The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  After Einstein, it became disturbingly clear that not only was science unable to provide us with definitive certainty but its findings were inherently limited and provisional too. In 1927, Heisenberg formulated the principle of indeterminacy in nuclear physics, showing that it was impossible for scientists to achieve an objective result because the act of observation itself affected their understanding of the object of their investigation. In 1931, the Austrian philosopher Kurt Gödel (1906–78) devised a theorem to show that any formal logical or mathematical system must contain propositions that are not verifiable within that system; there would always be propositions that could be proved or disproved only by input from outside. This completely undercut the traditional assumption of systematic decidability. In his 1929 Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, the American philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) argued that Descartes’ quest for certainty could no longer be the goal of modern philosophy. Heisenberg had liberated us from seventeenth-century mechanics, when the universe had seemed like a giant machine made up of separate components, whereas this new generation of scientists was revealing the deep interconnectedness of all reality.

  Apparently our brains were incapable of achieving a complete worldview or incontrovertible proof. Our minds were limited, and some problems, it seemed, would remain insoluble. As the American physicist Percy Bridgman (1882–1961) explained:

  The structure of nature may eventually be such that our processes of thought do not correspond to it sufficiently to permit us to think about it at all. … The world fades out and eludes us. … We are confronted with something truly ineffable. We have reached the limit of the great pioneers of science, the vision, namely, that we live in a sympathetic world in that it is comprehensible to our minds.8

  Scientists were beginning to sound like apophatic theologians. Not only was God beyond the reach of the human mind, but the natural world was also terminally elusive. It seemed that a degree of agnosticism was endemic to the human condition.

  Yet however unsettling this new scientific revolution, physicists did not seem unduly dismayed.9 Einstein had declared that if his theory of relativity was correct, it was possible to make three predictions: it would account for the apparently eccentric precession of the planet Mercury; it would be possible to calculate the exact deflection of a beam of light by the gravitational mass of the sun; and because the mass of the sun would reduce the velocity of light, this would have an effect on the light it emitted. Within ten years, the first two predictions were confirmed by experimental data. But the third was not established until the 1960s, because the reduction of the speed of light was minute and scientists lacked the technology to measure it. In principle, Einstein could be proved wrong. He himself was not perturbed: when asked what would happen if his theories were not vindicated in the laboratory, he retorted, “So much the worse for the experiments; the theory is right!” Scientific theory did not seem to depend wholly on ratiocination and calculation: intuition and a sense of beauty and elegance were also important factors. And during these forty years, physicists were content to work as though relativity were true. They had what religious people would call “faith” in it. It was finally rewarded when a new spectroscopic technique became available and scientists could finally observe the effect Einstein had predicted. In science, as in theology, human beings could make progress on unproven ideas, which worked practically even if they had not been demonstrated empirically.

  The scientific revolution of the 1920s clearly influenced the work of the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper (1902–94). In his seminal book The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934), he upheld the rationality of science and its commitment to rigorous testing and principled neutrality, but argued that it did not, as commonly thought, proceed by the systematic and cumulative collection of empirically verified facts. It moved forward when scientists came up with bold, imaginative guesses that could never be perfectly verified and were no more reliable than any other “belief,” because testing could show only that a hypothesis was not false. Popper was often heard to say: “We don’t know anything.” According to the British philosopher Bryan Magee, he believed that this was “the most important philosophical insight there is, which ought to inform all our philosophical activity.”10 Human beings never achieve perfect knowledge, because anything we know at any given moment is invariably revised later. But far from being depressed by this, Popper found his constant engagement with insoluble problems an endless delight. “One of the many great sources of happiness,” he explained in his memoir, “is to get a glimpse, here and there, of a new aspect of the incredible world we live in, and of our incredible role in it.”11

  This was also Einstein’s experience. The new science was no longer averse to mystical wonder and mystery. As Einstein explained:

  The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger … is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of all true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men.12

  Einstein emphatically did not subscribe to the personalized modern God. But many of the theologians whose work we have considered— Origen, the Cappadocians, Denys, and Aquinas—would have understood exactly what he meant.

  Not everybody was ready to abandon the quest for certainty. During the 1920s, a group of philosophers in Vienna met to discuss, among other topics, the ideas of the Austrian mathematician Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). The goal of his extremely complex Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1921) was to show the utter futility of speaking of ideas that lay beyond clear facts based on empirical sense data: “Whereof one cannot speak,” he said famously, “thereof one must be silent.”13 It was quite legitimate to say “It is raining,” because this statement was easy to verify. But it was pointless to discuss anything hypothetical or ineffable—in philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, logic, or mathematics—so this type of speculation should be scrapped. True to his principles, Wittgenstein had left his university in 1918 to become a village schoolmaster until 1930, when he accepted a Cambridge fellowship.

