The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  transcendence (Latin derivation); adj. transcendent. That which “climbs beyond” known reality and cannot be categorized.

  ummah (Arabic). The Muslim community.

  univocal (Latin derivation). “With one sense;” a proposition that has only one meaning; a word that is unambiguous.

  Upanishads (Sanskrit). “To sit down near to;” esoteric scriptures revered as the culmination of Vedic religion. Thirteen of the classical Upanishads were composed between the seventh and second centuries BCE.

  Veda (Sanskrit); adj. Vedic. “Knowledge;” the term used to denote the huge corpus of sacred literature of the Aryan Indians.

  Wisdom (translation of the Hebrew Hokhmah). A personified figure in the book of Proverbs who represents God’s divine plan that governs the universe; the blueprint of creation; identified later with the Torah, the highest wisdom, and the divine Word that brought the world into being. A method of describing God’s activity in the world that human beings can experience as opposed to the inaccessible reality itself.

  Word. See wisdom; logos.

  yoga (Sanskrit). “Yoking;” the yoking of the powers of the mind to achieve enlightenment. The meditative discipline designed to eliminate the egotism that holds us back from Nirvana and enlightenment.

  zannah (Arabic). Guesswork; surmise; used in the Qur’an to denote pointless and divisive theological speculation.

  ziggurat (Akkadian). Temple towers built by the Sumerians in a form found in other parts of the world; huge stone ladders that men and women could climb to meet their gods.

  Selected Bibliography

  Abelson, J. The Immanence of God in Rabbinical Literature. London, 1912.

  Akenson, Donald Harman. Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds. New York, San Diego, and London, 1998.

  Alter, Robert, and Frank Kermode, eds. The Literary Guide to the Bible. London, 1987.

  Altizer, Thomas J. The Gospel of Christian Atheism. Philadelphia, 1966.

  _____, with William Hamilton. Radical Theology and the Death of God. New York and London, 1966.

  Anonymous. The Cloud of Unknowing. Trans. Clifton Wolters. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1980.

  Anselm of Laon. The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm, with the Proslogion. Trans. and introduction by Sister Benedicta Ward, SLG. Foreword by R. W. Southern. London, 1973.

  Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York, 2001.

  Atran, Scott. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. New York and Oxford, 2002.

  Augustine. The Confessions. Trans. and ed. Philip Burton. Introduction by Robin Lane Fox. London, 2007.

  _____. On Christian Doctrine. Trans. and ed. D. W. Robertson. Indianapolis, 1958.

  _____. The Trinity. Ed. and trans. Edmund Hill, OP. New York, 1994.

  Ayer, A. J. The Central Questions of Philosophy. London, 1973.

  _____. Language, Truth and Logic. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1974.

  Baggini, Julian. Atheism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, 2003.

  Balthasar, Hans Urs von. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. Vol. 4: The Realm of Metaphysics in the Middle Ages. Trans. Oliver Davies, Andrew Louth, Brian McNeill CRV, John Saward, and Rowan Williams. Edinburgh, 1991.

  Barbour, Ian. Religion in an Age of Science. San Francisco, 1990.

  Barker, Margaret. The Gate of Heaven: The History and Symbolism of the Temple in Jerusalem. London, 1991.

  Barnes, Jonathan, trans. and ed. Early Greek Philosophy London, 1987.

  Basil of Caesarea. On the Holy Spirit. Ed. C. F. H. Johnston. Oxford, 1982.

  Bauman, Zymunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, N.Y., 1989.

  Belkin, Samuel. In His Image: The Jewish Philosophy of Man as Expressed in Rabbinic Tradition. London, 1961.

  Bellah, Robert. Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-traditionalist World. New York, 1970.

  Bloch, Ruth H. Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800. Cambridge, U.K., 1985.

  Bonaventure (John of Fidanza). The Works of St Bonaventure. 2 vols. Ed. and trans. Philotheus Boehner OFM and Sister Mary Frances Laughlin SMIC. New York, 1990.

