"The Case For God"

[Dennis Spath]

This is the latest from Karen Armstrong, and IMO her most important contribution yet to the our understanding of the Worlds Great Religions, their antecedents in history (and pre-history), and how various "sacred books" evolved over time to meet the emotional and spritual needs of indiginous populations. For those of you, like me, who'd spent several hundreds of hours doing your best to understand the complete works of Plato, she renders it all comprehensible in a few dozen pages while illuminating the impact of the Greek Philosophers upon Western Thought. I was most impressed You won't find a better Holiday Gift for your educated and naturally curious friends than this scholarly and easy to read book....whether they be of Christian or Jewish heritage, Agnostic or Atheist as well!!

[fishgrit]

Thanks for the suggestion. I will look out for the Case for God. I recently read and was impressed by the Evolution of God by Robert Wright. Although I don't go along with his speculations at the end of the book it does seem well researched and thought provoking. Jeremy

[Dennis Spath]

Your local library most likely has it Grit. That's where I found it, in the new non-fiction section. It was just published this past summer. When I originally commented on "The Case For God" here I was a little more than halfway thru. Now that I've finished it my enthusiasm has only increased dramatically. I've spent several of my retirement years researching the history of the Bible and the world's great religions, including all of Armstrong's previous books, and find this pulls everything together....is the definitive work on the subject to date, including all of the rational arguments for Agnosticism and Atheism which have influenced modern scientific thought.

[smitty1931]

I have read most of her books as well as most of Bart Ehrmans. Interesting that after a lifetime of study, Ehrman declared himself an agnostic. The libraries are full of books on God, Christ and Religion. If you are comfortable with the religion in which you were raised DO NOT READ these books. They will shake your faith to its very fondation. Ignorance is bliss.

[Dennis Spath]

I have read most of her books as well as most of Bart Ehrmans. Interesting that after a lifetime of study, Ehrman declared himself an agnostic. The libraries are full of books on God, Christ and Religion. If you are comfortable with the religion in which you were raised DO NOT READ these books. They will shake your faith to its very fondation. Ignorance is bliss.

Your take on Ehrman is far different from my own.....perhaps because as a Catholic I've been acculterated in a branch of Christianity which is not reliant upon the Protestant Reformation, the KJV Bible, and Evangelical claims of salvation by faith alone. For any serious student of history and the world's great religions it appears obvious that humanity has always felt a need for a mythology which explains the unknowable...why and how we and the material world came to be. Armstrong has demonstrated this magnificently in her latest scholarly work on the subject. Of course "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing", therefore for most who feel a need for emotional security in their belief system ignorance truly is bliss.

[Brendan]

Ok, I guess my role is once more to rattle cages . . .

Both Armstrong and Ehrman are lightweights. Armstrong's conversion to Islam has coloured her work to the point where I won't bother with it anymore, and her alayses of the Trinity and such are very superficial at best (deeply flawed IMHO).

Try the Oxford Early Christian Studies series of excellent monographs. For biblical commentaries, the International Critical Commentary series and the New International Greek Testamanet Commentary series are the two I prefer, although there are a lot of fine volumes in other such series (Word, Anchor Bible etc).

If you want to look at how religious thought develops in the human brain and human society, the works of d'Aquili and Newberg (eg The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Thought) and Roy Rappaport (Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity) go so much deeper than Armstrong. For straight mythology try Phil Cousineau's Once and Future Myths: the Power of Ancient Stories in Modern Times. Armstrong's work is very far indeed from definitive, IMHO. Armstrong's works are popular books, not scholarly works as the target audience is not scholars. Something like Melchisedec Törönen's Unity and Distinction in the Thought of St Maximus the Confessor [Oxford Early Christian Studies, 2007] is a scholarly work - and also a much better read than Armstrong's.