  The Vienna Circle agreed that because we could make meaningful statements only about matters that could be tested and verified by sense experience, the natural sciences alone were a reliable source of knowledge.14 Emotive language was meaningless, because it was equipped simply to arouse feeling or inspire action and could not be proved one way or the other. Obviously the concept of “God” had no meaning at all; indeed, atheism and agnosticism were also incoherent positions, because there was nothing to be agnostic or atheistic about.15 Like other intellectuals at this time, the logical positivists— as these philosophers became known—were attempting to return to irreducible fundamentals. Their stringent position also revealed the intolerant tendency of modernity that would characterize other types of fundamentalism. Their narrow definition of truth entailed a wholesale dismissal of the humanities and a refusal to entertain any rival view.16 Yet human beings have always pondered questions that are not capable of definitive solutions: the contemplation of beauty, mortality, and suffering has been an essential part of human experience, and to many it seems not only arrogant but unrealistic to dismiss it out of hand.

  At the other extreme of the intellectual spectrum, a form of Christian positivism developed that represented a grassroots rebellion against modern rationalism. On April 9, 1906, the first congregation of Pentecostalists claimed to have experienced the Spirit in a tiny house in Los Angeles, convinced that it had descended upon them in the same way as upon Jesus’s disciples on the Jewish festival of Pentecost, when the divine presence had manifested itself in tongues of fire and given the apostles the ability to speak in strange languages.17 When they spoke in “tongues,” Pentecostalists felt they we
re returning to the fundamental nub of religiosity that existed beneath any logical exposition of the Christian faith. Within four years, there were hundreds of Pentecostal groups all over the United States, and the movement had spread to fifty other countries.18 At first they were convinced that their experience heralded the Last Days: crowds of African Americans and disadvantaged whites poured into their congregations in the firm belief that Jesus would soon return and establish a more just society. But after the First World War had shattered this early optimism, they saw their gift of tongues as a new way of speaking to God: Had not Saint Paul explained that when Christians found prayer difficult, “the Spirit itself intercedes for us with groans that exist beyond all utterance”? 19

  In one sense, this was a distorted version of apophatic spirituality: Pentecostalists were reaching out to a God that existed beyond the scope of speech. But the classical apophaticism of Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Denys, Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Eckhart had been suspicious of this type of experiential spirituality. At a Pentecostal service, men and women fell into tranced states, were seen to levitate, and felt that their bodies were melting in ineffable joy. They saw bright streaks of light in the air and sprawled on the ground, felled by a weight of glory.20 This was a form of positivism, because Pentecostalists relied on the immediacy of sense experience to validate their beliefs.21 But the meteoric explosion of this type of faith indicated widespread unhappiness with the modern rational ethos. It developed at a time when people were beginning to have doubts about science and technology, which had shown their lethal potential during the Great War. Pentecostalists were also reacting against the more conservative Christians who were trying to make their Biblebased religion entirely reasonable and scientific.

  As A. C. Dixon, one of the founding fathers of Protestant fundamentalism, explained in 1920, “I am a Christian because I am a Thinker, a Rationalist, a Scientist.” His faith depended upon “exact observation and correct thinking.” Doctrines were not theological speculations but facts.22 Evangelical Christians still aspired to the early modern ideal of absolute certainty based on scientific verification. Yet fundamentalists would also see their faith experiences— born-again conversions, faith healing, and strongly felt emotional conviction—as positive verification of their beliefs. Dixon’s almost defiant rationalism indicates, perhaps, a hidden fear. With the Great War, an element of terror had entered conservative Protestantism in the United States. Many believed that the catastrophic encounters at the Somme and Passchendaele were the battles that, according to scripture, would usher in the Last Days; many Christians were now convinced that they were on the front line of an apocalyptic war against Satan. The wild propaganda stories of German atrocities seemed proof positive that they had been right to fight the nation that had spawned the Higher Criticism.23 But they were equally mistrustful of democracy, which carried overtones of the “mob rule” and “red republic” that had erupted in the atheistic Bolshevik revolution (1917).24 These American Christians no longer saw Jesus as a loving savior; rather, as the leading conservative Isaac M. Haldeman proclaimed, the Christ of Revelation “comes forth as one who no longer seeks either friendship or love. … He descends that he may shed the blood of men.”25

  Every single fundamentalist movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is rooted in profound fear.26 For Dixon and his conservative Protestant colleagues, who were about to establish the first fundamentalist movement of modern times, it was a religious variation of the widespread malaise that followed the Great War, and it made them distort the tradition they were trying to defend. They were ready for a fight, but the conflict might have remained in their own troubled minds had not the more liberal Protestants chosen this moment to launch an offensive against them. The liberals were appalled by the apocalyptic fantasies of the conservatives. But instead of criticizing them on biblical and doctrinal grounds, they hit quite unjustifiably below the belt. Their assault reflected the acute anxieties of the postwar period and, at this time of national trauma, was calculated to elicit outrage, fury, and a determination to retaliate.