  Bossy, John. Christianity in the West, 1400 to 1700. Oxford and New York, 1985.

  Boyer, Paul. Religion Explained: The Human Instincts That Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors. London, 2001.

  Breuil, Abbe Henri. Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art. Montignac, France, 1952.

  Brewster, Sir David. Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton. 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1885.

  Brown, Callum G. The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization, 1800-2000. London, 2001.

  Brown, D. Mackenzie, ed. Ultimate Concern: Tillich in Dialogue. London, 1965.

  Buckley, Michael J. At the Origins of Modern Atheism. New Haven, Conn., and London, 1987.

  _____. Denying and Disclosing God: The Ambiguous Progress of Modern Atheism. New Haven, Conn., and London, 2001.

  Bultmann, Rudolf. Essays: Philosophical and Theological. London, 1955.

  _____. Jesus and the Word. London, 1958.

  _____. Jesus Christ and Mythology. New York, 1958.

  _____. The Gospel of John. Oxford, 1971.

  _____. The Theology of the New Testament. 2 vols. London, 1952, 1955.

  Burkert, Walter. Ancient Mystery Cults. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1986.

  _____. Greek Religion. Trans. John Raffan. Cambridge, Mass., 1985.

  _____. Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Rites and Myth. Trans. Peter Bing. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1983.

  _____. Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1979.

  Bushnell, Horace. God in Christ. Hartford, Conn., 1849.

  Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1990.

  Cameron, Euan, ed. Early Modern Europe. Oxford, 1999.

  Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, N.J., 1949.

  _____. Historical Atlas of World Mythologies. 2 vols. New York, 1988.

  _____. Primitive Theology: The Masks of God. Rev. ed. New York, 1969.

  _____, with Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. New York, 1988.

  Caputo, John. On Religion. London, 2001.

  _____. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion.

  Bloomington, Ind., 1997.

  _____. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington, Ind., 2006.

  _____, with Gianni Vattimo. After the Death of God. Ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins. New York, 2007.

  Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Enlightenment. Princeton, N.J., 1951.

  Certeau, Michel de. The Mystic Fable. Vol. 1: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Chicago, 1992.

  Chadwick, Owen. The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, U.K., 1975.

  ______. The Victorian Church. 2 vols. London, 1966.

  Clark, J. C., trans. and ed. Meister Eckhart: An Introduction to the Study of His Works with an Anthology of His Sermons. New York, 1957.

  Clarke, Samuel. A Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God, the Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation. 9th ed. London, 1738.

  _______. A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Religion. In Richard Watson, ed., A Collection of Theological Tracts. London, 1785.

  Clements, R. E. God and Temple. Oxford, 1965.

  _____, ed. The World of Ancient Israel: Sociological, Anthropological and Political Perspectives. Cambridge, U.K., 1989.

  Coakley, Sarah, ed. Rethinking Gregory of Nyssa. Oxford, 2003.

  Cohen, A., ed. Everyman’s Talmud. New York, 1975.

  Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ag
es. London, 1957.

  Collins, James. God in Modern Philosophy. Chicago, 1959.

  Confucius. The Analects of Confucius. Trans. Arthur Waley. New York, 1992.

  Copernicus, Nicolaus. Nicholas Copernicus: On the Revolutions. Trans. Edward Rosen. Warsaw and Cracow, 1978.

  Cornwell, John. Darwin’s Angel: An Angelic Response to “The God Delusion.” London, 2007.

  Cox, Harvey. Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-first Century. New York, 1995.

  _____. The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective. New York, 1966.

  Cross, Frank Moore. Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1973.

  _____. From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel. Baltimore and London, 1998.

  Cross, Richard. Duns Scotus. Oxford, 1999.

  Cupitt, Don. Is Nothing Sacred? New York, 2002.

