The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

A God who interfered with human freedom was a tyrant, not so different from the human tyrants who had wrought such havoc in recent history. A God envisaged as a person in a world of his own, an “ego” relating to a “thou,” was simply a being. Even the Supreme Being was just another being, the final item in the series. It was, Tillich insisted, an “idol,” a human construction that had become absolute. As recent history had shown, human beings were chronically predisposed to idolatry. The “idea that the human mind is a perpetual manufacturer of idols is one of the deepest things which can be said about our thinking of God,” Tillich remarked. “Even orthodox theology is nothing other than idolatry.”60 An atheism that passionately rejected a God that had been reduced to a mere being was a religious act.

  For centuries, symbols such as “God” or “providence” enabled people to look through the ebb and flow of temporal life to glimpse Being itself. This helped them to endure the terror of life and the horror of death, but now, Tillich argued, many had forgotten how to interpret the old symbolism and regarded it as purely factual. Hence, these symbols had become opaque; transcendence no longer shone through them. When this happened they died and lost their power, so when we spoke of these symbols in a literal manner, we made statements that were inaccurate and untrue. That was why, like so many premodern theologians, Tillich could state without qualification: “God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.”61 This was not, as many of his contemporaries believed, an atheistic statement:

  We can no longer speak of God easily to anybody, because he will immediately question: “Does God exist?” Now the very asking of that question signifies that the symbols of God have become meaningless. For God, in the question, has become one of the innumerable objects in time and space which may or may not exist. And this is not the meaning of God at all.62

  God could never be an object of cognition, like the objects and people we see all around us. To look through the finite symbol to the reality—the God beyond “God” that lies beyond theism—demands courage; we have to confront the dead symbol to find “the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.“63

  Tillich liked to call God the ground of being. Like the atman in the Upanishads, which was identical with the Brahman as well as being the deepest core of the individual self, what we call “God” is fundamental to our existence. So a sense of participation in God does not alienate us from our nature or the world, as the nineteenth-century atheists had implied, but returns us to ourselves. Like Bultmann, however, Tillich did not regard the experience of being as an exotic state. It was not distinguishable from any of our other affective or intellectual experiences, because it pervaded and was inseparable from them, so it was inaccurate to say “I am now having a ‘spiritual’ experience.” An awareness of God did not have a special name of its own but was fundamental to our ordinary emotions of courage, hope, or despair. Tillich also called God the “ultimate concern;” like Bultmann, he believed that we experience the divine in our absolute commitment to ultimate truth, love, beauty, justice, and compassion—even if it requires the sacrifice of our own life.

  The Jesuit philosopher Karl Rahner (1904–84), who had been Heidegger’s pupil, dominated Catholic thought in the mid-twentieth century. He insisted that theology was not a set of dogmas handed down mechanically as self-evidently true. These teachings must be rooted in the actual conditions in which men and women lived, reflecting the manner in which they knew, perceived, and experienced reality. People did not come to know what God was by solving doctrinal conundrums, proving God’s existence, or engaging in an abstruse metaphysical quest, but by becoming aware of the workings of their own nature. Rahner was advocating a version of what the Buddha had called “mindfulness.” When we struggle to make sense of the world, we constantly go beyond ourselves in our search for understanding. Thus every act of cognition and every act of love is a transcendent experience because it compels us to reach beyond the prism of selfhood. Constantly, in our everyday experience, we stumble against something that takes us beyond ourselves, so transcendence is built into the human condition.

  Rahner stressed the importance of mystery, which was simply an aspect of humanity. The transcendent is not an add-on, something separate from normal existence, because it simply means “to go beyond.” When we know, choose, and love other beings in this world, we have to go outside ourselves; when we try to get beyond all particular beings, we move toward what lies beyond words, concepts, and categories. That mystery, which defies description, is God. Religious doctrines were not meant to explain or define the mystery; they were simply symbolic. A doctrine articulates our sense of the ineffable and makes us aware of it. A dogmatic statement, therefore, is “merely the means of expressing a being referred beyond itself and anything imaginable.”64

  Bernard Lonergan (1904–84), a Canadian Jesuit, rejected the positivists’ belief that all reliable knowledge was derived from external sense data. In Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957), he argued that knowledge required more than simply “taking a look.” It demanded in-sight, an ability to see into an object and contemplate it in its various modes: mathematical, scientific, artistic, moral, and finally metaphysical. Continually we find that something eludes us: it urges us to move on further if we wish to become wise. In all cultures, humans have been seized by the same imperatives—to be intelligent, responsible, reasonable, and loving, and, if necessary, to change. All this pulls us into the realm of the transcendental, the Real and Unconditioned, which in the Christian world is called “God.” But this demonstration of the ubiquity of God does not force acceptance. Lonergan concluded by pointing out that his book had merely been a set of signs that readers must appropriate and make their own, a task that each person could complete only for him-or herself.