  Fundamentalism—be it Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—nearly always begins as a defensive movement; it is usually a response to a campaign of coreligionists or fellow countrymen that is experienced as inimical and invasive. In 1917, during a particularly dark period of the war, liberal theologians in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago launched a media offensive against the Moody Bible Institute on the other side of town.27 They accused these biblical literalists of being in the pay of the Germans and compared them to atheistic Bolsheviks. Their theology was, according to the Christian Register, “the most astounding mental aberration in the field of religious thinking.”28 The conservatives responded in kind, retorting that, on the contrary, it was the pacifism of the liberals that had caused America to fall behind in the arms race;29 it was they who had been in league with the Germans, since the Higher Criticism that the liberals admired had caused the collapse of decent values in Germany.30 For decades, the Higher Criticism had been surrounded with a nimbus of evil. This type of symbolism, which takes the debate beyond the realm of logic and dispassionate discussion, is a persistent feature of fundamentalist movements.

  In 1920, Dixon, Reuben A. Torrey, and William B. Riley officially established the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association to fight for the survival of both Christianity and the world. That same year, at a meeting of the Northern Baptist Convention, Curtis Lee Lewis defined the “fundamentalist” as a Christian who fought to regain territory already lost to the Antichrist and “to do battle royal for the fundamentals of the faith.”31 The movement spread. Three years later, the fundamentalists were riding high, and it seemed as if they would succeed in gaining the upper hand in most of the Protestant denominations. But then a new campaign caught their attention, which brought fundamentalism, at least for a few decades, into disrepute.

  In 1920 the Democratic politician William Jennings Bryan (1860— 1925) launched a crusade against the teaching of evolution in schools and colleges; almost single-handedly, Bryan was responsible for ousting the Higher Criticism from the top of the fundamentalist agenda and putting Darwinism in its place.32 He saw the two issues as indissolubly linked but regarded evolution as by far the more dangerous. Two books—Headquarter Nights (1917) by Vernon L. Kellogg and The Science of Power (1918) by Benjamin Kidd—had made a great impression on him. The authors reported interviews with German soldiers, who had testified to the influence that Darwinian ideas had played in Germany’s determination to declare war. This “research” convinced Bryan that evolutionary theory heralded the collapse of morality and decent civilization. His ideas were naive, simplistic, and incorrect, but people were beginning to be suspicious of science and he found a willing audience. When Bryan toured the United States, his lecture “The Menace of Darwinism” drew large crowds and got extensive media coverage. But an unexpected development in the South threw the campaign into even greater prominence.

  At this date, the fundamentalist movement was chiefly confined to the northern states, but southerners had become concerned about evolution. In 1925, the state legislatures of Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Louisiana passed laws to prohibit the teaching of evolution in the public schools. In response, John Scopes, a young teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, decided to strike a blow for free speech, confessed that he had broken the law, and in July 1925 was brought to trial. The new American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent a team of lawyers to defend him, headed by the rationalist campaigner Clarence Darrow (1857–1938). When Bryan agreed to speak in defense of the anti-evolution law, the trial ceased to be about civil liberties and became a contest between religion and science.

  Like many fundamentalist disputes, the Scopes trial was a clash between two incompatible points of view.33 Both Darrow and Bryan represented core American values: Darrow, of course, stood for intellectual liberty and Bryan for the rights of the ordinary folk, who were traditionally leery of l
earned experts, had no real understanding of science, and felt that sophisticated elites were imposing their own values on small-town America. In the event, Bryan was a disaster on the stand and Darrow was able to argue brilliantly for the freedom that was essential to the scientific enterprise. At the end of the trial, Darrow emerged as the hero of lucid rational thought, while Bryan was seen as a bumbling, incompetent anachronism who was hopelessly out of touch with the modern world: he compounded the symbolism by dying a few days later. Scopes was convicted, the ACLU paid his fine, but Darrow and science were the real victors at Dayton.

  The press had a field day. Most notably, the journalist H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) denounced the fundamentalists as the scourge of the nation. How appropriate it was, he crowed, that Bryan, who loved simple country people, including the “gaping primates of the upland villages,” had ended his days in a “one-horse, Tennessee village.” Fundamentalists were everywhere: they are “thick in the mean streets behind the gas works. They are everywhere learning is too heavy a burden for mortal minds to carry, even the vague pathetic learning on tap in the little red schoolhouse.” They were the enemies of science and freedom and had no legitimate place in the modern world.34 The author Maynard Shipley argued that if the fundamentalists seized control of the denominations and imposed their bigoted views on the people, America would be dragged back to the Dark Ages.35