Karen Armstrong's "The Case for God" (2)

 (Cont'd)

In a chapter captioned with the interrogative title "Death of God?", Armstrong surveyed the religious situation from the 1960s.. According to her, during that era, Europe experienced a "dramatic loss of faith" because the people in Europe stopped going to church in increasing numbers and in a recent survey, it was found that only 6% of Britons regularly attend a religious service and sociologists confidently predicted the triumph of secularism and in 1965, sociologist Harvey Cox's book The Secular City, in which he proclaimed that God was dead and that henceforth religion must center on humanity and not on a transcendent deity, became a bestseller. The 1960s was a time of rapid cultural change: censorship was relaxed, abortion and homosexuality legalized, divorce made easier, women fought for gender equality and the young rebelled against the modern morality and ethos of their parents. They fought for a more just and equal society, protested against the materialism of their governments and refused to fight for their nation's wars or to study at its universities and created an "alternative society" in revolt against the mainstream.

Some saw the 1960s as the fulfillment of the rational ethos of the Enlightenment whilst others treated the 60's as the beginning of the end of the Enlightenment project and the start of postmodernity. There were skepticism everywhere: Christian values were called into doubt including the subordination of women and the structures of social and moral authority; doubts were expressed against the modern expectation of continuous progress and the efficacy of rationalism and the modern dualities of mind/body or spirit/matter, of reason/emotion were challenged and the hitherto marginalized and subjugated groups like women, homosexuals, blacks, indigenous populations, colonized peoples were all demanding and beginning to achieve liberation and atheism was no longer a term of abuse. The masses did not need carefully examine the scientific and rational arguments against God's existence. For many European, God had simply become otiose!

Armstrong quotes the comments of the political philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt: "Modern negativity is located not in any transcendental realm but in the hard reality before us: the fields of patriotic battles in the First and Second World Wars, from the killing fields at Verdun to the Nazi furnaces and the swift annihilation of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the carpet bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia, the massacres from Setif and Soweto to Sabra and Shatila and the list goes on and on. There is no Job who can sustain such suffering". (Empire 2000 46). Belief was seen as the enemy of peace and John Lennon could sing in his song "Imagine" (1971) that people were looking for a world where there is no heaven, no hell and "above us only sky". To Armstrong, this is a simplistic view because "many of the conflicts which had inspired the peace movement were caused by an imbalance of political power, secular nationalism, and the struggle for world domination" But it was clear that religion was implicated in many of such atrocities e.g those in Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

In America, " a small group of theologians created a form of "Christian atheism" e.g Thomas J J Altizer in The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966) announced the "good news" that the death of God had freed us from slavery to a tyrannical transcendent deity, speaking "in mystical, poetic terms of the dark night of the soul, the pain of abandonment and the silence that must ensure before what we mean by God can become meaningful once more" (CG 278) Our old notions of God must die before a new theology could be reborn. In 1963, Paul van Buren argued in The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (138)("SMG") that science and technology had invalidated traditional mythology and urged us to abandon even the sophisticated theology of Bultmann or Tillich, which he thought was still immersed in the old non-viable theology. We must give up God and focus on Jesus of Nazareth, the liberator who "defines what it is to be a man" (SMG 138). William Hamilton, however, saw the death of God theology as a 20th century way of being Protestant in his Radical Theology and the Death of God (1966)(" RTDG") and argued that just as Luther left his cloister and went into the world, "the modern Christian must walk away from the sacred place where God used to be and find the man Jesus in the world of technology, power, money, sex and the city. Human beings did not need God; they must find their own solution to the world's problems"  (CG 279). To Armstrong, the "Death of God movement" was "essentially a white, middle-class, affluent and sometimes--offensively--Christian theology because like Hegel, Altizer saw the Jewish God as the alienating deity that had been negated by Christianity and many black theologian questioned how the white people could affirm freedom through God's death when they had enslaved people in God's name. But the youths of the 1960s seemed to have lost faith in the traditional Christian God and some sought it Katmandu or Eastern meditative techniques whilst others sought personal transformation by drug-induced trips or such techniques as the Erhard Seminars Training (EST). it was obvious that there was a hunger for mythos and the rejection of the scientific rationalism which had become the new orthodoxy but according to Armstrong, because they ignored and neglected the traditional ways of arriving at more intuitive knowledge, their quest for spirituality was often "wild, self-indulgent and unbalanced" (CG 279) but the hopes for the arrival of the Secular City was dashed when in 1978-79, an obscure Ayatollah brought down the regime of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran and there was a revival of Islamic fundamentalism. In 1979, Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority urging Protestant fundamentalists to get involved in politics to challenge any state or federal legislation that pushed a "secular humanist" agenda and started to campaign against the teaching of evolution in public schools and, seeing feminism as one of the evils of the day, crusaded against abortion, absolutely convinced that their doctrinal "beliefs" are an accurate, final expression of sacred truth and that every word of the Bible is literally true (an attitude that to Armstrong, is a radical departure from mainstream Christian tradition). They believe that miracles are an essential hallmark of true faith and that God will give the believer anything that he asks for in prayers and are quick to condemn any one they regard as enemies of God, like Jews, Muslims and would regard Buddhists, Hindus and Daoists as inspired by the devil. Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists take a similar stance, each seeing their own tradition as the only true faith. Muslim fundamentalists have toppled governments and some extremists have been guilty of terrorism whilst Jewish fundamentalists have founded illegal settlement in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with the avowed intention of driving out the Arabs, convinced that they are paving the way for the coming of the Messiah.

