Category: apologetics

A universe fine-tuned for humans?

May 30, 2014 • 10:08 am

A few days ago I put up a video by Keith “Mr. Deity” Dalton, decrying a really insane piece by Jewish apologist Dennis Prager explaining why the story of Noah’s Ark was “one of the most moral stories ever told.” (There was also a funny video of Bill Maher’s take on The Great Flood.)

Prager’s piece included this gem:

Q: Why did God destroy animals as well?

A: In the biblical worldview, the purpose of all creation is to benefit man. This anthropocentric view of nature, and indeed of the whole universe, is completely at odds with the current secular idealization of nature. This secular view posits that nature has its own intrinsic meaning and purpose, independent of man.

All of creation, in the biblical view, was to ultimately prepare the way for the creation of man. But one does not need the Bible alone to hold this view. A purely scientific reading of the universe is in keeping with this view. Everything — every natural and physical law — is exquisitely tuned to produce life, and ultimately man, on earth.

What struck me was the argument for “fine-tuning” has now been turned from the production of life to the production of “man.” Yet the physical constants supposedly necessary to produce life are sufficient to produce humans as well: God clearly required no additional “fine-tuning”—even if you accept that fallacious argument—to allow for humans than to allow for, say, fungi and squirrels.

Over at the creationist website Evolution News and Views (where they don’t allow any comments), the equally batty David Klinghoffer, another Jewish apologist, lauds Prager’s ridiculous piece, and denigrates me at the same time (that’s usual for Klinghoffer, who, bereft of arguments for Intelligent Design, spends his time obsessing over my character and my criticisms of ID). Here’s a screenshot of part of his comment:

Screen shot 2014-05-30 at 7.42.28 AM

Exactly right???? Really? Even if the universe were fine-tuned for life (and I don’t think for a minute it was), how, my dear Mr. Klinghoffer, can you distinguish God’s fine-tuning the universe for life versus fine-tuning it for human life? After all, the physical constants required for both kinds of tuning are identical!  

The fact that he and others make this argument is a clear sign that their arguments are based not on science but on religion. For it is only scripture and not science that argues that humans are special creatures on this planet. The phrase “the fine-tuning of the cosmos specifically for human life” gives away the religious roots of intelligent design—roots that people like Klinghoffer repeatedly deny.

And, as I’ve argued before, you can’t sensibly make the argument that the evolution of humans or human-like creatures was inevitable. Even given determinism, if mutations are inherently nondeterministic phenomena, and evolution depends, as it does, on what mutations appear, then we can’t say that the appearance of any specific species or morphology was inevitable.

Have a look at the trailer given below for the upcoming creationist movie “Privileged Species” touted by Klinghoffer. Notice that there is not one bit of evidence in this goddamned trailer that humans, as opposed to any other oxygen-using species, are “privileged.” The trailer emphasizes oxygen, which is of course a requirement for animal life. But that oxygen was produced by the photosynthesis of plants, not by God. And since hummingbirds have a higher per gram requirement for oxygen than humans, I conclude that if the Earth was was fine-tuned for life, the ultimate aim of God’s machinations was hummingbirds, the apotheosis of creation.

The trailer is narrated by Michael Denton, described as “geneticist and senior fellow, Discovery Institute.”

A peeved believer argues that science arose from Christianity

April 30, 2014 • 8:31 am

Yesterday reader “Py” wrote in trying to add a comment to an old post, “Did Christianity (and other religions) promote the rise of science?” Here’s the comment:

I say without Christianity, there’ll be no modern science. An incomplete list of Christian Scientists (i’ve got a link to 80+ more, all YECs) vs. An incomplete list of atheist scientists.

The atheist front is quite lacking.

I wonder if this’ll get posted or strangely moderated away like my other posts. So much for truth huh?

Curiously, checking back through comments using “Py”‘s email address and IP number, I find no comment that he/she has tried to make before. But the sheer ignorance of the comment above mandates that this will be the last one. I’d administer a swift corrective to Py, but I’m way too busy today and thought that the readers might be able to help. Check out those lists.

By the way, the notion that modern science arose in the West beginning in late medieval times (a dubious claim anyway) is made for both empirical and emotional reasons. The empirical claim is that the Church promoted reason (though founding universities, encouraging people to find the hand of God in Nature) in a way that helped give birth to science. The emotional reason is because religious people, seeing how fast science has outstripped religion in understanding the universe, want to claim some credit for science. The emotional reason is clearly true, but I won’t adjudicate the first claim, for I’m not an expert in the history of science. Let me just say that the arguments of people like Rodney Stark (and other theists) that Christianity was pivotal in the rise of modern science have been contested by other scholars.

What is indubitably true is that the proportion of atheist scientists is ten times higher than the proportion of atheist nonscientists, at least in America. And the great majority of accomplished scientists in the U.S. are now atheists: only 7% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences, for instance, accept a personal God–while the proportion of the American public that does so is 80% or higher. I believe the figures are similar for members of Britain’s Royal Society.  So whatever held true in the past, when everyone was religious, holds no longer.

Christianity can claim credit for science if they want, but it’s not much to brag about. Certainly science would have arisen without that faith.

 

 

David Bentley Hart responds (poorly and arrogantly) to Adam Gopnik on God

April 24, 2014 • 6:39 am

Somehow, in my evening perusal of the Internet, I came across a piece in The American Conservative by Rod Dreher, religionist, former Templeton flack (he ran the “Big Questions” site for a while), and author of some of the most mean-spirited pieces I’ve seen. (In one piece, for example, which has since disappeared from the Templeton site but remains in snippets on my site, he rebukes Chrisopher Hitchens for being blind to Jesus while he, Hitchens, was dying of cancer.) Unable to control my anger, I called Dreher a “contemptible little worm” for that piece. And, apparently, he remains an annelid.

At any rate, Dreher was touting a new column by David Bentley Hart called “Gods and Gopniks” published in the religious journal First Things. As you may remember, Adam Gopnik recently published a critique of Sophisticated Theology™ at the New Yorker called “Bigger than Phil,” an analysis of New Atheist arguments and the theological response. I thought Gopnik’s piece was pretty good, but, in a post on this site that got a surprising number of comments, faulted Adam for his “belief in belief” and his notion that we atheists are, at bottom, sort of religious because we have emotions and humanity and—here he singled me out—have affection for things like cats and Motown songs.  Gopnik considered such affections a form of “irrationality” equivalent to that promoted by religion, thus discerning common ground between belief and non-belief. But Gopnik failed to discern the huge difference between ailurophilia and religiosity. Cats may think they’re gods, but we don’t see them as divine.

Gopnik did, however, call out Hart for his lack of specificity and failure to engage with religion as it is practiced by normal humans. Gopnik used Mel Brook’s analogy, as the “2,000 year old man,” of worshiping a guy named “Phil” as an explanation of the universe:

As the explanations [for why God resides in the gaps of scientific understanding] get more desperately minute, the apologies get ever vaster. David Bentley Hart’s recent “The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss” (Yale) doesn’t even attempt to make God the unmoved mover, the Big Banger who got the party started; instead, it roots the proof of his existence in the existence of the universe itself. Since you can explain the universe only by means of some other bit of the universe, why is there a universe (or many of them)? The answer to this unanswerable question is God. He stands outside everything, “the infinite to which nothing can add and from which nothing can subtract,” the ultimate ground of being. This notion, maximalist in conception, is minimalist in effect. Something that much bigger than Phil is so remote from Phil’s problems that he might as well not be there for Phil at all. This God is obviously not the God who makes rules about frying bacon or puts harps in the hands of angels. A God who communicates with no one and causes nothing seems a surprisingly trivial acquisition for cosmology—the dinner guest legendary for his wit who spends the meal mumbling with his mouth full.

Well you can imagine how that would get Hart’s knickers in such a twist, and it was published in such a widely-read magazine! Hart couldn’t let it stand, and so has answered.

But Hart’s answer is lame, asserting merely that Gopnik didn’t understand his argument, that Adam is not a scholar (the implication is “he’s not as serious as I am”), that modern atheism is devoid of content, and that no discourse is possible between believers and nonbelievers. By “discourse,” of course, Hart means “Discourse centered on my own arguments.”

It’s hard to convey how arrogant Hart’s piece really is. You must read it to get the full effect of his spleen and pomposity. Above all, Gopnik is a man who tries to be measured, and even when promoting non-belief (something he doesn’t often do), he tries to be fair—and even took a swing at atheists like me. Gopnik could never be described as mean-spirited. But Hart’s response is simply to dismiss the seriousness of Gopnik’s argument because Gopnik is a mere—journalist! 

