Book review: The Case For God: What Religion Really Means

WHEN NEWS OF HIS DAUGHTER Aline's death reached Paul Gaugin in Tahiti in 1897, he produced a massive painting onto which he slashed three questions: "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?"

These are not just Gaugin's questions; they are questions that are intrinsic to the human condition, and we can be pretty certain that we are the only animals on earth asking them. Unlike the other creatures with whom we share the planet, we humans are an object of interest to ourselves. The big brains we have evolved, and the self-consciousness that comes with them, means that in us, and in us alone as far as we can tell, the universe has started asking questions about itself. From that passionate interrogation have come three great intellectual enterprises: religion, philosophy, and science; and each is inherently dynamic and disputatious.

Contrary to some of its more priest-like protagonists, science has never been a steady, accumulative discipline. Its periods of normality are constantly being interrupted with violent clashes and changes of direction; and in the higher physics of today we are given glimpses, at the subatomic level, into levels of indeterminacy and unpredictability that make metaphysics straightforward in comparison.

Philosophy, too, has been characterised by dramatic changes in emphasis and direction, from grand totalising narratives to tedious exercises in linguistic analysis.

But it is religion that has been most productive of dispute and disagreement. If we limit ourselves to what are called the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, we immediately encounter a history of division and subdivision, a process that is still active today. Though the statistics are not totally trustworthy, it was reckoned in the mid-1980s that there are between 23,000 and 33,000 different Christian denominations in the world, most of them variants of Protestantism. Judaism and Islam, while not as fissile as Protestantism, have also been subject to the separatist dynamic. This disputatiousness has not been confined to the institutional aspects of religion; it has been true at the theological level as well; and it includes religion's own understanding of God, that potent little word used to symbolise humanity's obsession with the possibility of an indescribable transcendence that may be the clue to the great unanswerable question: why is there something and not just nothing?

It is religion and the meaning of God that is the focus of Karen Armstrong's impressive new book. She tells us that the book, and the formidable research that underpins it, was prompted by the new and rather ugly debate about God that is currently being waged in the blogosphere as well as in the book industry. She makes the point that the God effectively demolished by Richard Dawkins is not the God of historic Christianity, but is a conceptual idol manufactured in the US in 1870 by fundamentalists who decided to believe in the literal inerrancy of the Bible, an approach that is as fanciful as it is absurd.

Armstrong uncovers for readers unfamiliar with the disciplines of theology the depths of meaning in that too-familiar little word, God. In particular, she describes with great eloquence the apophatic tradition, which is a way of approaching God that denies any of our concepts can properly be affirmed of him, and which leads, ultimately, to a silence and darkness that is beyond understanding. It is because humanity has found it impossible to live in this state of unknowing that religious hucksters down the ages have gone into the profitable business of manufacturing idols for them, and they are still at it. Atheism is important to the purification of religion, because it helps to purge it of limiting conceptions of the divine. This is why people like Richard Dawkins can be seen as friends rather than enemies of religion, because by casting idols out of the temple they leave it empty and silent, the preconditions for encountering the haunting possibility of that indescribable transcendence.

If her discussion of the apophatic tradition is Karen Armstrong at her elucidatory best, her discussion of the difference between logos and muthos will be familiar to readers of her previous books, and they may not be totally convinced by the distinction. "Logos" is that part of human discourse that deals in measurable facts, "Muthos" that part which deals with meanings and mysteries. She says religion is the keeper of great mythic narratives that are closer to poetry than fact, in the usual understanding of that word, but that religion has failed to understand the distinction.

While I find this approach congenial, not every theologian would agree with it. For many, Christianity makes factual and historical claims. This is why CS Lewis said that while Christianity was a myth, it was a true myth: it was based on historical truths that had an eternal resonance. While I think Christianity ought to be open to either approach, I recognise the paradox that it is those who believe it is Logos who do most to keep it in existence for those of us who practise it as Muthos. Which only goes to show how richly contradictory the whole enterprise is. In the last resort, if the mysteries and paradoxes of religion do not lead to an increase of love and compassion they are only, as St Thomas Aquinas recognised, a pile of chewed-over straw.