Karen Armstrong's "the Case For God" understanding religion from a scientific perspective

[mitchellmckain 0]

The first thing to understand is that the title is misleading. This book does not make an argument for the existence of God -- not that I can tell. I think it would be of interest to anyone with an appreciation for an objective scientific approach and willing to consider such an approach to the study of religion. It proposes some interesting speculations from an evolutionary perspective about how various religious ideas came about. They are challenging for me as a religious person for they certainly do not agree with my religious convictions. But I am very much interested in an objective scientific approach and in expanding my awareness of what evidence is available.

 

Of course her writing is not scientific in the strictest sense of the word. This is no article in a scientific journal. And since it is my claim that only science -- real science is really and truly objective that means that this isn't purely objective either. I think she is arguing that religion in general does have a role to play in human thought and life but her approach is not one of accepting any mythology of a religion literally or as being historical. Her book is a scientific approach in the sense that she argues from the scientific world-view alone.

 

Religion was not something tacked on to the human condition, an optional extra imposed on people by unscrupuous priests. The desire to cultivate a sense of the transcendant may be the defining human characteristic.

Indeed! It is in fact my belief that our humanity is itself a kind of religion and thus that our humanity is necessarily to be found in this religious dimension of our existence, WHICH Buddhism demonstrates is not necessarily mean having to believe in God. Indeed I would aree with Karen's sentiment that atheism is just another facet of the religious nature and development of human beings.

 

Theologically Karen Armstrong seems to lean toward some kind of pantheism or the ideas of Tillich, and these are not something that I would really consider theistic. But her call to show recognition for the unavoidably relgious nature human beings is I think crucial to the future of mankind. I think she fails to make clear that it is the diversity human thought is the most important thing that is at stake -- it is something that I think that evolutionary science can link directly to our ability to survive.

 

The ending paragraph of here book should give you some idea of her conclusions:

Even though so many people are antagonistic to faith, the world is currently experiencing a religious revival. Contrary to the confident secularist predictions of the mid-twentieth century, religion is not going to disappear. But if it succumbs to the violent and intolerant strain that has always been inherent not only in the monotheisms but also in the modern scientific ethos, the new religiosity will be "unskillful." We are seeing a great deal of strident dogmatism today, religious and secular, but there is also a growing appreciation of the value of unknowing. We can never re-create the past, but we can learn from its mistakes and insights. There is a long relgious tradition that stressed the importance of recognizing the limits of our knowledge, of silence, reticence, and awe. That is what I hope to explore in this book. One of the conditions of enlightenment has always been a willingness to let go of what we thought we knew in order to appreciate truths we had never dreamed of. We may have to unlearn a great deal about religion before we can move on to new insight. It is not easy to talk about what we call "God," and the religious quest often begins with the deliberate dissolution of ordinary thought patterns. This may be what some fo our earliest ancestors were trying to create in their extraordinary underground temples.

Karen has her own speculative theory about the origins of the human religious impulse, though I can hardly say that I completely agree with her speculation in this regard. Her idea is that this religious nature comes from some cognative dissonance over the fact of life that their own lives depended on taking life from other creatures. So she thinks that ritual and the the addition of a religious dimensions to this was our answer to this. She sees this as becoming a part of a religious tradition that evolved into the practice of animal sacrifices and that religion in general became our way injecting meaning and value into the often arduous task of living. I think this is certainly a valid objective perspective. I have in fact made similar obserations.

 

But I think that the whole point of the value of religion is that life cannot or should not be confined to an objective perspective. If one truly believes in the value of religion then one participates and if one participates then as part of that participation it would be absurd to confine ones speculations about the origins of religion to such an objective perspective. But this does not exclude one from doing the work of a scientist or academic to examine things from the objective perspective as much as possible. Thus in response to Karen's theory about the origins and motivation for the religious impulse of human beings, I will explain my own idea of this to contrast with hers.

 

We all seek to find meaning in our lives. For some it is easy and for others it is more difficult. Regardless, we suceed in doing this in very different ways. Nothing could be more natural because we are all different. Our lives are different. Our talents are different. Our challenges are different.

 

If religion represents a way of telling others what the meaning of their life should be then it is a deception -- an obstacle to meaningfulness -- an evil if you will. But if religion simply represents the part of the spectrum and diversity of the ways in which people find meaning in their lives then there is nothing more natural -- more good -- more human than this. And thus we MUST realize that religion is not the ONLY thing that can be an obstacle to meaningfulness -- it is ANY time that people participate in the rather dubious activity of telling other people what the meaning of their life should or should not be -- which is something I see atheists doing all the time.

 

 

Karen does have some rather serious critiques of modern atheism which she sees as just another one of many developments in the relgious thinking of human beings -- part of a particular historical progression of relgious ideas.

