The Case for God: What Religion really means by Karen Armstrong

There are now two interesting additions to the case against Dawkins, because Karen Armstrong's The Case for God and Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith and Revolution are less about whether God exists than whether the secularists' case against him adds up to much. And I might as well tell you right now that they conclude that the pressing need of the age is for a better class of atheist.

Whatever we may say about religion — and almost the point of Armstrong's book is that we're better off saying as little as possible about God — the version of it advanced by the new secularists is crude, ignorant and partial. "They buy," says Terry Eagleton, "their rejection of religion on the cheap." Terry Eagleton is a distinguished Marxist literary critic and bad Catholic. Armstrong is an ex-Catholic and exnun. Both authors share the view that we have an etiolated understanding nowadays of what we mean by belief. Our version of what it means to believe in God is an intellectual assent to a series of propositions.

Yet what it used to mean and should mean is something more, a giving of the heart, a commitment which is manifest in the way we live. Thomas Aquinas thought saying "I believe in God" was an expression of faith and love, unlike other grammatical ways of putting it.

The difference between the authors in terms of argument is that Eagleton assumes — correctly, in my view — that what we believe makes a difference to the way we live. The Incarnation, the Resurrection matter to a Christian. Armstrong appears to regard any discussion of the substance of belief as bad form.

Indeed, her weighty book, a systematising description of religious thought from cavemen to Jacques Derrida, gives remarkably short shrift to any development that appears to favour the articulation of doctrine as opposed to just accepting that God is unknowable and getting on with being compassionate. "Religion," she declares, "was not primarily something people thought but what they did." So a religion of works, not faith, then.

She presents us with a conflict between two ideas: Logos, or rational thought, versus Mythos, a fuzzier, symbolic and not literally true way of looking at things. The problem now, she says, is that we're too fixated with the first at the expense of the second. Which would be fine, except that the gospel of St John famously starts with a hymn to the Logos or "Word"... "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God...".

That suggests it's a rather larger concept than she makes out. You also have to wonder whether a Mother Teresa would have given her life to serve the poor as another Christ if she had thought, as Armstrong appears to suggest, that Jesus was a minor figure in Judaism whose divinity was much overrated.

Eagleton's book began as a series of lectures delivered at Yale University. They must have been a riot. One would love to have watched the audience reaction to, say, his declaration that "... without the vast concentration camp known as the Gaza Strip, it is not at all out of the question that the Twin Towers would still be standing".

But he's fantastically rude all round, about "Ditchkins", about religion itself, which "has wrought untold misery in human affairs". Yet, following his friend, the late, great theologian Herbert McCabe, he points out that "God's love and forgiveness are ruthlessly unforgiving powers which break violently into our protective, selfrationalizing little sphere ... turning our world brutally upside down".

It's terrific polemic. And, incidentally, a much shorter book than Karen Armstrong's.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

The enormous popularity of books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and others shows that despite the religious revival that is under way in many parts of the world, there is widespread confusion about the nature of religious truth. For the first time in history, a significantly large number of people want nothing to do with God. In the past people went to great lengths to experience a sacred reality that they called God, Brahman, Nirvana or Dao; indeed religion could be said to be the distinguishing characteristic of homo sapiens. But now militant atheists preach a gospel of godlessness with the zeal of Christian missionaries in the age of faith and find an eager audience. What has happened? Karen Armstrong argues that historically atheism has rarely been a denial of the sacred itself but has nearly always rejected a particular conception of God. During the modern period, the Christians of the West developed a theology that was radically different from that of the pre-modern age. Tracing the history of faith from the Palaeolithic Age to the present, Armstrong shows that until recently there was no warfare between science and religion. But science has changed the conversation. The meaning of words such as belief, faith, and mystery has been entirely altered, so that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God - and, indeed, reason itself - in a way that our ancestors would have found astonishing. Why has the modern God become incredible? Has God a future in this age of aggressive scientific rationalism? Karen Armstrong suggests that if we draw creatively on the insights of the past, we can build a faith that speaks to the needs of our troubled and dangerously polarized world.