11.15.09
Facile god talk
Book Review: The Case for God, by Karen ArmstrongPosted: November 14, 2009, 2:00 AM by Sarah Murdoch
Non-Fiction, Profile, The Case For God, Karen Armstrong, Charles Lewis
The Case for God
By Karen Armstrong
Knopf
406 pp.; $34.95
Karen Armstrong, a former nun and a prolific writer of religious history, has a few warnings for those about to tackle her latest book, The Case for God.
“We are talking far too much about God these days, and what we say is often facile,” she writes in the first sentence of the introduction. She warns, too, that much of what we think about God is bunk. God is not the Supreme Being “because God is not a being at all.” Nor is God a divine “Personality” who created the world, and we have no idea what we mean when we say God is “good,” “wise” or “intelligent.”
Armstrong is right: we are talking too much about ‘god’, and that includes Armstrong here. It is pointless at this stage to use the word at all for serious discussion. And Armstrong’s effort to redefine is simply more talk.
I am not a theist, as such, or an atheist, and I don’t indulge in efforts to redefine ‘god’. It is seemingly apt to try and refine god thinking, viz. god is not a supreme being, god is not a being, god is not a divine peronality….
We can’t really redefine ‘god’ in this way, since many of the earliest proponents of the idea thought of divinity in just those terms.
How would anyone know enough to resolve the questions? It might help to consider that the sources of monotheism didn’t speak of ‘god’ either, at least not in the beginning. IHVH, to what did that refer?
Armstrong is proceeding toward a kind secular Spinozist atheism/theism, and confusing the issue as she goes along.
Look at the eonic effect: it is true that there is ‘higher power’ in history that interacts with the stream histories of men. And while, to me, that is emphatically not grounds for ‘god talk’, it nonetheless does show that the secular view of universal history is missing something.
BTW, if you use the term ‘god’ in the context of the eonic effect confusion of the worst kind will arise at once. The materilal on this prefers to use a ‘systems language of evolution’.
In any case, shutting up about ‘god’ is not one of the virtues of Armstrong’s book.
James said,
November 15, 2009 at 2:15 pm
“Fundamentalists, she says, are a relatively recent phenomenon; through most of history, religious followers understood that the Bible was never meant to be taken literally.”
Come again?
Darwiniana » Fundamentalists, ancient, modern said,
November 15, 2009 at 6:10 pm
[...] Comment on Facile God-talk James said, November 15, 2009 at 2:15 pm · “Fundamentalists, she says, are a relatively recent phenomenon; through most of history, religious followers understood that the Bible was never meant to be taken literally.” Come again? [...]