  Since the scientific revolution of the 1920s, there has been a growing conviction that unknowing is an ineradicable part of our experience. In 1962, the American intellectual Thomas Kuhn (1922–96) published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which criticized Popper’s theory of the systematic falsification of existing scientific theories but also undermined the older conviction that the history of science represented a linear, rational, and untrammeled progress toward an ever more accurate achievement of objective truth. Kuhn believed that the cumulative testing of hypotheses was only part of the story. During “normal” periods, scientists did indeed research and test their theories, but instead of reaching out toward new truth, they were, in fact, simply seeking confirmation of the scientific paradigm of the day. Teachers and texts all worked to support the prevailing orthodoxy and tended to ignore anything that challenged it; they could advance no farther than the current paradigm, which thus acquired a conviction and rigidity not unlike theological dogma. But then—as had occurred during the 1920s—the “normal” period was succeeded by a dramatic paradigm shift. The accumulating uncertainties and puzzling results of experiments became irresistible, and scientists contended with one another to find a new paradigm. This was not a rational process; it consisted of imaginative and unpredictable flights into the unknown, all influenced by metaphors, imagery, and assumptions drawn from other fields. Kuhn seemed to suggest that aesthetic, social, historical, and psychological factors were also involved, so that the ideal of “pure science” was a chimera. Once the fresh paradigm had been established, a new “normal” period would begin in which scientists worked to endorse the new model, disregarding hints that it was not impregnable, until the next major breakthrough.

  It seemed that the scientific knowledge that had come upon the early modern world with the force of a new revelation was not, after all, fundamentally different from the understanding we derived from the humanities. In Knowing and Being, Michael Polyani (1891–1976), a chemist and philosopher of science, argued that all knowledge was tacit rather than objectively and self-consciously acquired. He drew attention to the role of practical knowledge, which had been gr
eatly overlooked in the modern emphasis on theoretical understanding. We learn how to swim or dance without being able to explain precisely how it is done. We recognize a friend’s face without being able to specify exactly what it is that we recognize. Our perception of the external world is not a mechanical, straightforward absorption of data. We integrate a vast number of things into a focal awareness, subjecting them to an interpretive framework that is so deeply rooted that we cannot make it explicit. The speed and complexity of this integration easily outstrips the relatively ponderous processes of logic or inference. Indeed, knowledge is of little use to us until it has been made tacit. Once we have learned how to drive a car, “the text of the manual is shifted to the back of the driver’s mind and transported almost entirely to the tacit operations of a skill.”65

  When we learn a skill, we literally dwell in the innumerable muscular actions we perform without fully knowing how we achieve them. All understanding, Polyani claimed, is like this. We interiorize a language or a poem “and make ourselves dwell in them. Such extensions of ourselves develop new faculties in us; our whole education operates in this way; as each of us interiorises the cultural heritage, she grows into a person seeing the world and experiencing life in terms of this outlook.”66 This, it has been pointed out, is not dissimilar to the Cappadocians’ insistence that the knowledge of God was acquired not merely cerebrally but by the physical participation in the liturgical tradition of the Church, which initiated people into a form of knowing that was silent and could not be clearly articulated.67

  Polyani argued that the scientific method is not simply a matter of progressing from ignorance to objectivity; as in the humanities, it is more likely to consist of a more complex movement from explicit to tacit knowledge. In order for their investigations to work, scientists often have to believe things that they know will be later proved wrong—though they can never be sure which of their current convictions will be so jettisoned. Because there is so much that cannot be proven, there will always be an element of what religious people call “faith” in science—the kind of faith that physicists showed in Einstein’s theory of relativity in the absence of empirical proof.

  Scientific rationalism consists largely of problem solving, an approach that does lead to systematic advance: after a problem has been solved, it can be laid aside and scientists can move on to tackle the next. But the humanities do not function in this way, because the problems they confront, such as mortality, grief, evil, or the nature of happiness, are not capable of a once-and-for-all solution. It can take a lifetime’s engagement with a poem before it reveals its full depth. This type of contemplation may function differently from ratiocination, but it is not for that reason irrational; it is like the “thinking” Heidegger prescribed: repetitive, incremental, and receptive.68 The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) distinguished between a problem, “something met which bars my passage” and “is before me in its entirety,” and a mystery, “something in which I find myself caught up, and whose essence is not before me in its entirety.”69 We have to remove a problem before we can proceed, but we are compelled to participate in a mystery—rather as the Greeks flung themselves into the rites of Eleusis and grappled with their mortality. “A mystery is something in which I am myself involved,” Marcel continued, “and it can therefore only be thought of as a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and its essential validity.”70 It is always possible—and perhaps a modern temptation—to turn a mystery into a problem and try to solve it by applying the appropriate technique. It is significant that today a detective story based on such problem solving is popularly known as a “mystery.” But for Marcel this is a “fundamentally vicious proceeding” that could be symptomatic of a “corruption of the intelligence.”71

  Philosophers and scientists were beginning to return to a more apophatic approach to knowledge. But the tradition of Denys, Thomas, and Eckhart had been so submerged during the modern period that most religious congregations were unaware of it. They tended still to think about God in the modern way, as an objective reality, “out there,” that could be categorized like any other being. During the 1950s, for example, I learned by heart this answer to the question “What is God?” in the Roman Catholic catechism: “God is the supreme spirit, who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections.” Denys, Anselm, and Aquinas were probably turning in their graves. The catechism had no hesitation in asserting that it was possible simply to draw breath and define, a word that literally means “to set limits upon,” a transcendent reality that must exceed all words and concepts.

