I’ve finally started reading the book that’s touted as the be-all and end-all of Sophisticated Theology™, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, by David Bentley Hart, published last year by Yale University Press. As you probably know if you’re a regular, this book has been touted by many religious people as the most definitive argument for God and most compelling refutation of New Atheism. The implication is that if you’re an atheist and haven’t read it, you can’t argue properly against religion—in fact, as Hart maintains, you’re deluding yourself as an atheist.

While the thought of reading yet another theology book makes my gorge rise, I figured I’d better read this one, if for no other reason than to have some minimal street cred in theology. But I am curious to see what arguments Hart adduces for God that differ from those of other theologians. (Hart, born in 1965, is described by Wikipedia as “an Eastern Orthodox theologian, philosopher, and cultural commentator.”)

I’ll be reacting to this book as I read it, so these are merely ober dicta as I go along. I’ll try to sum it up after I’ve finished.

I’m only 35 pages in, but it’s already clear that Hart in fact has little desire to provide evidence for God’s existence. In fact, he thinks that God’s existence is self-evident, and (à la Plantinga) says that our very ability to apprehend truth testifies to God’s existence, for natural selection alone could not have given us such abilities. The fact that we are often deceived by things, and have devised science as a way to prevent such deception, is not considered, nor is the fact that in many cases natural selection would have favored an accurate assessment of our environment.

Hart doesn’t think that one can adduce evidence for God in the way you can adduce evidence for fairies or other paranormal phenomenon, so he doesn’t regard the existence of God as an empirical hypothesis, as many of us do. Rather, evidence for God is basically logical and experiential; and so the New Atheists who equate God with fairies and the like are simply wrong. As Hart says (p. 34):

Evidence for or against the reality of God, if it is there, saturates every moment of the experience of existence, every employment of reason, every act of consciousness, every encounter with the world around us.

It seems that if our experience is saturated with evidence against the reality of god (say, if you’re a pediatric oncologist), that doesn’t count for Hart. I’m curious to see what he will say about the Achilles Heel of theism: the problem of evil, which he promises to address later.

What’s clear, though, is that Hart’s main intentions in the book are to give a characterization of God, and to show that this characterization holds for nearly all major religions and is not limited to Christianity. Further, he argues, this conception of God is one that is not only held currently by all major religions, but has been held by Christianity throughout its history. According to Hart, literalism, or the interpretation of Biblical events as historical, is a recent phenomenon that accompanied the rise of Fundamentalism about a century ago. (I disagree with him on this, having looked at a fair amount of writings by Church Fathers like Aquinas lately.)

Hart further argues that if you don’t hold his view of God, but remain an atheist, then you’re arguing against strawmen “old-guy-with-beard” conceptions that aren’t the best theology has to offer; and your arguments carry no weight. (More in a minute about whether such definitions are held by “regular” believers). It’s also clear that Hart despises New Atheists, and dismisses them by name (Dawkins, Stenger, Hitchens, and Grayling, among others) as attacking cartoon definitions of religion. There is a undertone of arrogance and dismissiveness in his prose (Hart does write well), which is off-putting to someone who has seen value in New Atheism. He also dismisses materialism as an unwarranted assumption of atheists, and will, I think, use the examples of “being, consciousness, and bliss” as immaterial phenomena that cannot be explained or even understood by science, and hence give evidence for God. Or so he hints in the first chapter.

So what is Hart’s take on God? Here’s the definition he synthesizes and sees as part of all major faiths (pp. 30-31):

To speak of “God” properly, then—to use the word in a sense consonant with the teachings of Orthodox Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, Baháí, a great deal of antique paganism, and so forth—is to speak of the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things. God so understood is not something poised over against the universe, in addition to it, nor is he the universe itself. He is not a “being,” at least not in the way that a tree, a shoemaker, or a god is a being; he is not one more object in the inventory of things that are, or any sort of discrete object at all. Rather, all things that exist receive their being continuously from him, who is the infinite wellspring of all that is, in whom (to use the language of the Christian scriptures) all things live and move and have their being. In one sense he is “beyond being,” if by “being” one means the totality of discrete, finite things. In another sense he is “being itself,” in that he is the inexhaustible source of all reality, the absolute upon which the contingent is always utterly dependent, the unity and simplicity that underlies and sustains the diversity of finite and composite things. Infinite being, infinite consciousness, infinite bliss, from whom we are, by whom we know and are known, and in whom we find our only true comprehension.

Well, parts of that are opaque to me, particularly the part about God sustaining all things, but so be it. My question is this: even if this is a syncretic conception of God, how did all those religions arrive at this unanimity? What reasons did they use did to arrive at a God who omniscient, omnipotent, and a source of bliss? Hart punts a bit on this (pp. 30-31):

All the great theistic traditions agree that God, understood in this proper sense, is essentially beyond finite comprehension; hence much of the language used of him is negative in form and has been reached only by a logical process of those qualities of fine reality that make it insufficient to account for its own existence. All agree as well, however, that he can genuinely be known: that is, reasoned toward, intimately encountered, directly experienced with a fullness surpassng mere conceptual comprehension.

This baffles me. If God is beyond comprehension, not subject to any kind of empirical investigation, how can he be “known” and “reasoned toward”? Can logic and reason alone, even when combined with revelation, give us a solid view of God? For surely there are many who have revelatory experiences of God that differ from Hart’s view. And if only reason and not verified empirical observation is in play, how do we know that god is omniscient or omnipotent? How do we know, in fact, that he is not a being, since many people experience him that way: as a person to whom one can pray, an entity that is anthropormorphic—a humanlike mind without a body?

Hart’s response is that we need to rely on the consensus not of “average” believers, but of theologians, who somehow have the wisdom to winnow the true God from the bearded one. But that’s not the case, for many other theologians see God differently from Hart. Here, for example, are Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne, whom I quoted in a recent post about whether God is a bodiless person:

“What he [Daniel Dennett] calls an “anthropomorphic” God, furthermore, is precisely what traditional Christians believe in—a god who is a person, the sort of being who is capable of knowledge, who has aims and ends, and who can and in fact does act on what he knows in such a way as to try to accomplish those aims.” (Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, p. 11) I take the proposition ‘God exists’ (and the equivalent proposition ‘There is a God’) to be logically equivalent to “there exists necessarily a person without a body (i.e. a spirit) who necessarily is eternal, perfectly free, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, and the creator of all things.’ I use ‘God’ as the name of the person picked out by this description.” (Swinburne, Existence of God p. 7) “That God is a person, yet one without a body, seems the most elementary claim of theism. It is by being told this or something that entails this (e.g., that God always listens to and sometimes grants us our prayers, he has plans for us, he forgives our sins, but he does not have a body) that young children are introduced to the concept of God.” (Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism, p. 101)

Now Plantinga and Swinburne may also sign on to all the characteristics given above, but they also have add-ons about God’s characteristics (how do they know that from reason and revelation alone?), and about his goodness. The fact is that there is not the consensus God that Hart sees, for even if he’s distilled a nucleus from other religions (some of which seems opaque), those other faiths have further beliefs about God that are incompatible, and probably rejected by Hart. What about Jesus, about the Resurrection, Allah’s dictations to Muhammad, about Xenu, about Moroni and the Golden Plates? Are those add-ons mere myths without historical veracity, and, since they’re arrived at in the same way Hart arrives at his conception of God, why do they conflict? Do we perceive their “truth” the same way we perceive the true nature of God? After all, many people “sense” Jesus the way Hart senses God.

Finally, as pointed out by Isaac Chotiner in The New Republic, these characteristics of God are not those seen by the “average” believer:

I cannot speak for everyone, of course, and the amount of time I have spent with deeply religious people (Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims) is relatively limited. But I have talked somewhat extensively with people in each of these religions and not a single one of them has ever described his or her belief in God in anything like these terms. As Jerry Coyne puts it in response to Linker, “Yes, it turns out that the 99% of believers who see God as an anthropomorphic being are wrong, and only the theologians—that is, some theologians—truly know what God is.”

But to Hart, what the average believer thinks about God is irrelevant. (So much for the New Atheists, whose arguments are largely aimed at those people, and have been, contra Hart’s claim, remarkably effective at dispelling faith.) For Hart sees the relationship between the average believer and the theologian in the same way that he sees the relationship between the average layperson who’s interested in science and the professional scientist. The layperson has an imperfect—and sometimes erroneous—idea of what scientists really say, and likewise the average believer has an imperfect notion of what God really is, for it is the theologians who have to work that out, just as scientists must work out the facts of biology, physics, and so on.

The problem with this argument is that scientists have the tools and the system for sussing out the truths about nature: it’s the toolkit of reason, a background in the field, and the endemic cross-checking of data with other scientists and testing of hypotheses against nature, as well as the readiness to discard those hypotheses that don’t comport with data.

In contrast, theologians have no tools for finding out about the true nature of the divine except some training in philosophy and—sometimes—a decent ability to write. Theologians like Aquinas believed in all sorts of historical phenomena from the Bible, like Paradise and Adam, and they have the same tools as does Hart, who sees Aquinas as one of the greatest of Christian philosophers. Aquinas also believed in angels, and devoted a huge section of the Summa Theologica to figuring out what angels were like, how many there were, what they wanted, and how they moved about. All that is precisely the same brand of nonsense that Hart attributes to the New Atheists. Hart’s claim that Biblical literalism began in the last 120 years with Fundamentalism is not supported by the beliefs of early church fathers. Yes, they sometimes emphasized that Scripture should be read metaphorically as well as literally, but if there was a conflict, people like Aquinas and Augustine always took the literal description as bedrock.

I am writing this just to distill and collect my own thoughts as I read this book. I am clearly not reading it as a religionist, but neither am I automatically rejecting everything that Hart says. Nevertheless, I am reading the book critically, and much of what he maintains is, I think, in conflict with the history of theology. And I say that in full realization that Hart knows a lot more about theology than I do.

In the end, of course, even if atheists finally comprehend the Sophisticated Notion of God adumbrated by Hart, we have to ask ourselves why we should think that this God exists. The Argument from Self Evidence, which resembles that of Plantinga, will not convince many of us, even though Hart maintains that atheism is even more of a delusion than theism.

I am of course interested in getting readers’ takes on Hart’s view of God, especially if they’ve read his book.