Finally, what makes us think that we are persons, is our awareness of our own existence and uniqueness. We observe a certain centre of self-consciousness somewhere deep inside us—something which we cannot really determine but which at the same time makes us feel that we are persons, and that ‘I am I’ and nobody else. Yet, here too we should point out that, although one’s self is entirely personal, self-consciousness itself is an ingredient of the human qua human being. There is no human individual without this property (even if it sometimes ‘switched off’) and thus common to all humans. Therefore, from the standpoint of Byzantine thought, as I have presented it here, self-consciousness, too, is constitutive, not of the personal, but of the essential.
Törönen, Melchisedec – Unity and Distinction in the Thought of St Maximus the Confessor [Oxford Early Christian Studies, 2007, p. 58]

As for Ehrman, try the works of Bruce Metzger as an alternative:

Textual variants in manuscripts of New Testament books are many and varied to be sure, but it is simply a myth to take the variants Ehrman deals with in his books as evidence that some essential Christian belief was cooked up after the fact and retrojected into the text of New Testament documents by overzealous and less than scrupulous scribes. There is no hard evidence in any of the variants he treats either in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture or his more recent Misquoting Jesus that in any way demonstrates that ideas like the virginal conception, crucifixion, bodily resurrection of Jesus, or even the Trinity were ideas later added to copies of New Testament documents to make them more “orthodox.” This is simply false.

What is the case is that we have hard evidence of such ideas being amplified or clarified by overzealous scribes in a text like 1 John 5:7b. That is the most sober historical judgment will allow in regard to such variants. There is a reason that both Ehrman’s mentor in text criticism and mine, Bruce Metzger, has said that there is nothing in these variants that really challenges any essential Christian belief: they don’t. I would add that other experts in text criticism, such as Gordon Fee, have been equally emphatic about the flawed nature of Ehrman’s analysis of the significance of such textual variants.
Witherington III, Ben – What Have They Done With Jesus? [Harper SanFrancisco, 2006, p. 7]

But the two major works I'm slogging through are those of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Catholic) and Karl Barth (Protestant). For an introduction into Orthodoxy I recommend Vladamir Lossky's classic volume The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, as well as a copy of The Philokalia.

The revelation of Biblical salvation-history is a form set before mankind’s eyes, implanted in the midst of mankind’s evolution: it is a form which every passer-by must perceive, a sphinx-like divine enigma which he must decipher. The contour lines have been drawn with such mastery that not the smallest detail can be altered. The weights have been poised in such a way that their balance extends to infinity, and they resist any displacement. God’s art in the midst of history is irreproachable, and any criticism of his masterpiece immediately rebounds on the fault-finder. The mere light of reason clearly does not suffice to illumine this masterwork, and it can be irrefutably established that anyone who seeks to comprehend it with this light cannot do it justice. But the light of God which faith has sees the form as it is, and, indeed, it can demonstrate that the evidence of the thing’s rightness emerges from the thing itself and sheds its light outwards from it. In this light it can be proven that here what is involved is not at all a projection of the mythopoeic religious imagination, but rather the masterpiece of the divine fantasy, which puts all human fantasy to naught.
von Balthasar, Hans Urs – The Glory of the Lord – A Theological Aesthetics. Volume I: Seeing the Form [Ignatius 1961, 1982, Leiva-Merikakis, Erasmo trans. p. 172]

[Dennis Spath]

I agree, Brenden, that my use of the word "scholarly" with regard to Armstrong's latest would be inappropriate in the eyes of dedicated students who've immersed themselves in the study of Christianity and its sectarian variants. A better description would have been "well researched and loaded with source references" which, for the typical churchgoer, would "appear" to be quite scholarly. It is, after all, a generalized commentary on the origins of major world religions....which deals primarily with the God concept prevelent in the Abrahamic faiths. And you seem to object strongly to Armstrong's attempts to describe the nature of Buddhist/Daoist traditions....the role of Vedic deities in the Indian subcontinent. Why is that? Isn't it true this cultural inheritance of 2.5 Billion people is a fact, and just as important - valid in their minds - as Christianity in the West?

[karlhenning]

Very interesting thread, thanks.