  Not surprisingly, many thoughtful people were unable to believe in this remote and abstractly conceived deity. By the middle of the twentieth century, it was commonly imagined that secularism was the coming ideology and that religion would never again play a role in public life. But atheism was still not perceived as an easy option. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) spoke of a God-shaped hole in human consciousness where the sacred had always been. The desire for what we call God is intrinsic to human nature, which cannot bear the utter meaninglessness of the cosmos. We have invented a God to explain the inexplicable; it is a divinized humanity. But even if God existed, Sartre claimed, it would be necessary to reject him, since this God negates our freedom. This was not a comfortable creed. It demanded a bleak acceptance of the fact that our lives had no meaning—a heroic act that brought an apotheosis of freedom but also a denial of an intrinsic part of our nature.

  Albert Camus (1913–60) could no longer subscribe to the nineteenth-century dream of a deified humanity. Our lives were rendered meaningless by our mortality, so any philosophy that tried to make sense of human existence was a delusion. We had to do without God and pour all our loving solicitude and care upon the world. But this would bring no liberation. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus showed that the abolition of God required a lifelong and hopeless struggle that it was impossible to rationalize. In his passion for life and hatred of death, Sisyphus, king of ancient Corinth, had defied the gods, and his punishment was to spend eternity engaged in a futile task: each day he had to roll a boulder up a mountainside; but when he reached the summit, the rock rolled downhill, so the next day he had to begin all over again. This was an image of the absurdity of human life, from which even death offered no release. Can we be happy in the knowledge that we are defeated before we even begin? If we make a heroic effort to create our own meaning in the face of death and absurdity, Camus concludes that happiness is possible:

  I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.72

  By the middle of the twentieth century, many found it impossible to imagine that getting rid of God would lead to a brave new world; there was no serene Enlightenment optimism in the rationality of human existence. Camus had embraced the state of unknowing. He did not know for certain that God did not exist; he simply chose to believe this. We have to live with our ignorance in a universe that is silent in the face of our questioning.

  Within a decade of Camus’ death, though, the world had drastically changed. There was a rebellion against the ethos of modernity; new forms of religiosity, a different kind of atheism, and, despite the fact that unknowing seemed built into our condition, a strident lust for certainty.

  Death of God?

  During the 1960s, Europe experienced a dramatic loss of faith. After a rise in religious observance during the austerity years immediately after the Second World War, for example, British people stopped going to church in unprecedented numbers and the decline has steadily continued.1 A recent poll has estima
ted that only about 6 percent of Britons attend a religious service regularly. In both Europe and the United States, sociologists proclaimed the triumph of secularism. In 1965, The Secular City, a best seller by the American theologian Harvey Cox, claimed that God was dead and that henceforth religion must center on humanity rather than a transcendent deity; if Christianity failed to absorb these new values, the churches would perish. The decline of religion was just one sign of major cultural change during this decade, when many of the institutional structures of modernity were pulled down: censorship was relaxed, abortion and homosexuality were legalized, divorce became easier, the women’s movement campaigned for gender equality, and the young railed against the modern ethos of their parents. They called for a more just and equal society, protested against the materialism of their governments, and refused to fight in their nation’s wars or to study in its universities. They created an “alternative society” in revolt against the mainstream.

  Some saw the new wave of secularism as the fulfillment of the rational ethos of the Enlightenment. Others saw the 1960s as the beginning of the end of the Enlightenment project and the start of “postmodernity.”2 Truths hitherto regarded as self-evident were called into question: the teachings of Christianity, the subordination of women, and the structures of social and moral authority. There was a new skepticism about the role of science, the modern expectation of continuous progress, and the Enlightenment ideal of rationality. The modern dualities of mind/body; spirit/matter, and reason/emotion were challenged. Finally, the “lower orders,” who had been marginalized and even subjugated during the modern period— women, homosexuals, blacks, indigenous populations, colonized peoples—were demanding and beginning to achieve liberation.

  Atheism was no longer regarded as a term of abuse. As Nietzsche had predicted, the idea of God had simply died, and for the first time ordinary folk, who were not pioneering scientists or philosophers, were happy to call themselves atheists.3 They did not spend time examining the scientific and rational arguments against God’s existence: for many Europeans, God had simply become otiosus (“superfluous”). As the political philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have explained: