The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  33. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 184–89; Szasz, Divided Mind, pp. 117–35; Numbers, Creationists, pp. 98–103; Laurence R. Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (Oxford and New York, 1986), pp. 160–63.

  34. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 187–88.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Moore, Religious Outsiders, pp. 161–63.

  37. Tarnas, Passion of the Western Mind, pp. 211–19; Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989); George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (New Haven, Conn., 1971), pp. 36–48; Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (New York, 1966).

  38. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, pp. 77–92.

  39. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, pp. 12–42.

  40. Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle, pp. 36–42.

  41. Ibid., p. 46.

  42. Ibid., pp. 47–48.

  43. Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. Stella Rodway (Harmondsworth, U.K., 1981), p. 45.

  44. Ibid., pp. 76–77.

  45. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, passim.

  46. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cecil Barrett (Oxford, 1966), p. 56.

  47. Ibid., p. 53.

  48. Maurice Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Rush E. Rhees, ed., Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections (Totowa, N.J., 1981), p. 117.

  49. Ibid., p. 123.

  50. Ibid., p. 101.

  51. Ibid.

  52. Ibid., p. 129.

  53. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London, 1990), p. 410.

  54. Martin Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us,” Der Spiegel 23 (1976).

  55. Rudolf Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology,” in Hans Werner Bartsch, ed., Kerygma and Myth, 2 vols. (London, 1964), 2:36.

  56. Ibid., 2:11.

  57. Rudolf Bultmann, Essays: Philosophical and Theological (London, 1955), p. 239.

  58. Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word (London, 1958), p. 103.

  59. Paul Tillich, Theology and Culture (Oxford and New York, 1964), p. 129.

  60. Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought (New York, 1969), p. 264.

  61. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1951), 1:205.

  62. D. Mackenzie Brown, Ultimate Concern: Tillich in Dialogue (London, 1965), p. 88.

  63. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (Glasgow, 1952), p. 183; Tillich’s italics.

  64. Karl Rahner, “What Is a Dogmatic Statement?” in Theological Investigations V (New York, 1966), pp. 18–19.

  65. Michael Polyani, Knowing and Being (London, 1969), p. 144.

  66. Ibid., p. 148.

  67. Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology (Oxford, 1983), pp. 64–65.

  68. Ibid., pp. 67–68.

  69. Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having (London, 1965), p. 101.

  70. Ibid., p. 127; author’s italics.

  71. Ibid., p. 128.

  72. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (London, 2005), p. 119.

  TWELVE Death of God?

  1. Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800-2000 (London, 2001).

  2. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York, 1990), pp. 172–81; Keith Jenkins, ed., The Postmodern History Reader (London, 1997), pp. 3–5.

  3. Michael J. Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1987), p. 28; Karl Rahner, interview with Gwendoline Jancyk, 12 June 1981.

  4. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), p. 46.

  5. Paul Van Buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (London, 1963), p. 138.

  6. I have discussed fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam more fully than is possible in these pages in The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (London and New York, 2000).

  7. Afghani was alienated from Western modernity by his experience of British colonialism in India.

  8. Azar Tabari, “The Role of the Clergy in Modern Iranian Politics,” in Nikki R. Keddie, ed., Religion and Politics in Iran: Shiism from Quietism to Revolution (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1983), pp. 58–59.

  9. Richard Mitchell, The Society of Muslim Brothers (London, 1969), pp. 152–61.

  10. Yvonne Hadad, “Sayid Qutb: Ideologue of Islamic Revival,” in John Esposito, ed., Voices of Resurgent Islam (New York and Oxford, 1993), p. 70.

  11. Charles J. Adams, “Mawdudi and the Islamic State,” ibid., pp. 99–133.

  12. Qur’an 2.256. The Arabic is very strong: “La ikra fi’l-din.”

  13. Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (Delhi, 1988), p. 90.

  14. Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, trans. Hamid Algar (Berkeley, Calif., 1981), p. 28.

  15. Interview with Scott McConnell, “The Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” The American Conservative, 18 July 2005; John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think (New York, 2007), p. 77.

  16. Qur’an 5:32.

  17. Esposito and Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam?, p. 80.

  18. Ibid., pp. 86–87.

  19. Ibid., p. 97.

  20. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (New York, 1972), pp. 160–80.

  21. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London, 2006), p. 188.

  22. Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York, 2004); Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York, 2007); Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York, 2007).

  23. Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (London, 2001), p. 6.

  24. Ibid., p. 7.

  25. Ibid., pp. 58–59.

  26. John F. Haught, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens (Louisville and London, 2008); Alister McGrath, Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (Malden, Mass., 2005); John Cornwell, Darwin’s Angel: An Angelic Response to “The God Delusion” (London, 2007).

  27. Harris, End of Faith, p. 35.

  28. Hitchens, God Is Not Great, p. 120.

  29. Dawkins, God Delusion, pp. 237–67.

  30. Daniel Dennett, “Atheism and Evolution,” in Michael Martin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (Cambridge, U.K., 2007), p. 137.

  31. Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 31; Dawkins’s italics.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Ibid., pp. 31–73; Haught, New Atheism, pp. 41–44.

  34. Harris, End of Faith, pp. 58–73.

  35. Ibid., p. 73.

  36. Ibid., p. 45.

  37. Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 306.

  38. Harris, End of Faith, pp. 14–15.

  39. Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, p. 85; Harris’s italics.

  40. Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 1.

  41. Haught, New Atheism, p. 63.

  42. Dawkins, God Delusion, p. 221.

  43. Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (London and New York, 2005), p. 93.

  44. Esposito and Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam?, pp. 86–91.

  45. Paul Davies, The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning (London, 1992), p. 176.

  46. Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Mind, and the Laws of Physics (Oxford, 1989), p. 421.

  47. Haught, New Atheism, pp. 44–49.

  48. Robert Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-traditionalist World (New York, 1970), p. 254.

  49. George Steiner, ed., Is Science Nearing Its Limits? Conference Convened by George Steiner (Manchester, U.K., 2008), p. xxii.

  50. Ibid., pp. xxii—xxiii.

  51. Mark Vernon, After Atheism: Science, Religion and the Meaning of Life (Basingstoke, U.K., 2007), p
p. 49–51.

  52. Ibid., pp. 45–47.

  53. Paul Davies in an interview with Bel Mooney, ed., Devout Sceptics (London, 2003), p. 57.

  54. Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (New York, 1983), p. ix.

  55. Jacques Derrida, On Grammatology, corrected ed., trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, 1992), p. 323.

  56. Gianni Vattimo, “Towards a Non-Religious Christianity,” in John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God, ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins (New York, 2007), p. 43.

  57. Ibid.

  58. Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. Luca D’Isanto (New York, 2002), p. 17.

  59. Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Baltimore, 1992), pp. 2–9.

  60. Vattimo, “Towards a Non-Religious Christianity,” p. 45. Vattimo refers to the Latin hymn “Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.”

  61. John D. Caputo, “Atheism, A/theology and the Postmodern Condition,” in Michael Martin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (Cambridge, U.K., 2007), p. 277.

  62. John D. Caputo, On Religion (London, 2001), p. 60.

  63. Ibid., p. 61.

  64. Ibid., p. 63.

  65. John D. Caputo, “Spectral Hermeneutics: On the Weakness of God and the Theology of the Event,” in Caputo and Vattimo, After the Death of God, pp. 57–59.

  66. John D. Caputo, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Caputo and Vattimo, After the Death of God, pp. 115–16.

