A History of God

Armstrong, a former nun turned historian of religion, traces four thousand years of the idea of a single God through Judaism, Christianity and Islam — and argues that the idea has never held still. Her subject is not whether God exists but what successive generations have meant by the word: a tribal deity becomes a universal creator, the philosophers’ abstract First Cause competes with the mystics’ experienced presence, and each era’s God turns out to answer that era’s questions. The implication she draws is that conceptions of God which stop being useful get quietly replaced, and that the modern Western difficulty with the word may be a failure of one particular conception rather than of religion as such.

Why it’s on the list: Li Lu’s first section is about how human beings came to think the way they do — evolution, civilisation, the history of knowledge. Religion is the largest and longest-running instance of that, and Armstrong treats it as intellectual history rather than apologetics, which is what earns it a place next to Popper and Morris.

Where I saw it: On Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, the 137-entry Himalaya Capital bibliography, in its first section — Science, Philosophy, Evolution, History of Human Civilization, Human History. Kyle saved the list as two X posts that photographed only the value-investing section; this entry came out of the source PDF.

Connections

• Religion — treated here as a 4,000-year intellectual history rather than a set of claims to accept or reject.
• Christianity — one of the three traditions traced.
• Philosophy — the strand Armstrong keeps setting against mysticism as rival routes to the same word.
• History — the method: ideas dated, placed, and shown changing.
• Li Lu · Himalaya Capital — the curator and the bibliography.