism, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish or atheist, and the dangerous literal interpretations they put
on holy books. “Dawkins’ only point of disagreement with the Protestant fundamentalists”, sniffs Armstrong, “is that he finds the Bible unreliable about science while they do not.”
She laments the loss of Socratic dialogue and the genuine exchange of views it makes possible. Discussion now is aggressive, with the objective of not just trouncing the arguments of opponents, but humiliating them, too. We see it nightly on our TV screens; that professed certainty which in truth can only be provisional.
But if that’s how national debate is conducted, then that’s the way it is. Enlightenment may come more usually from contemplation within than from revelation without just as it has always done. But words are still needed to argue with those who do not accept that, whether soberly in a TV studio or at the dinner table while filled with the spirit.
Nigel Nelson
