‘The Case for God: What Religion Really Means’
by Karen Armstrong, Bodley Head 2009, 376 pp

Visiting the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence half a dozen years ago my daughter, whose eight years of life had been spent in China, asked her mother who the guy hanging on the cross was. To the brief explanation that followed Tian Tian reacted with the genuine shock of one from whose eyes the scales have fallen, revealing the banality of the world: “God was a man!!!???” We took this at the time as intuitive, pre-teen feminism (Why not a woman, an Earth Mother figure?) Recently recalling the event, Tian Tian clarified that, on the contrary, her remark was ungendered: what boggled her mind was the thought that God could begin to resemble, let alone be, anything so idiotic as a human being. Before she could read more than a handful of English sentences, she had grasped an essential thread of Karen Armstrong’s theology; and, as we shall see, that almost certainly had much to do with growing up in China—and not just because of the relative dearth of Christian icons there.

It was only after starting this notebook that I googled my old London University professor, Peter Winch, and discovered from Wikipedia that he died back in 1996, at the relatively early age of 71.

Here’s a familiar topic: how much of what we are, our character, behaviour, interests and desires, comes from nature (construed as raw genetic material) and how much from nurture (environment, culture, education etc?) Supposing some very clever behavioural scientist came up with the answer: 62.4 per cent nature, 37.6 per cent nurture. How could this not be fatuous (whether asserted as a human universal or applied to a single individual?)