Although David Bentley Hart claims, in his book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, that he isn’t adducing evidence for God, that’s in fact what he spends most of his time doing. That evidence includes Why is There Something Instead of Nothing, the scientifically inexplicable fact of consciousness as well as of our power to reason, the effectiveness of mathematics, and our ability to experience beauty.

Those are old arguments, but I’ll give an example of one that’s not often used. Here is Hart explaining why humans’ search for truth about the universe constitutes evidence for God. It’s from pp. 233-234 of his book, and the logic and style, as well as the show-offy foreign phrases and arcane references to other faiths, are absolutely typical of the book.

Remember, this is the book that both Damon Linker and Ross Douthat see as The Best Argument for God. You’re not a credible atheist unless you can not only fathom this palaver, but answer it. Note that in the argument below, Hart isn’t just talking about the search for truth about God, but for truth in general:

The essential truth to which Lonergan’s argument points is that the very search for truth is implicitly a search for God (properly defined, that is). As the mind moves toward an ever more comprehensive capacious, and “supereminent” grasp of reality, it necessarily moves toward an ideal level of reality at which intelligibility and intelligence are no longer distinguishable concepts. It seems to me we all really know this in some sense: that we assume that the human mind can be a true mirror of objective reality because we assume that objective reality is already a mirror of mind. No other comportment toward truth as a desirable end is existentially possible. The ascent toward ever greater knowledge is, if only tacitly and secretly and contre coeur, an ascent toward an ultimate encounter with limitless consciousness, limitless reason, a transcendent reality where being and knowledge are always one and the same, and so inalienable from each other. To believe that being is inexhaustibly intelligible is to believe also—whether one wishes to acknowledge it or not—that reality emanates from an inexhaustible intelligence: in the words of the Shevanashvatara Upanishad, “pure consciousness, omnipresent, omniscient, the creator of time.”

See? Now that’s Sophisticated Theology™, for it shows that even atheists scientists are providing evidence for God. After all, that’s what it means when we find out stuff!

Hart quotes the Upanishads, but I’ll quote Professor Ceiling Cat: “Hart’s argument is good only for growing flowers.”

I’m not turning in my atheist card yet, and I bet reader Sastra has a field day with this one!