To Armstrong, "fundamentalism is a fiercely reductive faith" prompted by fear and anxiety at the corruption of traditional religious values by scientific and rationalist values. They are highly selective in their reading of the scriptures. Christian fundamentalists quote extensively from the Book of Revelation but rarely refer to the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus urged his followers to love their enemies, to turn the other cheek and not to judge others. Jewish fundamentalists relied heavily on the Deuteronomist sections of the Bible and pass over those in which they were advised charity. Muslim fundamentalists ignore the pluralism of the Qu'ran and extremists quote its more aggressive verses to justify violence, ignoring other passages calling for peace, tolerance and forgiveness. To make purely human, historical phenomena e.g. "Family Values", "the Holy Land" or "Islam" sacred and absolute values is idolatry and as always, their idol forces them to destroy its opponents. (CG 282). To Armstrong, far from being typical of faith, such conduct is an "aberration".

Armstrong advises us, quite properly, to see fundamentalism in the proper historical context. To her, the fundamentalist fear of annihilation is not " a paranoid delusion". In fact , there is a historical basis for their fear. Some advocates of the values of science have called for the abolition of all religion. She says that "all these movements begin with what is perceived to be an attack by liberal co-religionists or by a secularist regime. She thinks that further attacks would make them even more extreme. In America, this happened after the media harassment in the wake of the Scopes Trial. In the Jewish world, this happened after the Shoah, when Hitler tried to exterminate the European Jewry and again after the October War of 1973, when the Arab army took Israeli by surprise. The Muslim world did not always recoil instinctively from the modern West nor from the idea of democracy. At the turn of the 20th century, every single Muslim intellectual with the exception of the Iranian ideologue  Jamal al-Din-Afghani (1839-97) was in love with the West and wanted their country to look like France and Britain. Although Muhammad Abdu (1849-1905), the Grand Mufti of Egypt,  who hated British occupation of his country, felt entirely at home with Western culture, studied western science and was completely at home with Guizot, Tolstoy, Renan, Strauss and Herbert Spencer. The British sabotaged the effective functioning of the Iranian parliament after the Constitutional Revolution in 1906 because two years later, they discovered oil in Iran and they needed it to fuel their navy.Sheik Muhammad Hussain Naini.(1850-1936) argued in 1909 that representative government was the next best thing to the coming of the Hidden Imam, the Shiite Messiah who would inaugurate a realm of justice and equity in the Last Days because the constitution would limit the tyranny of the Shah and should therefore be endorsed by every Muslim.  Armstrong also reminds us that Islam is the last of the three Abrahamic monotheistic religions to develop a fundamentalist strain. It only did so in response to their catastrophic defeat by Israel in the Six Days War of 1967 after socialist and nationalist ideologies have failed. Religion then appeared a way of returning to the pre-colonial roots of their culture and of regaining a more authentic identity. The West also is to blame in part for its birth. In 1953, the CIA and British Intelligence organized a coup that replaced the nationalist but secular ruler Muhammad Mosadeq (1881-1967) and put the exiled Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi back on the throne. The Iranians felt betrayed, humiliated and impotent. The failure of the international community to alleviate the plight of the Palestinians has also led to despair of any conventional political solution. The West's support of Saddam Hussein, who denied his people basic human rights, has also tarnished the democratic ideal because the West was openly adopting double standards. That has also helped to radicalized Islam, since the mosque was often the only place where the people could express their discontent. 