Cheers,
~Karl

[Brendan]

I agree, Brenden, that my use of the word "scholarly" with regard to Armstrong's latest would be inappropriate in the eyes of dedicated students who've immersed themselves in the study of Christianity and its sectarian variants. A better description would have been "well researched and loaded with source references" which, for the typical churchgoer, would "appear" to be quite scholarly. It is, after all, a generalized commentary on the origins of major world religions....which deals primarily with the God concept prevelent in the Abrahamic faiths. And you seem to object strongly to Armstrong's attempts to describe the nature of Buddhist/Daoist traditions....the role of Vedic deities in the Indian subcontinent. Why is that? Isn't it true this cultural inheritance of 2.5 Billion people is a fact, and just as important - valid in their minds - as Christianity in the West?

Excuse me? Where did I even mention her views on Buddhism or Daoism, Vedic traditions and such? I criticised her views of the Trinity and the way her conversion to Islam colours the rest of her work. The rest was your own invention.

The view of comparative religion, that all religions are equally valid because they all have followers is very PC but doesn't look too closely at the religions themselves, their advantages, morality, rationality, closeness to reality and so forth. The scientific revolution, for instance, emerged from the Christian West, not Islam or India or China despite technological superiority prior to the revolution. Perhaps there were reasons in and around the Christian faith that allowed for reason in a way no other faith ever has. I do not believe in the new religion of moral and cultural relativism - and few followers of any religious faith other than PC do. Ask a [insert religion] if their's is the one and only true faith and the most likely answer is either a qualified or unqualified "Well, of course!"

In fact, cultural relativism ensures that comparative religion is reduced to "All religion is equally valid (- and therefore equally untrue)" instead of actually comparing the religions at any depth. Yet I know of know justification, moral, scientific, political, religious or musical, to accept cultural relativism and religious pluralism as anything other than fashionable nonsense in good moments and part of the new religion of PC at other times. It is a tool for PC to destroy (other) religion - especially Christianity - and nothing else in my eyes.

While we in the West take the scientific point of view as the standard by which all others are to be judged, it often escapes our attention that the scientific point of view (which I shall deliberately leave undefined for the present) had to fight its way to success through many long battles. Beyond that, modern science, as we know it, failed to materialize in other civilizations of the world (in India, China, and Islam), despite the fact that some of them had great cultural and scientific advantages over the West up until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. That realization ought to encourage us to consider the possibility that the arrival of modern science at its destination in the West was in fact the outcome of a unique combination of cultural and institutional factors that are, in essence, nonscientific. In other words, the riddle of the success of modern science in the West – and its failure in non-Western civilizations – is to be solved by studying the nonscientific domains of culture, that is, law, religion, philosophy, theology, and the like. From such a point of view, the rise of modern science is the result of the development of a civilizationally based culture that was uniquely humanistic in the sense that it tolerated, indeed, protected and promoted those heretical and innovative ideas that ran counter to accepted religious and theological teaching. Conversely, one might say that critical elements of the scientific worldview were surreptitiously encoded in the religious and legal presuppositions of the European West.
Huff, Toby E. – The Rise of Early Modern Science [Cambridge 1993, 2003 p10-11]

Robert Merton suggested four main sets of “institutional imperatives” in scientific communities: universalism, communalism, disinterestedness and organized skepticism. Others have been suggested since, but these four remain basic.

Merton says “For the mores of science possess a methodological rationale but they are binding, not only because they are procedurally efficient, but because they are also believed to be right and good. They are moral as well as technical prescriptions.” Science and the Social Order p270

To the postmodernist, this means that science is not a truth or false claim about reality or human knowledge, but a moral claim. That isn’t exactly what Merton said, who highlighted the moral as well as the technical aspects. But let’s take a look again at what kind of moral and technical claims are being made. Based on Merton, here is Huff expanding on those four main sets of imperatives:

