An artist's rendering of Joseph Smith's first vision

Karen Armstrong, a popular historian of religion whose bestselling A History of God brought her to national prominence in 1993, is back in the news. Her new book, The Case for God, revisits some familiar  territory in a stimulating survey of Western religious history, but this time Armstrong packages her message in an admonition to both conservative Christians and bellicose atheists, mutual antagonists in the cultural skirmishes over religion.  The Wall Street Journal recently commissioned Armstrong and Richard Dawkins, the most outspoken of the new atheists, to respond to the question, “Where does evolution leave God?” (one wonders why they did not also include an informed representative of conservative religion in their symposium).  The two answers were published together, and they make a most interesting study in contrast. Armstrong uses the platform to reprise the argument of her new book:

In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call “God” is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart. …  Religion was not supposed to provide explanations that lay within the competence of reason but to help us live creatively with realities for which there are no easy solutions and find an interior haven of peace; today, however, many have opted for unsustainable certainty instead.

I object to Armstrong’s implication that an earlier, purer form of monotheism unproblematically accommodated scientific hypotheses about the nature of the universe.  The scientific way of knowing is a modern intellectual artifact, and ancient religious worldviews did not have to contend with its claims. I share the criticism of Ross Douthat, in his Times review of the book, that Armstrong’s history is selective and skewed toward her preferred version of liberal modern spirituality.  She described this preferred theology in her earlier History of God as she narrates her journey away from orthodox Catholicism:

Other rabbis, priests and Sufis would have taken me to task for assuming that God was—in any sense—a reality “out there”; they would have warned me not to expect to experience him as an objective fact that could be discovered by the ordinary process of rational thought. They would have told me that in an important sense God was a prophet of the creative imagination, like the poetry and music that I found so inspiring.  A few highly respected monothesist would have told me quietly and firmly that God did not really exist—and yet that “he” was the most important reality in the world.

The two passages are closely similar, both banishing certainty and reason from the realm of religion and enthroning intuition and creative self-exploration in their stead. If Armstrong is perhaps guilty of reading her personal views into the historical record—of “discovering” exactly what she hoped to find—then she is no worse than many of us, I suspect. Most religious traditions look to history for legitimacy in some way, and Armstrong’s “restoration” of a pure, primitive theology follows, ironically, the logic of the same Christian denominational distinctions she dismisses as so much propositional window dressing.

Whether or not the pristine foundations of monotheism were seduced by modernity to a vulgar scientism, Armstrong’s radically abstracted understanding of God will resonate with many of her readers—the same educated elite who will encounter her  book in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.  For most American believers, though—my own Mormon community included—an amalgam of symbol and intuition  will fail to satisfy the human longing for an emotional relationship with a personal Heavenly Father.

There is only a small core of beliefs that Mormons must affirm (although of course there is a much larger range of Mormon doctrine),  and the first of those propositions is the reality of God.  Most Mormons hold dear the knowledge of a Heavenly Father who is intimately aware of their joys and difficulties, who lovingly metes out tender mercies and trials all of which will ultimately work together for their eternal good.  The message that most Mormons draw from their foundational narrative, Joseph Smith’s first vision, is that God hears personal prayers and answers them personally.  Mormons are unapologetic about the literalness of their belief, and they are comfortable with—even hungry for—certainty in their religious convictions. In a recent Pew Forum survey of the American religious landscape, 90% of Mormons surveyed said that their belief in God was “absolutely certain”—among the very highest levels of certainty of any religious group. (Evangelical Christians and Jehovah’s Witnesses also reported high levels of certainty.)

Of course, there are also Mormons who take a more distanced view of God’s hand in their lives, or whose faith takes a less certain form. And there are drawbacks to a culture of certainty, just as there can be uncomfortable implications to the notion of a personal God.  But the knowledge of a God “out there,” really out there, is a cornerstone of Mormon conviction—and of ordinary religious experience generally. If Ms Armstrong succeeds in brokering a cultural truce by radically diminishing the scope of religious claims, she will do so only by excluding the experience of ordinary believers, with their ordinary processes of feeling and discovery.  They will find their own consolation.