According to Armstrong, an additional cause contributing to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is the rapidity of its industrialization, modernization, westernization and secularization. Whilst the West had more than a century to adapt to the relevant secularization, the Islamic world had only about 50 years to do so e.g. when Kemal Ataturk secularized Turkey, he closed down all the madrassahs and abolished the Sufi orders. The shah made their soldiers go through the streets  tearing off women's veils with their bayonets and ripping them to pieces although only a small sector of their society was familiar with Western ethos. Then again, in 1935, Shah Reza Pahlavi (1877-1944) ordered his soldiers to shoot at a crowd of unarmed demonstrators peacefully protesting against the obligatory Western dress in Mashhad, one of the holiest shrines in Iran.Hundreds died that day. It can be understood that Muslims did not think secularism such an attractive option.

What about Sunni fundamentalism? To Armstrong, it was bred in the political prisons of Egypt. Thousands of the members of the Muslim Brotherhood were locked up without trial and subjected to mental and physical torture when all that some of them did was to distribute some leaflets or was attending a meeting. Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), the author of Milestones, a landmark book,described how he had been pushed into it by unjust imprisonment and treatment. In his paranoid world, Jews, Christians, communists, capitalists and imperialists were all in league against Islam. Thus Muslims had a duty to fight against the barbarism (jahiliyyah) of their day, starting with Nasser. This was a completely new idea. In making jihad, (understood as armed conflict) central to the Islamic vision, Qutb had distorted the faith that he was trying to defend. He had been influenced by the writings of Abu Ala Madudi (1903-79), a Pakistani journalist and politician who feared the effects of Western Imperialism in the Muslim world. He believed that to survive, Muslims must be prepared to fight with the pen, politics and as a last resort, with their body in war. This is a controversial claim but he thought the political situation justified it. Qutb justified his stand against the warning in the Qu'ran that in matters of religion, there must be no compulsion, by claiming that tolerance was not possible when Muslims were subjected to such violence and cruelty and that there could be toleration only after the political victory of Islam and the establishment of a truly Muslim unmah. (CG 285). He was preaching an Islamic liberation theology similar to that adopted by the Catholics fighting brutal regimes in Latin America: because God was sovereign, no Muslim was obliged to obey any ruler who contravened the Qu'ranic demand for justice and equity.Similarly, when the revolutionary Iranian leader Ayatollah Rudollah Khomeini (1902-89) declared that only a faqih, a cleric versed in Islamic jurisprudence, should be head of the state, he was breaking with centuries of Shiite tradition, which since the 8th century, had separated religion and politics as a matter of sacred principle. But after years of secularism as interpreted by the Shahs, Khomeini believed that this was the only way forward. Khomeini preached that Islam is the religion of militant individuals who are committed to the freedom and independence and against imperialism. But many forms of fundamentalism should be seen as essentially political discourse or a religiously articulated form of nationalism or ethnicity e.g Zionist fundamentalism. The Palestinian party Hamas began as a resistance movement and developed only after the secular policies of  Yasir Arafat and his party Fatah appeared to have become both ineffective and corrupt. Hamas killing of innocent Israelis are politically rather than religiously motivated and its goals are limited. When an occupation has lasted for 40 years, the resistance is likely to be violent. It is a misconception that the cult of murderous martyrdom is endemic in the religion itself. The American scholar Robert Pape who made a careful study of all suicide attacks between 1980 to 2004, including the Al Queda atrocities of 11th Sept, 2001 concluded that "overwhelmingly suicide terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka, to Chechnya to Kashmir, to the West Bank, every major suicide terrorist campaign--more than 95% of all the incidents--has had as it major objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw." (CG 287). Osama Bin Laden cited the presence of American troops in his native Saudi Arabia and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land high on his list of complaints against the West.

