The Case for God

A sweeping history of how Western religious traditions understood and spoke of God across two-and-a-half millennia, written explicitly as Armstrong's reply to the New Atheist arguments of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Daniel Dennett. The argument is that pre-modern religion was not in the business of making metaphysical claims about a supernatural being but of cultivating the practices — silence, ritual, apophasis, ethical formation — by which a transformed mode of knowing becomes possible.

The literalism the New Atheists rightly criticise is itself a post-seventeenth-century invention rather than a feature of the deep tradition. Armstrong traces the apophatic current — the theology of unknowing — from ancient Greece through Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticism, arguing that modern atheism and modern fundamentalism are mirror images of the same category error: treating "God" as a factual hypothesis rather than a practice.

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Reception

The Case for God spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was widely reviewed both in mainstream press (Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times, James Wood in The New Yorker) and within religious studies (Sara Maitland in the Tablet, Diarmaid MacCulloch in the Guardian). The book has become one of the standard popular references for the apophatic-theology line of response to scientific naturalism. Critics from the New Atheist side (Stephen Asma, Tim Crane) have argued the book defines religion narrowly enough to immunise it from the very critiques the New Atheists levelled, while historians of religion (Eamon Duffy, Mark Lilla in the New York Review of Books) have questioned the unity Armstrong attributes to a pre-modern religious sensibility across cultures she treats fairly compactly. In 2009 the book was awarded the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize by the University of Tübingen. It remains the standard counter-text to The God Delusion in most undergraduate religious-studies syllabi that pair the two.

Frequently asked

What is The Case for God about?

Armstrong surveys how Western and Eastern religious traditions have understood God over 2,500 years — from Paleolithic ritual through modern secular culture. Her central argument is that pre-modern religion was primarily a practice for cultivating a transformed mode of knowing, not a set of metaphysical claims about a supernatural being.

How does Armstrong respond to atheists like Richard Dawkins?

She argues that Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett target a literalist, propositional idea of God that the apophatic tradition — the theology of unknowing — has consistently rejected as inadequate. The fundamentalism and atheism she describes are, in her account, mirror images of the same modern category error.

What is apophatic theology, as Armstrong describes it?

Apophatic or "negative" theology holds that God transcends all human language and categories, so only silence and practice — rather than doctrinal assertion — can approach the divine. Armstrong traces this tradition from ancient Greece through Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticism as a central current of pre-modern religious thought.