  _____. Taking Leave of God. London, 1980.

  Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Princeton, N.J., 1981.

  _____. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Oxford, 1986.

  Darwin, Francis. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin. 2 vols. New York, 1911.

  Davies, Brian. The Thought of Thomas Aquinas. Oxford, 1992.

  Davies, Oliver. God Within. London, 1988.

  _____. Meister Eckhart: Mystical Theologian. London, 1991.

  _____, and Denys Turner, eds. Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation. Cambridge, U.K., 2002.

  Davies, Paul. God and the New Physics. London, 1984.

  _____. The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning. London, 1992.

  Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker. London, 1986.

  _____. The God Delusion. London and New York, 2006.

  _____. River Out of Eden. London, 2001.

  Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester. New York, 1990.

  _____, and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and G. Burchill. London, 1994.

  De Lubac, Henri, SJ. The Drama of Atheist Humanism. London, 1949.

  Dennett, Daniel. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York, 2006.

  Denys the Areopagite. Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem. Mahwah, N.J., and London, 1987.

  Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Corrected ed. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore, 1992.

  _____. Points… Interviews, 1974-94. Ed. Elisabeth Weber. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Stanford, Calif., 1995.

  Descartes, Rene. Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology. Trans. Paul J. Olscamp. Indianapolis, 1965.

  _____. Key Philosophical Writings. Trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross. Ed. and intro. by Enrique Chávez-Arvizo. Ware, U.K., 1997.

  Dever, William G. What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us About the Reality of Ancient Israel. Grand Rapids, Mich., and Cambridge, U.K., 2001.

  Dewey, John. Experience and Nature. La Salle, Ill., 1971.

  Diderot, Denis. Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works. Trans. and ed. Margaret Jourdain. Chicago, 1916.

  _____. Diderot: Interpreter of Nature: Selected Writings. Ed. J. Kemp. New York, 1963.

  Dillenberger, John. Protestant Thought and Natural Science. Nashville, Tenn., 1960.

  Drake, Stillman, ed. Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo. Garden City, N.Y., 1957.

  Draper, John William. History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. New York, 1894.

  Dupré, Louis, and Don E. Saliers. Christian Spirituality: Post-Reformation and Modern. London and New York, 1989.

  Dyson, Freeman. Disturbing the Universe. New York, 1979.

  Eckhart, Meister. Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense. Trans. and ed. Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn. New York, 1981.

  _____. Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher. Ed. and trans. Bernard McGinn, Frank Tobin, and Elvira Borgstadt. New York, 1986.

  Edwards, Jonathan. The Great Awakening. Ed. C. C. Goen. New Haven, Conn., 1972.

  Eliade, Mircea. Birth and Rebirth: The Religious Meanings of Initiation in Human Culture. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York, 1958.

  _____. A History of Religious Ideas. 3 vols. Trans. Willard R. Trask. London and New York, 1985.

  _____. Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism. Trans. Philip Mairet. Princeton, N.J., 1991.

  _____. The Myth of the Eternal Return, or Cosmos and History. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton, N.J., 1954.

  _____. Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities. Trans. Philip Mairet. London, 1960.

  _____. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Trans. Rosemary Sheed. London, 1958.

  _____. The Sacred and the Profane. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York, 1959.

  _____. Yoga, Immortality and Freedom. Trans. Willard R. Trask. London, 1958.

  Esposito, John L., ed. Voices of Resurgent Islam. New York and Oxford, 1983.

  _____, and Dalia Mogahed. Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, Based on the Gallup World Poll. New York, 2007.

  Fakhry, Majid. A History of Islamic Philosophy. New York and London, 1970.

  Fantoli, Annibule. Galileo: For Copernicanism and the Church. Trans. George Coyne. Vatican City, 1996.

  Febvre, Lucien. The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais. Trans. Beatrice Gottlieb. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1982.

  Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. Trans. George Eliot. New York, 1957.

