The Case for God: What Religion Really Means Book

With all of the wars, crusades, inquisitions, witch trials, Jihadists, Creationists and the rest of it, God has got a lot to answer for. Armstrong's case for the defence is essentially that people are interpreting religion wrongly: to the founders of the religions faith was about mystery, symbolism, practice and good works. Early Christians, Armstrong argues, looked to the scriptures for inspiration not information, and would be shocked at what religion has become for many people today.

The case opens with a rather long history of Western philosophy focussing on Christianity, but also taking in Socrates, Aristotle, Confucius, Augustine, al-Ghazzali, Aquinas, Spinoza, Paine, Hume, Kant, Derrida and many more, in which they are shown to have developed variations around the idea that practising meditation and compassion while accepting that you can't know everything can make you a better person, while temporarily shutting off the chatter of your own mental commentary can bring a special feeling of peace and reflectiveness. Well, amen to that. Especially in ancient times before all of the scientific insights we take for granted today, you might reasonably decide to take a poetic view of existence and resolve to live a life inspired by your culture's oldest stories. As an atheist I didn't find much to disagree with, although I felt this this material was covered better in Armstrong's earlier History of God, without the sniping at atheism or overuse of the word "apophatic".

So religion is really meant to be a meditative, allegorical self-improvement programme, but unfortunately today's fundamentalists and (Armstrong claims) atheists fail to realise this and treat it instead as a set of factual claims, leaving us with two warring sides who are both wrong. Even the words belief and faith have shifted in meaning since the Bible was translated into English, from something more to do with trust and belonging, to the modern sense of simply thinking a statement is true. (I remember how as schoolchildren we sniggered when finding the word virgin in crumbly old Latin textbooks, because to us as ten year olds it meant a person who has not had sex - tee hee - while to the innocent author of translation exercises such as 'the virgins carry water from the well' it meant a young unmarried woman. Well, it seems this confusion predates the 1970s and is how the story of Christ being born of a virgin became a miracle.) Armstrong sides with the faithful as they are at least trying, and if only we could get back to taking it all a bit more symbolically again we'd all be better off:

The idea of God is merely a symbol of indescribable transcendence and has been interpreted in many different ways over the centuries. The modern God - conceived as a powerful Creator, First Cause, Supernatural personality realistically understood and rationally demonstrable - is a recent phenomenon.

Except that it is never clear in The Case For God when this golden age of non-literalism took place. The Apostles' Creed from the Book of Common Prayer is quite specific about God being creator of Heaven and Earth with Jesus sitting at His right hand having risen from the dead, so it had already gone wrong by its publication in 1662. However, the Nicene Creed of 325 CE contains most of the absurdities of the current version, so this supposedly modern error of mistaking metaphor for fact seems to have been a problem for religion from its earliest times, perhaps because we humans are only partly rational and have always been drawn to superstition, and of course to any myth that tells us we are better than some other group. I can't help wondering how many of the elaborate spiritual exercises of the great medieval mystics ever filtered down to the ordinary people, lectured from the pulpit about heaven and hell. Were the crusaders, witch hunters and inquisitors simply defending their communities against perceived threats while following their mystical, symbolic traditions? The Case For God didn't convince me. At best, it presents religion as something that may have some value for some people if followed in the right spirit, but which is constantly - inevitably - taken the wrong way with catastrophic consequences for millions.

And then there are her odd comments about atheism, where the case collapses into ill-considered muddle. Armstrong's claim that atheists' theology - of all things - is poor and that they do not understand what they criticise is one that you will see repeated on Christian websites and indeed book reviews, and I was disappointed to see an academic I used to respect sink to this level. Atheism is a rejection of the idea of supernatural gods, so to argue that sophisticated believers see God as symbolic, while doubtless true, misses the point. Atheists don't have a problem with symbolic gods, just the supernatural ones. And to claim that atheism is fundamentalist is meaningless mudslinging:

Like all religious fundamentalists, the new atheists believe that they alone are in possession of truth; like Christian fundamentalists, they read scripture in an entirely literal manner and never seem to have heard of the long tradition of allegoric or Talmudic interpretation.

After so many chapters of careful philosophical reasoning, this kind of clumsy point-missing comes as a shock and a disappointment. "Alone in possession of truth"? Is she saying that a fairer-minded atheist than Dawkins would agree that the theists might have a bit of truth to their viewpoint after all? What sense would that make? Does she have any idea of the debate, let alone the repression, persecution and wars, actually going on in the real world, outside her cosy academic ivory tower? Has she ever actually seen a Christian website? Did she just call us fundamentalists?

A 2002 survey found that two thirds of Church of England clergy have no doubt that Jesus was physically resurrected from the dead (although naturally the headlines were all about the worrying third of doubters). These are not "religious fundamentalists" in the sense of unrepresentative weirdos, these are the respectable, tea-drinking moderate mainstream, one of whom I might mention announced at my elderly aunt's funeral that she was at that moment renewing her acquaintance with previously deceased friends and relatives. Atheists' criticisms concern what is being said by people living today who think there is an invisible homophobic sky wizard (and witches, and a devil). People who do not think there is an invisible homophobic sky wizard are not part of the problem under discussion. Religion would be fine if people followed it in the way Armstrong describes - as indeed many Buddhists do, Sam Harris among them.

Her unarticulated point might be that many of the "why doesn't God save babies from earthquakes?" type of questions have been asked and answered many times, and theologians groan when they see them and refer you wearily to the standard because we have freedom, because it's complicated, and anyway we must all have faith in something including scientific truth itself set of answers, which may (depending on who you ask) include because God is not a sky wizard but a symbol for indescribable transcendence / metaphor for love / guiding force only appreciable via meditation. This is a favourite trick of theists, to become all philosophical and sophisticated when a debate calls for it, while back in the real world the Pope goes on announcing that Hell is a real place and vicars tell you your late aunt is currently attending a celestial tea party.

The Case for God positions itself as an academic rebuttal to a series of well-written, accessible atheist manifestos by Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and others. I am sure many people would be interested in such a book - I certainly would - but unfortunately despite good intentions (Armstrong at least rejects supernatural theism and tries to put fundamentalism in perspective), TCFG is heavy going, makes a weak case, ultimately frustrates more than it enlightens, and uses the word "apophatic" too often. Read her earlier A History of God instead.