Armstrong’s Case for God

In recent years, we have seen a num­ber of books pub­lished that have made the case for athe­ism: Richard Dawk­in’s The God Delu­sion, Christo­pher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, Sam Har­ris’ Let­ter to a Chris­t­ian Nation, and Daniel Den­net­t’s Break­ing the Spell: Reli­gion as a Nat­ur­al Phe­nom­e­non. It was almost as if a dam had bro­ken, and sud­den­ly a voice that had­n’t been heard in some time, at least not in the US, was let loose. The books hit hard, one after anoth­er, and they made their point. And now Karen Arm­strong, who has writ­ten more than 20 books on Islam, Judaism and Chris­tian­i­ty, offers a reply. Her new book pub­lished this week, The Case for God: What Reli­gion Real­ly Means, takes a his­tor­i­cal look at God and con­cludes that we mod­erns (athe­ists, evan­gel­i­cals and the rest) are work­ing with a facile con­cep­tion of God. And then she sug­gests an alter­na­tive way of see­ing things. You can get a taste for her think­ing in this NPR inter­view con­duct­ed this week: Lis­ten with the play­er below, or via these links (MP3 — iTunes — Stream):