False Witness

I see that the philosopher Alain de Botton has now weighed in with his  review of Karen Armstrong’s The Case For God. What I find so exasperating about people such as de Botton and Armstrong is the way they make assertions that patently are simply not true. For example, de Botton explains Armstrong’s point as:

Both atheists and fundamentalists take God to be an essentially human sort of figure, a giant Father in the sky who watches over us, punishes the guilty, intervenes directly in our affairs and is entirely comprehensible to our minds. "We regularly ask God to bless our nation, save our queen, cure our sickness or give us a fine day for a picnic."

Er, just a minute, guv – this atheist certainly doesn’t. In fact, I thought I was operating under the assumption that the very definition of an atheist was someone who lacked the belief in any form of gods, beardy interventionist in the sky included… So having erected a strawman, Armstrong and de Botton continue blithely on:

Her sympathy is with the great Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians who have denied that any human attempt to put the divine into words will be accurate. We are simply too limited to be able to know God; our apprehension must hence be suffused with an awareness of our provisional and potentially faulty natures. She writes: "He is not good, divine, powerful or intelligent in any way that we can understand. We could not even say that God ‘exists’, because our concept of existence is too limited."

Right, so having disposed of any attempt at a definition of a god, Armstrong then plays what she sees as her trump card: the whole point of religion is that it’s a mystery, one that helps us deal with our feelings of fear, aggression and guilt. She also defends religion as a source of compassion. This seems to me to be a case of mistaken identity – compassion seems to me to be powered by our human sense of empathy; no religion required. It may find expression through religiosity, but that is not the only channel. Indeed, the problem seems to be organised religion’s tendency to display anything but compassion; the recent statements by the Catholic Church once again appear to underscore the importance of doctrinal faith over compassion. Armstrong seems to acknowledge this:

The concluding part of Armstrong’s book traces the growth of modern atheism and attributes it largely to religions’ failure to argue for what is most compelling about them. Fatally, religions tried to defend themselves against science by arguing that they knew the truth better than the geologists, rather than presenting themselves (as one feels Armstrong would have wished) as the guardians of mystery and therapeutic manoeuvres of the mind.

The problem with this view, it seems to me, is that, taken to its logical conclusion, it completely undercuts all the tenets and dogma of practically all organised religion. It seems to point towards something like Zen or Confucianism. So away with the Nicene creed, the Catechism and the Koran. They are false and a distraction. Instead we have a set of mind exercises and stories (often myths) designed to help us deal with our feelings of fear, aggression and guilt, and to improve our feelings of compassion. But that sounds like the sort of thing that I do when I listen to music, look at a piece of art, go for a walk in the woods, or read the Brothers Grimm or the Arabian Nights…