FINISHED READING - The Case for God by Karen Armstrong

A few months back I read Richard Holloway's A Little History of Religion, which was disappointing in how thin and general it was. No such problem here with Karen Armstrong, as with characteristic relish, she fearlessly enters into explaining subtle changes in Christian theology, why they happened and what was their outcome. For a small book of 316 pages, it is ferociously detailed, which lost my comprehension on ocassions. That feeling of re-reading sentences, that still mean nothing to you. So, this time, if I struggled with anything, it was the density with which its written. Armstrong is nothing if not thorough.

She begins with early pre Christian belief systems and how they relate to conceptions of God when Christianity does arise. Any supreme God, in amongst a polytheistic pantheon, of most early religions cannot be spoken of and are unknowable. The spiritual life itself inhabiting this 'cloud of unknowing'.  Like in many other religions, if you can define the absolute, you do not know the absolute. The unknowable nature of God is what you have faith in. All the stories told concerning God are not always meant to be taken literally. They are frequently symbolic and mythic, meant to be instructive of something or encapsulate it. A self-conscious aurora of vagueness envelopes the form of the divine. This lack of definition, left room for doubt, left room for each disciple to discover their own connection to divinity. God's indefinable invisibility was a useful one.

But over time through the Christian medieval period into the Reformation and 18th century Enlightenment attitudes toward those unknowable elements changes. Science and religion were not always at loggerheads. But once the scientific method began to become more prevalent, believing anything you cannot know or proves exist, was no longer considered rational or reasonable. The distinctions between what faith and belief meant began to be blurred. You could no longer just have faith, you had to have clearly defined sets of beliefs, alternative facts you could hold yourself to. The presence of the scientific method, amplifying and redefining how the religious method was presented. God was no longer allowed to be unknowable. And so we have the present cultural image of God as a bearded figure resting on a cloud, dispensing benevolence and punishment in confusingly inconsistent ways. Faith, rather than being a place for what we feel, but don't know, becomes incorporated into a set of proscribed beliefs.

The dominance of this approach prepared the ground for the emergence of fundamentalism in all the major theistic faiths. Where dogmatism now rules. The Bible becomes a life guide and manual, the literal rather than the symbolic truth, eg. that God did actually make the whole world in seven days  She repeats the point several times that attacking fundamentalism only makes it more extreme. Particularly if they are opposed by an equally fundamentalist, intransigent and intellectually bullying scientific atheism. This viewpoint examines the Bible and Christian teachings as if they always describe the literal truth. Unsurprisingly Christians get caught up in this too, as people from any other faith also do, with the need to express their religious selves only in terms of certainty, belief and conviction.

She points out that religions should understand the need to hold provisional theoretical viewpoints in order to test them, as this is part of the scientific method too. As science expands its theoretical areas and tries to describe things that go beyond being tangible and touchable, it begins to venture into less knowable indescribable territories. Armstrong appears to believe that this could be where a different visualisation or conception of what God could possibly be, might reenter. 

Though I found it heavy going at times, it has nonetheless both clarified and provoked further thought about what I believe. What I find unpalatable in Christianity as it currently is, Armstrong describes in her signature calm prose how these came about, how they slowly deviated from the style of Christianity as it was first manifested. 

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8