  Findlay, J. N. The Philosophy of Hegel: An Introduction and Re-examination. New York, 1966.

  Fingarette, Herbert. Confucius: The Secular as Sacred. New York, 1972.

  Finkelstein, Israel, and Neil Asher Silberman. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. New York and London, 2001.

  Finnocchiano, Maurice A., ed. and trans. The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History. Berkeley, Calif., 1989.

  Fishbane, Michael. The Exegetical Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1998.

  _____. The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics. Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1989.

  _____. Text and Texture: Close Readings of Selected Biblical Texts. New York, 1979.

  Frank, William A., and Allan B. Wolter. Duns Scotus: Metaphysician. West Lafayette, Ind., 1995.

  Fredricksen, Paula. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity. London, 2000.

  Freeman, Charles. The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World. New York and London, 1999.

  Frei, Hans. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. New Haven, Conn., and London, 1974.

  Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York, 1961.

  _____. The Future of an Illusion. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York, 1961.

  _____. Moses and Monotheism. London, 1990.

  _____. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Newly trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York, 1965.

  _____. Totem and Taboo. London, 1990.

  Friedman, Richard Eliot. Who Wrote the Bible? New York, 1987.

  Fuller, Steve. Kuhn vs Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science. London, 2003.

  Funkenstein, Amos. Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. Princeton, N.J., 1986.

  Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. London, 1975.

  Galambush, Julia. The Reluctant Parting: How the New Testament’s Jewish Writers Created a Christian Book. San Francisco, 2005.

  Galilei, Galileo. Dialogues Concerning Two Sciences. Trans. Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio. New York, 1914.

  Gay, Peter. The Enligh
tenment: An Interpretation. 2 vols. Vol. I: The Rise of Modern Paganism. New York, 1968; vol. 2: The Science of Freedom. New York, 1969.

  _____. A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism and the Making of Psychoanalysis. New Haven, Conn., and London, 1987.

  Gilson, Etienne. L’Esprit de la philosophie medievale. Paris, 1944.

  _____. The Unity of Philosophical Experience. New York, 1937.

  _____, and Thomas Langan. Modern Philosophy: Descartes to Kant. New York, 1963.

  Gottlieb, Anthony. The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance. London, 2000.

  Gould, Stephen Jay. The Flamingo’s Smile. New York, 1985.

  _____. Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. London, 2001.

  Grant, Edward, ed. A Source Book in Medieval Science. Cambridge, Mass., 1974.

  _____. “The Condemnations of 1277: God’s Absolute Power and Physical Thought in the Late Middle Ages.” Viator 10 (1979). _____. Much Ado About Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages. Cambridge, U.K., 1981.

  Green, Arthur, ed. Jewish Spirituality. 2 vols. London, 1986, 1989.

  Gregory of Nyssa. The Catechetical Oration of St. Gregory of Nyssa. Trans. J. H. Strawley. London, 1903.

  _____. Commentary on the Song of Songs. Trans. Casimer McCambley. Brookline, Mass., 1987.

  _____. The Life of Moses. Trans. A. J. Malherbe and E. Ferguson. New York, 1978.

  _____. Select Writings and Letters of Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa. Trans. H. A. Wilson, New York, 1893.

  Griffith, Ralph T. H., trans. The Rig Veda. New York, 1992.

  Guthrie, W. K. C. The Greek Philosophers. London, 1967.

  Guttmann, Julius. Philosophies of Judaism: The History of Jewish Philosophy from Biblical Times to Franz Rosenzweig. Trans. David W. Silverman. New York, 1964.

  Habermas, Jürgen. Knowledge and Human Interests. Trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. 2nd ed. London, 1978.

  Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Trans. Michael Chase. Intro. and ed. Arnold I. Davidson. Oxford, 1995.

  Harris, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York, 2004.

  _____. Letter to a Christian Nation. New York, 2007.

  Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Culture. New Haven, Conn., and London, 1989.