Author Barbara Ehrenreich recently wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about a mystical moment she had when young. Dead tired from skiing and probably hypoglycemic, she saw the world “flame into life,” and was suddenly infused with the furious beauty of the world. Although an atheist, Ehrenreich suggested that she had experienced something truly beyond the present ken of science, but perhaps something that science might one day illuminate.

But to Times columnist Ross Douthat, an observant Catholic, that kind of talk is a no-no, for it still makes God amenable to scientific inquiry. In Douthat’s recent piece, “How to study the numinous,” he therefore tells us where Ehrenreich went wrong. Douthat’s argument draws heavily on David Bentley Hart’s new book, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. That book has been heavily touted as the one text that atheists must confront if they’re to address the most serious and irrefutable arguments for God.

I’ve just finished Hart’s book, and it’s hardly a compelling argument for God. It is in fact a series of recycled “proofs” of God couched in fancy and often arrogant language. Hart claims repeatedly that his book was not meant to give evidence for God, but merely to distill the common essence of God shared by all major faiths. And Hart claims that such an essence can truly be found: It’s God as a transcendent and largely ineffable Ground of All Being, above all things yet immanent in them. Nor is this Tillich-ian deity in any way like a person, although Hart calls it a “he” and argues that it’s capable of anthropomorphic feelings like love. But despite his disclaimer, Hart is indeed deeply concerned with giving evidence for God. He brings up the cosmological argument (something that is itself uncaused had to get the universe started) as well as the existence of things like consciousness, rationality, and our love of beauty—all things that, argues Hart, could never be explained by naturalism. Indeed, at times Hart seems to claim that beauty, consciousness, and rationality are God, a tactic that completely immunizes his views from disproof. I could just as well claim that God is the sense of accomplishment I get when writing a piece like this, or the enjoyment I derive from a good Havana cigar.

Hart’s book, then, is a sophisticated version of old God-of-the-Gaps arguments, and it’s gained traction because of two things: Hart’s exceedingly rarified notion of God (one shared by almost no believers but admired because it can’t be refuted); and his well-written—and sometimes pedantic—reiteration of shopworn arguments about phenomena that supposedly elude science, and can hence be peddled to a new generation of believers as signs of God. Further, Hart doesn’t argue for the existence of his own God (he’s an Eastern Orthodox Christian), so we are stymied in understanding why he holds the faith he does. He’s also cagey when dealing with his personal beliefs: When it comes time to tell us what he thinks about miracles, for example, he simply “draws the veil of authorial discretion” in front of his thoughts.

But back to Douthat. Hart’s influence on him is clear in the following dismissal of science’s attempts to understand religious phenomena: