A bold and persuasive case for abandoning old religions and still
believing in God
In this book, Mark Johnston argues that God needs to be saved not only
from the distortions of the "undergraduate atheists" (Richard Dawkins,
Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris) but, more importantly, from the
idolatrous tendencies of religion itself. Each monotheistic religion has
its characteristic ways of domesticating True Divinity, of taming God's
demands so that they do not radically threaten our self-love and false
righteousness. Turning the monotheistic critique of idolatry on the
monotheisms themselves, Johnston shows that much in these traditions
must be condemned as false and spiritually debilitating.
A central claim of the book is that supernaturalism is idolatry. If
this is right, everything changes; we cannot place our salvation in
jeopardy by tying it essentially to the supernatural cosmologies of the
ancient Near East. Remarkably, Johnston rehabilitates the ideas of the
Fall and of salvation within a naturalistic framework; he then presents
a conception of God that both resists idolatry and is wholly consistent
with the deliverances of the natural sciences.
Princeton University Press is publishing Saving God in conjunction
with Johnston's forthcoming book Surviving Death, which takes up the
crux of supernaturalist belief, namely, the belief in life after death.
