A History of God

Name: A History of God
Author: Karen Armstrong

A History of God is a work by Karen Armstrong (1993).

Core claims

Armstrong’s central intervention is not comparative theology but a demonstration that every “God” ever worshipped is a human artifact of the creative imagination — and that this fact, far from diminishing the divine, is precisely what the most sophisticated monotheists across all three Abrahamic traditions have always understood.
The book reveals that the so-called “death of God” in Western modernity was not the death of the divine but the collapse of a single, historically aberrant theological strategy: treating God as an empirically verifiable object — a strategy that mystics in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had warned against for centuries.
Armstrong quietly dismantles the secularist assumption that religion was imposed on a “primordially secular” human nature, reframing Homo sapiens as Homo religiosus and positioning modern secularism itself as an untested experimental condition whose psychological consequences remain unknown.

How does Armstrong’s claim that God is “a product of the creative imagination” compare to Jung’s formulation of the God-image as an autonomous archetypal structure in Answer to Job — and where do the two accounts fundamentally diverge on the question of human agency versus psychic autonomy?
Armstrong argues that modern secularism produces a “God-shaped hole” filled by fundamentalism, addiction, and anomie. How does this diagnosis map onto Gabor Maté’s framework in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, where the absence of meaning and attachment drives compulsive self-medication?
Armstrong identifies the Western theological habit of treating God as an empirical object as the precondition for the Enlightenment’s atheism. How does this parallel Edinger’s account in The Creation of Consciousness of the dangers of ego-Self identification, where the symbol collapses into the literal?