  67. Caputo, On Religion, p. 115.

  68. Caputo, “Spectral Hermeneutics,” p. 47.

  69. Caputo, “Power of the Powerless,” p. 147.

  70. Caputo, “Atheism, A/theology,” p. 283.

  Epilogue

  1. Julian Baggini, Atheism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2003), p. 106.

  2. J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane, Atheism and Theism (Oxford, 1996).

  3. Peter Berger, A Rumour of Angels (London, 1970), p. 58; see John Macquarrie, Thinking About God (London, 1975), p. 54.

  4. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, 1968).

  5. Charles Webster, “Puritanism, Separatism and Science” in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1986), pp. 192–217.

  6. William B. Ashworth, Jr., “Catholicism and Early Modern Science,” ibid., pp. 154–60.

  7. Denys Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge, U.K., 2004), pp. 114–15.

  8. Xunzi, “The Book of Master Xan” 21:34–39, in Burton Watson, ed. and trans., Xunzi: Basic Writings (New York, 2003).

  9. Anguttara Nikaya 4.36; my translation.

  Glossary

  agnosticism (Latin derivation from agnosco: “I do not know”). The principled refusal to suspend belief in a doctrine, teaching, or idea that is incapable of proof.

  ahimsa (Sanskrit). “Harmlessness;” nonviolence.

  allegory (Greek allegoria). A discourse that describes one thing under the guise of another.

  anagogical (Greek derivation). The mystical or eschatological meaning of a biblical text.

  apokalypsis (Greek). “Apocalypse;” literally an “unveiling” or “revelation;” an eternal truth hitherto hidden that has suddenly become clear; often used to refer to a revelation about the last days or the End-time.

  apologia (Latin). A rational explanation.

  apophatic (Greek derivation). “Speechless;” wordless; silent.

  arche (Greek). The “beginning;” the original substance of the universe.

  archetype (Greek derivation). The “original pattern” or paradigm. A term connected with the perennial philosophy, which sees every earthly object or experience as a replica, a pale shadow of a more powerful, richer reality in the heavenly world. In ancient religion, the return to the archetypal reality was regarded as the fulfillment of a person or object. One thus attained a fuller, more complete existence.

  ataraxia (Greek). Freedom from pain.

  atheism. Today this means the outright denial of God’s existence; until the nineteenth century, however, it was usually a term of abuse applied to others, and people generally did not call themselves atheists. Before this time, it commonly referred to a “false belief.” It was used to describe a way of life, an idea, or a form of religion that people disapproved of.

  atman (Sanskrit). The immortal or eternal “self” sought by yogins and the sages of the Upanishads that was believed to be identical with the Brahman.

  atomism (Greek derivation). A scientific theory developed by the Greek physicist Democritus (c. 466–370 BCE), who believed that the raw material of the universe consisted of innumerable tiny, indivisible atomos (particles) that swirled eternally in empty space. Periodically the atoms would collide and stick together, forming the objects of our world. Eventually these objects would disintegrate, and the atoms that composed them returned to mill around in space until they formed their next combination. This theory was revived by European philosophers during the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.

  atopos (Greek). Unclassifiable; untypical; outside the norm; extraordinary.

  avatar (Sanskrit: avatara). “Descent;” “manifestation;” the earthly appearance of one of the gods; an incarnation of the divine.

  ayah (Arabic); plural ayat. “Sign, symbol, parable.” The Qur’an distinguishes between the absolute reality of God and the “signs” or “manifestations” of God that we see in the world. Muslims are commanded to contemplate the marvelous “signs” of God’s benevolence and generosity in the natural world. The Qur’an is also a “symbol” of the divine, and every single one of its verses is called an ayah, a reminder that we can only speak of God in signs and symbols. The great images of the Qur’an, such as the Creation, Last Judgment, or Paradise, are also ayat, “symbols” that make an inexpressible reality known to us.

  Bavli. See Talmud.

