The Case for God: What Religion Means

I am currently reading this book, in the evening, before I retire. I am also teaching a new version of a course called "The Nature of Religion". You might think that I have included this book in the reading list for the course, but for a few reasons, including that I already had a lot of reading assigned, I did not.

I have taught this course a few times and I had originally chosen to stick to philosophical arguments about philosophical topics in religion—I was concerned about the kind of controversy that might erupt had I challenged outright some of the fundamental 'beliefs' of my students. However, I took a chance last year: near the end of the course, I showed one of the Dawkins documentaries. The response was not what I expected. Students who had not expressed anything of their own personal views came alive with criticism and personal insight into what they considered the failings of religion.

But their commentaries almost entirely ignored the, admittedly, exceptional brief discussion of fideism I gave when we talked about belief and faith. Not to claim that Armstrong's book is a kind of fideism, I find her argument appropriate to my pedagogical problem. But, again, I fear that her argument is being misunderstood or misrepresented.

At a swift glance, the title of Karen Armstrong’s new book (the subtitle is in very small print) might mislead the casual observer into thinking that she has written a case for the existence of God [...] Armstrong has done something far cleverer and more subtle than that, however. The alter native would have brought her on to a battlefield of her opponents’ choosing, the one on which Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris have pitched their tents. Those three, she writes, “insist that fundamentalism constitutes the essence and core of all religion”. In fact, she argues, it is “a defiantly unorthodox form of faith that frequently misrepresents the tradition it is trying to defend”.

The God whom Armstrong is discussing is one whose existence cannot be proved in any way to rational satisfaction, not by the ontological arguments of Anselm and Descartes, nor by science, as Newton thought he had. In fact, even to talk of his “existence” is in itself troublesome. The point she makes from the start is that language, being necessarily limited to human comprehension, cannot fully convey anything about God. All statements about Him are therefore at best analogical – when we say He is “perfectly good”, that is only the shadow of a goodness impossible for us to grasp – and any suggestion of literalism is to fall into a gross and idolatrous anthropomorphism (via New Statesman - The Case for God: What Religion Means).