1.Universalism: This norm suggests two imperatives: first, that knowledge claims should be judged impersonally according to standard criteria and without regard to the personal characteristics of the researcher; and second, that all persons, regardless of ethnic or kinship ties, or religious knowledge, should be freely admitted into the universe of scientific discourse.
2. Communalism: According to this imperative, the actual findings of research belong to the community at large and are not to be secreted or appropriated solely by the researcher. One is enjoined to make results available through publication as soon as normal cautions regarding error and precision are taken.
3. Disinterestedness: according to this norm, the scientist is expected to display a dispassionate pursuit of the truth through publicly available means and to forgo all forms of personal gain and aggrandizement.
4. Organized skepticism: This institutional imperative enjoins “temporary suspension of judgment and the detached scrutiny of beliefs in terms of empirical and logical criteria,” and the application of this attitude toward all knowledge claims, even those issuing from other well-regarded institutions. One may remark that this norm is particularly volatile and that traditional (or late-developing) societies are especially sensitive to criticism and questioning directed at their central and sacred values. This attitude prevails today among Muslims who are reluctant to allow any form of public skepticism, fictional or scientific, regarding the Prophet Muhammad or his teachings.
Huff, Toby E. – The Rise of Early Modern Science [Cambridge 1993, 2003 p23-24]

That modern science emerged from Christian thought and philosophy is rarley mentioned in high school or the media, but Huff'as work is the standard text on the subject today.

Beyond the rise of science, modern political systems, morality, law, music, art and culture, I also consider Western religion superior in terms of the religious experience itself and its relation to reality as we perceive it through evidentiary methods.

The first question addressed is the ultimate nature of the human being [within patristic Christian orthodoxy in the fifth century]. What we find is that these early Christians were, in the philosophical sense, realists. They presumed that human awareness has no apparent or ultimate role to play in determining the underlying nature of realities. In other words, the fundamental nature of a human being is not defined by conjunctive awareness but rather by disjunctive awareness (in the spatial sense of one awareness being spatially distinct from another). To conceive of a human nature as inherently disjunctive is to define the human being from the standpoint of the individual, that is, to conceive of a person as an inherently unique, singular, and separate presence in a world of many such presences. The essence of a human being is unique to the person; it is not a universal essence, such as a puruşa or the Ātman of Advaita-Vedānta.

This conception of human nature runs through the entire Christian Bible. The Bible begins with accounts of the creation of heaven, earth, and the creatures of the earth, including humans. Unlike, for example, the Upanisadic accounts in which God metamorphoses into creation and humankind, these Hebrew scriptures show God as pre-existent and creating human beings along with all other creatures. The human here, as well as throughout the Bible, is characterized as being one of a number of discrete, spatially disjunctive, living creatures.
Brainard, F. Samuel – Reality and Mystical Experience [2000 Penn State Press p187]

That other religions believe different things and experience the world differently to those of the Christian faith is doubtless true - but one of the interesting things about Christianity is it's ability to encompass and transcend all other types of religion and spirituality within it, from mysticism and meditation through tribal ritual and all the rest. The Bible contains all the kinds of human religious forms and thoughts - all encompassed and transcended in the person of Jesus Christ.

The Whole is a single Word; it extends its meaning in multifarious ways yet always holds it together.
. . .
This being so, it is no wonder that we already find a plurality of “Christologies” in the New Testament. If it were otherwise, the incomprehensibility of God, whose Word became flesh, would be at an end
. . .
Theologies that seem contradictory converge in a synthesis that surpasses them all in the fulfilment found in Jesus. Radiating from him, therefore, and ceaselessly circling around his mystery, paths lead off in all directions.
von Balthasar, Hans Urs – Truth is Symphonic [Ignatius Press 1972, trans. Harrison, Graham1987, p 59-60]

[Dennis Spath]

I'm impressed, Brendon, and wish to commend you for these well argued 'scientific" justifications for what you wish to believe is the ultimate "Case for (the Christian) God". Armstrong devotes over 100 pages of her book to the development of science and the critical method of reasoning, examining everything from the early religious skeptics to Modernism and Post-Modernism. Rather than rely upon specific sources selectively to make her point she takes the reader thru an extensive survey of philosophical concepts as they've evolved in the West from the Renaissance up to the present day. She doesn't tell anyone How to think, but effectively presents reasoned arguments which encourage further inquiry. This appeals to me as someone who majored in Philosophy on the Korean GI Bill, and has yet to conclude I've been blessed with Truth and Understanding.

[Dennis Spath]

Has anyone here read Armstrong's "Case For God??