  Being. The fundamental energy that supports, animates, and sustains everything that exists; to be carefully distinguished from a being, which is a finite, particular, and limited manifestation of Being itself.

  belief. Originally the Middle English verb bileven meant “to love; to prize; to hold dear;” and the noun bileve meant “loyalty; trust; commitment; engagement.” It was related to the German liebe (“beloved”) and the Latin libido (“desire.”) In the English versions of the Bible, the translators used these words to render the Greek pistis; pisteuo; and the Latin fides; credo. Thus “belief” became the equivalent of “faith.” But “belief” began to change its meaning during the late seventeenth century. It started to be used of an intellectual assent to a particular proposition, teaching, opinion, or doctrine. It was used in this modern sense first by philosophers and scientists, and the new usage did not become common in religious contexts until the nineteenth century.

  Brahman (Sanskrit). “The All;” the whole of reality; the essence of existence; the foundation of everything that exists; being itself. The power that holds the cosmos together and enables it to grow and develop. The supreme reality of Vedic religion.

  Brahmodya (Sanskrit). A ritual competition. The contestants each tried to find a verbal formula that expressed the mysterious and ineffable reality of the Brahman. The contest always ended in silence when contestants were reduced to wordless awe. In the silence they felt the presence of the Brahman.

  bricolage. A term in modern design that refers to the process of creating something new out of old materials that happen to lie at hand. Applied analogically to the transmission of tradition, it refers to the premodern habit of taking ancient texts and giving them an entirely fresh interpretation to suit the needs of the time and the requirements of a particular group of students. When written material was scarce, this was a recognized method of moving a tradition forward. It was used not only by religious teachers but also by Hellenistic philosophers.

  Buddha (Sanskrit). An enlightened or “awakened” person.

  buddhi (Sanskrit). The “
intellect;” the highest category of the human mind; the only part of the human person that was capable of reflecting the ultimate reality. Not dissimilar to the Latin intellectus.

  Christos (Greek). Christ; a Greek translation of the Hebrew messhiach.

  coincidentia oppositorum (Latin). The “coincidence of opposites;” the ecstatic experience of a unity that exists beyond the apparent contradictions of earthly life.

  compassion (Greek and Latin derivation). The ability to “feel with” another, “experience with” another; empathy; sympathy. It does not mean “pity.” Compassion is regarded as the highest of the virtues in all the major religious traditions; it is the test of genuine religious experience and practice and one of the chief means of encountering the sacred. All the traditions also insist that you cannot confine your benevolence to your own group but must have “concern for everybody;” honor the stranger; love even your enemies.

  cosmology (Greek derivation). Literally “discourse/speech about the cosmos;” a creation story; cosmogony refers to the birth of the cosmos.

  credo (Latin); credere. Today this is usually translated as “I believe” and “to believe,” respectively. But this is a relatively recent development (see belief).

  Credo derives from cor do: “I give my heart.” It originally meant “trust; commitment; engagement; involvement.” When Saint Jerome translated the Bible into Latin during the fourth century, he used credo as the equivalent of pisteuo.

  Dao (Chinese). The Way; the correct course or path. The object of much Chinese ritual was to ensure that human affairs were aligned with the Way of Heaven— or as we might say, were in tune with Being. In the tradition known as Daoism, it would become the ultimate, indescribable, and impersonal reality; the source from which all appearance derives, unproduced producer of all that exists that guarantees the stability and order of the world.

  demiourgos (Greek). “Craftsman.” The creator god in Plato’s Timaeus, which shaped the raw materials of the universe into an ordered cosmos modeled on the eternal forms.

  deva (Sanskrit); plural devas. “The shining ones;” the gods of the Vedic Aryans. Like all gods in the ancient world, they were not omnipotent or omniscient; they were animated by the same Spirit as all other creatures—men, women, animals, plants, rocks, trees, or stars—and were bound by the sacred order of the universe like everything and everybody else. They were a higher form of being because they were immortal, just as animals have a greater share of being than plants. But they were not supernatural in our sense, because they were simply members of the cosmos.