Hart begins with what he considers a bon mot, but is really just nasty. He’s trying to come off as humorous, but, as he often did in his book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, comes off as a puffed-up and pompous windbag, full of deepities as substantive as cotton candy. Here he is on Gopnik:

Journalism is the art of translating abysmal ignorance into execrable prose. At least, that is its purest and most minimal essence. There are, of course, practitioners of the trade who possess talents of a higher order—the rare ability, say, to produce complex sentences and coherent paragraphs—and they tend to occupy the more elevated caste of “intellectual journalists.” These, however, are rather like “whores with hearts of gold”: more misty figments of tender fantasy than concrete objects of empirical experience. Most journalism of ideas is little more than a form of empty garrulousness, incessant gossip about half-heard rumors and half-formed opinions, an intense specialization in diffuse generalizations. It is something we all do at social gatherings—creating ephemeral connections with strangers by chattering vacuously about things of which we know nothing—miraculously transformed into a vocation. . . Still, it seems fair to me to note that what a journalist does for a living does not, in itself, require him or her to be a scholar, an artist, a philosopher, or even particularly good at sorting through abstract ideas. And, really, it is hard both to meet a regular deadline and also to pause long enough to learn anything new, or waste much time even following one’s own arguments.

(Please note that Dreher is also a journalist! Note also that Christopher Hitchens described himself as a journalist.)

Now what is the point of that, except to impugn Gopnik’s credentials from the outset? It’s mean-spirited, and in fact it’s wrong. Gopnik can be quite thoughtful at times; what Hart is doing here is acting like a lawyer, going after Gopnik for irrelevant reasons simply because they’re on opposite sides and Hart wants to win. 

Before getting down to his own defense, such as it is, Hart bemoans the lack of serious discourse in modern arguments about belief vs. non-belief. As we hear so often, he decries the lack of Serious Modern Atheists compared to our supposedly lugubrious predecessors like Camus and Sartre (but what about Russell and Mencken? Was Mencken more “serious” than Sam Harris or Dawkins?).

Hart:

Simply said, we have reached a moment in Western history when, despite all appearances, no meaningful public debate over belief and unbelief is possible. Not only do convinced secularists no longer understand what the issue is; they are incapable of even suspecting that they do not understand, or of caring whether they do.

Which he continues at the end:

Nothing is happening here. The conversation has never begun. The current vogue in atheism is probably reducible to three rather sordidly ordinary realities: the mechanistic metaphysics inherited from the seventeenth century, the banal voluntarism that is the inevitable concomitant of late capitalist consumerism, and the quiet fascism of Western cultural supremacism (that is, the assumption that all cultures that do not consent to the late modern Western vision of reality are merely retrograde, unenlightened, and in need of intellectual correction and many more Blu-ray players). Everything else is idle chatter—and we live in an age of idle chatter. 

. . . What I find so dismal about Gopnik’s article is the thought that it represents not the worst of popular secularist thinking, but the best. Principled unbelief was once a philosophical passion and moral adventure, with which it was worthwhile to contend. Now, perhaps, it is only so much bad intellectual journalism, which is to say, gossip, fashion, theatrics, trifling prejudice.

This is not an argument; it’s a grumpy old man telling kids like Gopnik to get off his lawn, and longing for an age that never existed—an age when atheism was far more “serious” than it is now.

In fact, Hart’s real defense against Gopnik is both brief and thin. In essence, it’s this:

Excuse the sigh of vexation; I cannot help it. Setting aside the nonsense about desperately minute explanations, which cannot possibly be relevant to any argument of mine, the God described in my book is the creator of everything, who communicates with all persons in a constant and general way, and with many individuals in an episodic and special way. Whatever originality I might claim for certain aspects of my argument, its metaphysical content is entirely and ecstatically derivative: pure “classical theism,” as found in the Cappadocians, Augustine, Denys, Thomas Aquinas, Ibn Sina, Mulla Sadra, Ibn Arabi, Shankara, Ramanuja, Philo, Moses Maimonides . . . well, basically, just about every significant theistic philosopher in human history. (Not to get too recherché here, but one can find most of it in the Roman Catholic catechism.)

Well, excuse me, but that’s a bit of a distortion, for I’ve published quotes over the last week showing what Hart considers God, and it’s hardly a God who communicates with “all persons” constantly (perhaps Hart means that God is there in the beauty and rationality and consciousness we all have and perceive, but that we stupid atheists can’t perceive it), and “many individuals in an episodic and special way.” What Hart means by the latter is opaque to me, especially because he refuses to say what he thinks about miracles. The kernel of Hart’s argument, which Gopnik did discern (Hart has the temerity of claiming that Gopnik didn’t read his book), is that the essence of God, distilled from all religions, is that of an ineffable Ground of Being that doesn’t have any anthropomorphic traits. (If that’s true, how does he “communicate in an episodic and special way”? Isn’t communication of that sort a human quality?) What Hart pushed in his book was not “classical theism,” but deism, or rather pantheism.

