This Just Doesn’t Ring True

Karen Armstrong is a prolific writer about religion, and stakes out a conciliatory position in contemporary debates between "new" atheists and theists. I have not read any of her books and I don’t claim any expertise on the subject matter! But nonetheless her take on religious history as presented in this op-ed piece bothered me. Perhaps someone more familiar with her work and/or with history can set me straight.

Here are excerpts:

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…

But by the end of the 17th century, instead of looking through the symbol to "the God beyond God," Christians were transforming it into hard fact. Sir Isaac Newton had claimed that his cosmic system proved beyond doubt the existence of an intelligent, omniscient and omnipotent creator……it was not long before other scientists were able to dispense with the God-hypothesis and, finally, Darwin showed that there could be no proof for God's existence. This would not have been a disaster had not Christians become so dependent upon their scientific religion that they had lost the older habits of thought and were left without other resource.

Symbolism was essential to premodern religion, because it was only possible to speak about the ultimate reality—God, Tao, Brahman or Nirvana—analogically, since it lay beyond the reach of words…. This remained standard practice in the West until the 17th century…

Now I think that if one questioned the literal truth of the Bible in Europe in the centuries before Newton you would have been vulnerable to exile, jail, torture or death. I don't doubt that a number of theologians were subtle enough to avoid appearing to question literal truth while spinning out a an essentially symbolic interpretation of God and the Bible, but this fact isn’t enough to assert something about “standard practice in the West.”

What is she talking about?

UPDATE: 7 December 2009
In this interview on NPR (hat tip Thomas J McFarlane), Armstrong, after discussing the Descartes’ and Newton’s vision of God and universe says:

Well, once this scientific religion caught hold, people started to read the Bible in a literal manner, where they never had before. Nobody before the 17th, 18th century understood the first chapter of Genesis as a literal account of the origins of life. ….

And:

St. Augustine had made it quite clear, too, in the Christian world, that if a biblical text contradicted Scripture, that text must be re-interpreted and given an allegorical interpretation. And that remained the practice of the church right up until the 16th century.

And:

Nobody expected literal proof from Scripture, and that's whether you look in the Jewish world, people like Maimonides (ph); in the Muslim world, people like Abu Sina or Al-Ghazali; or in the Christian world with Thomas Aquinas.

I’m sorry. I understand the point she’s trying to make. She wants to argue that scientific understanding created fertile ground for a reactionary fundamentalism as well as for atheism. However, I still don’t buy this historical analysis implying there was some golden era of gentle allegorical interpretation of God as the ineffable Brahman during Europe’s dark ages (sorry for the sarcasm).

I don’t think you can cherry pick a few theologians and say this allegorical understanding of God and scripture was the pre-17th century “standard of practice”. And may I say using the creation story in Genesis as your example is far too easy – I’d like to hear an argument saying the New Testament miracles, including the resurrection of Christ, were taken as allegorical.

Maybe Armstrong makes a more persuasive case in her book – I guess I’ll have to read it now!? (Maybe overgeneralizations in the op-ed and interviews are in fact a deviously effective marketing strategy to sell the book).