Many in the West assume,especially after 9/11 that in general, Muslims hate the Western way of life, their democracy, freedom and success. But according to a recent Gallup Poll, only 7% of the Muslim interviewed in 35 countries believed that the 9/11 attacks were justified. They believed that Western foreign policy had been largely responsible for these heinous crimes, their reasons were entirely political e.g the problems in Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya and Western interference in the internal affairs of Muslim countries. The majority condemned the attacks, giving religious reasons quoting e.g the Qu'ran verse that the taking of a single life is equivalent to the destruction of the entire world. Both the politically radicalized and the moderates listed the following as things they most admired in the West: technology, the Western ethic of hard work, personal responsibility, the rule of law, democracy, respect for human rights, freedom of speech, gender equality and the majority of the political radicals wanted to move towards greater democracy to foster progress in the Muslim world and what they resented most about the West is its "disrespect for Islam" which they view as intolerant: only 12% of the radicals and 17% of the moderates thought the West respected Islamic values. The majority of them thought that to improve relations with the West, it is necessary to improve the presentation of Islamic values to the West in a positive manner. There are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world today. 7% of them would amount to 91 million. If they continue to feel politically dominated, occupied and culturally and religiously disrespected, there is little chance of the West changing their hearts and mind. Armstrong thinks that blaming Islam is not a productive solution. What is required is to examine the political issues and grievances.

Not only is there Christian and Muslim fundamentalism, there is also in the West a new kind of secular fundamentalism too which is similar in style and mood to the atheism of Vogt, Buchner and Haeckel. While physicists remain comfortable with the unknown, some biologists feel confident that they may discover the absolute truth and have abandoned the agnostic restraint of Darwin and Huxley. In 1970, Jacques Monod, Nobel Prize molecular biologist published Chance and Necessity in which he argued the absolute incompatibility of theism and evolution theory. He claims that change is the result of chance and is propagated by necessity and hence it is impossible to speak of design and purpose in the universe and that human beings are here by reason only of accident, that we are alone in this immense and impersonal cosmos and further that it is not only intellectually but morally wrong to accept any ideas that are not scientifically verifiable. But he does admit that there is no way of proving from evidence that this ideal of objectivity is true. He thus tacitly admits that even the scientific quest began with an act of faith. In the English speaking world, Richard Dawkins wrote an influential book in 1986, The Blind Watchmaker in which he argued that William Paley's argument for a divine watchmaker of the universe might be acceptable in early 19th century but since then Charles Darwin had shown that the "appearance" of design occurred quite naturally in the process of evolutionary development through the mechanism of natural selection and that evolution is a blind, purposeless process that could not plan intelligently nor deliberately produce the kind of "contrivance" that Paley was talking about. For him atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution and further that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, "a misfiring of something useful", a kind of virus parasitic on our cognitive system naturally selected because they had enabled a species to survive. More moderate versions of such scientism of d'Holbach can be seen in the works of such other scientists as Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg and such philosopher as Daniel Dennett. For Dennett, theology is now superfluous because biology can provide a better explanation of why people are religious but for Dawkins, as for neuroscientist Sam Harris and journalist Christopher Hitchins, religion is the cause of all problems of our world and a source of absolute evil. All of them are working hard to expunge the idea of God from the universe. But another biologist, Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002),  who has argued too that everything in the natural world could be explained by natural selection, thinks that science is not competent to decide whether or not God exist because science can only work with natural explanations. Some other prominent Darwinians like Asa Gray, Charles D Walcott, G. G. Simpson and Theodore Dobzhansky have been either practising Christians or agnostics. Thus in Armstrong's opinion, atheism is not a necessary consequence of accepting evolutionary theory. Gould in particular acknowledges the ancient complementarity of mythos and logos by his theory of NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria, a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution) between science and religion and hence each should not encroach on the other's domain. He says, "The magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap nor do they encompass all inquiry (Rocks of Ages  2001 7). To him, these two magisteria "hold equal and necessary status for any complete human life and ...remain logically distinct and fully separate in lines of inquiry..." (ibid 58-59). Dawkins does not agree but his opinions have been exhaustively criticized by John F Haught (God and the New Atheism 2008 ), Alister McGrath (Dawkins's God 2005)  and John Cornwall (Darwin's Angel 2007).