 

Like all religious fundamentalists, the new atheists believe that they alone are in possession of the truth; like Christian fundamentalists, they read scripture in an entirely literal manner and seem never to have heard of the long tradition of allegoric or Talmudic interpretation or indeed of Higher Criticism.

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But while Dawkin's irritation with creationist and ID theorists is understandable, he is not correct to assume that fundamentalist belief either represents or is even typical of either Christianity or religion as a whole.

 

This type of reductionism is characteristic of the fundmenalist mentality.

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The new atheists all equate faith with mindless credulity.

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As its critics have already pointed out, there is an inherent contradiction in the new atheism, especially in its emphasis on the importance of evidence and the claim that science always proves its theories empirically. A Popper, Kuhn, and Polyani have argued, science itself has to rely on an act of faith. Even Monod acknowledged this.

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The new atheists show a disturbing lack of understanding of or concern about the complexity and ambiguity of modern experience, and 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.

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Religious fundamentalists also develop an exaggerated view of their enemy as the epitome of evil. This makes the critique of the new atheists too easy. They never discuss the work of such theologians as Bultmann or Tillich, who offer a very different view of religion and are closer to mainstream tradition than any fundamentalist. Unlike Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud, the new atheists are not theologically literate.

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Our world is dangerously polarized, and we do not need another divisive ideology. The history of fundamentalism shows that when these movements are attacked, they nearly always become more extreme.

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Typical of the fundamentalist mind-set is the belief that there is only one way of interpreting reality. For the new atheists, scientism alone can lead us to the truth. But science depends upon faith, intuition, and aesthetic vision as well as on reason.

These are all sentiments and concerns that I share. In their reactionary response to fundamentalism, the new atheists have become very much like them. The false dichotomy that their rhetoric supports is destructive of one of mankind's most valuable assets - the diversity of human thought.

[mitchellmckain 0]

I thought I would follow up the discussion of Karen's book with an explanation of how I personally came to see value in the religous perspective because there is a different kind of response to what Karen is saying in her book.I was not raised to believe in any sort of god, and as a result finding meaning in this idea of God was not an automatic thing for me. I think you can say that it is the above sentiments that first allowed me to find meaning in the word "God". For it seemed quite clear to me that this act of finding meaning in ones life is necessarily an act of faith and I came to the conclusion that the "faith in God" that the religious people talked about was their way of having faith in the value and meaningfulness of life. They see their life in terms of a relationship with this being who is perceived in the totality of their experiences. I think this perception of a personal God is a way of animating ones experience of life and thus infusing it with meaning in a way that is more flexible than any ideological philosophy. This coming to see some meainging in the word "God" is only one part of the process of thought which took me from the perspective of the scientist through the philosophy of existentialism to eventually embrace Christianity -- or my own understanding of it -- which I think is a surprisingly orthodox one -- considering the circumstances. There is no doubt that there are both atheists and Christians who find this incomprehensible. No problem. There are Christians (Calvinists paricularly) whom I find rather incomprehensible myself. The bottom line is that my understanding does not have to make sense to them -- it makes sense to me and that is what counts -- and the same goes for their understanding for them. Once you come to the realization that a purely objective (observer) approach to life is nonsensical, then you are free to embark on a more subjective examination of religion to see if any and which of the ideas of religion fit your subjective perceptions of life and that necessarily includes decisions about what sort religion you can consider worth pursuing. I find the pretentions to objectivity by both atheist and christian , with this attitude that they have to believe this or that because it is "the truth" whether they like it or not, to be fundamentally delusional if not just bluster and rhetoric. I think this kind of thinking is ultimately no different than living ones life according to how someone else thinks you should. Objective truth is found but subjective truth is created and the former is the expertise of science while the latter is the essence of life itself. I found in my studies of physics a rather unlikely concoction of complexity and indeterminacy -- a rather common experience for physicists -- that seemed to me to have a most sensible explanation that the whole was designed for the specific purpose of creating the conditions where you could have this phenomenon of spontaneous self-organization that we call life. This is of course a rather subjective perception, and one which would imply the existence of a God motivated to create life. Furthermore, I found in evolution an understand of life that was more consistent with Christianity than creationism because it provided an important part of a sensible answer to that philosophical challenge to the idea of God known as the problem of evil and suffering. In evolutionary theory we face the undeniable fact that without the suffering found in challenges to our survival on the brink of extinction there can be no evolutionary development. We in fact find obvious parallels with this in relgious thought about how the difficulties we face in life are necessary for the growth and development of our spirit and character -- and this provides a more realistic understanding of God as a good shepherd who sometimes must cull the herd to keep it healthy. Which just points to the difference between a loving God who is sappy-stupid-indulgent and a loving God who really understands what our best interest requires however uncomfortable and painful it may be.