Book of the week: The Case for God by Karen Armstrong

last updated 8 January 2015

(Knopf, 432 pages, $27.95)

The Western world’s conception of God has never recovered from Sir Isaac Newton’s own brand of Christianity, says Karen Armstrong. Before the 17th century’s “father of physics” claimed to have proved the existence of “a divine architect,” most Western theologians and lay people believed that “God” was ineffable—that the word itself stood for an “indescribable transcendence.” Stories such as the Creation account found in Genesis, our ancestors recognized, were meant to be understood as analogy rather than as fact. Today, when prominent self-styled atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens ridicule faith in God, it is a Newtonian God who suffers their arrows, says Armstrong. Left entirely unscathed is the God of pre-Enlightenment Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The Case for God isn’t exactly what its title promises, said Repps Hudson in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Rather than attempting to prove that a God of any definition exists, the book tours human history to show “in great detail” how various ancient cultures sought, through religion, to cultivate an appreciation of that which is beyond understanding. Armstrong, a former nun who long ago established herself as one of this era’s most intelligent religious historians, “leans heavily” on the distinction that Greek philosophers made between “logos” and “mythos,” said Alain de Botton in the London Observer. One mode of knowledge allowed an individual to function effectively in the everyday world, while the other addressed the pain and mysteries of life. Religion thus belonged in the same realm as art and music, and the practice of both art and religion was “a means of stepping outside of the norm for the sake of release and consolation.”

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Armstrong is “uniquely qualified” to bridge the gap between believers and nonbelievers, said Lisa Miller in Newsweek. Since angrily rejecting Catholicism decades ago, she has come to accept that a belief in the God of the ancients “requires uncertainty.” Yet the practices of religion—the singing, the chanting, the praying—remain tangible means by which an individual can occasionally glimpse the transcendent. The one “odd thing” about Armstrong’s “eloquent” book is her claim to be providing a deeper understanding of the divine, said Simon Blackburn in the London Guardian. If the divine is beyond words, she’s offering “a kind of understanding that has no describable content.”