Armstrong complains that the new atheists, like Christian fundamentalists, seem never to have heard of the long tradition of allegorical or Talmudic interpretation or indeed of Higher Criticism and that their understanding of what monotheistic religion is all about is wrong.  Harris seems to think that Biblical inspiration means that the Bible was actually "written by God" (The End of Faith  2004  35) and Hitchins thinks that faith is entirely dependent upon a literal reading of the Bible and that the discrepancies in the gospel infancy narrative prove the falsity of Christianity: "Either the gospels are in some sense literal truth or the whole thing is essentially a fraud and perhaps a moral one at that" (God is Not Great 2007 28). Dawkins seems to think that the chief purpose of the Bible is to issue clear rules of conduct and provide us with "role model" which, not surprisingly, he finds lamentably inadequate (The God Delusion 237-267). He also assumes, like Christian fundamentalists, that since the Bible is claimed to be inspired by God, it must also provide scientific information, differing from them only in that he found the Bible unreliable about science while the Christian fundamentalists do. She can understand that why Dawkins is unhappy about the Christian fundamentalists' attempts to  push against the teaching of evolution in public high school and also against the proponents of a new quasi-scientific philosophy trying to revive the theory of intelligent design (ID) e.g Philip E Johnson, a law professor (Darwin on Trial 1991), the biochemist Michael Behe (Darwin's Black Box (1996) and philosopher William Dembsky (The Design Inference 1998). She also agrees with Dennett that the ID advocates have not devised any experiment or made any empirical observations that challenge modern evolutionary theory. She thinks that it is also theologically incorrect for the ID advocates to make scientific statements. She says that mythos and logos have different fields of competence and when they are confused, we have bad science and inadequate religion. Whilst Dawkins' irritation with creationists is understandable, she thinks that he is wrong to assume that the fundamentalist beliefs represents or is even typical of either Christianity or religion as a whole (CG 291) e.g Dawkins assumes that religious faith rests on the idea that "there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence, who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it." (The God Delusion 2006 31). He is also wrong to assume that this is "the way people have generally understood God" (ibid) and to treat God as a scientific hypothesis (ibid 31-73).

To Armstrong, it is only in the modern period that theologians started to treat God as a scientific explanation and in the process produced an idolatrous God concept (CG 291). She gives other examples of how the new atheists' understanding of religion is wrong.e.g Hitchins defines faith as "belief without evidence" (The End of Faith 2004 58-73), an attitude that he regards as morally reprehensible. Armstrong thinks that Hitchins has confused faith with belief (the intellectual acceptance of a proposition) perhaps that may be because the two have unfortunately become indistinguishable in the modern consciousness. She thinks that  Dawkins' has stretched his argument too far e.g "As long as we respect the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is real faith, it is hard to withhold respect for Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers" The alternative to him is therefore "to abandon the principle of automatic respect for religious faith" because "the teachings of 'moderate religion' though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism." (The God Delusion 307). Harris thinks that "The very idea of religious tolerance is one of the principal forces driving us towards the abyss." (The End of Faith 14-15). To her, it looks  remarkably like a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The new atheists seem to have forgotten that even science has to rely on certain basic assumptions which are taken on faith too and that the practice of science is itself based upon an act of faith, just like the Christian fundamentalists just like Darwin, just like Einstein. As Armstrong says, "Even Harris makes a large act of faith in the ability of his own intelligence to arrive at objective truth--a claim that Hume and Kant would have found questionable." (CG 292). She thinks that all three proselytizing atheists present religion at its absolute worst. Whilst she agrees that it is important to remember the evils committed in the name of religion and that all too often, people of faith like to remember the sins of other traditions whilst turning a blind eye to their own, she disagrees that religion has brought us nothing but evil, especially Harris' remark: "Most Muslims are deranged by their religious faith." (Letter to a Christian Nation 2007 85) Where is the evidence? Where is that Enlightenment spirit of tolerance? She also disagrees with Hitchens' claim that all the problems of the modern world are entirely due to religion. He cites at the beginning of his book the following examples: 9/11. 7/7, Crusades, witch-hunts, Gunpowder Plot, Indian Partition, Israeli/Palestinian wars, Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, persecution of the Jews as "Christ killers", Northern Ireland "troubles", 'honour killings", "shiny-suited-bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money".  Armstrong says that "not all these conflicts are wholly due to religion." She complains that "the new atheists show a disturbing lack of understanding of or concern about the complexity and ambiguity of modern experience"  and that "their polemic entirely fails to mention the concern for justice and compassion that, despite their undeniable failings, has been espoused by all three of the monotheisms."

(To be cont'd)