And even if we take that as Hart’s only message, do we need to waste our time debating it as the “proper conversation” about religion and atheism? Frankly, if Hart wants to find a common essence of God in all faiths (and, not being acquainted with all the world’s religions, I’m not sure that he has), more power to him. That doesn’t get us very far for one reason: all the world’s religions also have add ons to that abstract Ground of Being, and that includes theologians like Aquinas, Augustine, Whitehead, and Alvin Plantinga (sensus divinitatis, anyone?). That is what Gopnik was harping about in his piece.

If we’re going to engage belief, we should engage it as it’s practiced, and Hart’s “essence of god” is only a tiny fraction of what believers (including theologians) take to be true.  Even Hart himself believes more: he’s an Eastern Orthodox Christian, and that means he accepts a lot more than the Ground of Being. But what that is he doesn’t say.

I see no point in arguing with Hart’s pantheism, for it’s like trying, as they say, to nail Jell-O to the wall. If we’re going to engage with belief, let’s engage with belief as it is believed, including the various Gods with their add-ons like the resurrectd Jesus, the Trinity, the strictures of the Qur’an, the reincarnation of Buddhism, the sequestration of menstruating women in Orthodox Judaism, the strictures against gays in Islam, and so on ad infinitum. Is that not a serious endeavor? Believe me, those are the beliefs worthy of engagement because those are the beliefs that have real consequences in our world. The battle against religion is not a rarified argument over sherry about a Ground of Being.

Note, too, Hart’s reference to the Roman Catholic catechism, and how that also contains his God. But is he kidding? Not only is that Catechism pure theism, with lots of factual assertions, but it hardly paints the picture of God as a ground of being (have a look at the catechism here.) I’d accuse Hart of changing his argument, but he’ll just claim that I didn’t understand him in the first place.

Finally, Hart fulminates against materialism, giving a list of scientists who were also religious. The point of this eludes me, since many of those scientists lived in a time when nearly everyone was religious, and today the majority of good scientists are simply garden-variety atheists. To go after materialism, Hart first quotes Gopnik’s perfectly reasonable claim:

“[Unbelievers have] a monopoly on legitimate forms of knowledge about the natural world. They have this monopoly for the same reason that computer manufacturers have an edge over crystal-ball makers. . . . We know that men were not invented . . .; that the earth is not the center of the universe . . .; and that, in the billions of years of the universe’s existence, there is no evidence of a single miraculous intercession with the laws of nature. We need not imagine that there’s no Heaven; we know that there is none, and we will search for angels forever in vain.”

and then Hart responds in this ugly way:

Did Gopnik bother to read what he was writing there? I ask only because it is so colossally silly. If my dog were to utter such words, I should be deeply disappointed in my dog’s powers of reasoning. If my salad at lunch were suddenly to deliver itself of such an opinion, my only thought would be “What a very stupid salad.” Before all else, there is the preposterous temerity of the proprietary claim; it is like some fugitive from a local asylum appearing at the door to tell you that “all this realm” is his inalienable feudal appanage and that you must evacuate the premises forthwith. Precisely how does materialism (which is just a metaphysical postulate, of extremely dubious logical coherence) entail exclusive ownership of scientific knowledge? Does Gopnik think he can assert rights here denied to Galileo, Kepler, and Newton? Or to Arthur Eddington, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac, Anthony Zee, John Barrow, Freeman Dyson, Owen Gingerich, John Polkinghorne, Paul Davies, Stephen Barr, Francis Collins, Simon Conway Morris, and (yes) Albert Einstein?

Yes, all of those scientists, as far as I know—save Einstein—were or are religious, but I doubt that Einstein abjured materialism or naturalism.  If you read Hart’s book, you’ll know that he, along with many modern theologians, goes after naturalism and materialism as incoherent on philosophical grounds. What he doesn’t realize is that the pantheon of scientists he lists made wonderful discoveries about the universe using only the assumptions of naturalism and materialism. They didn’t need, or use, God as a hypothesis. Just because Francis Collins and Simon Conway Morris mouth the fictions of an ancient book on Sundays does not somehow constitute a criticism of materialism.  For if the rejection of materialism, and the acceptance of revelation and deism, were a route to knowledge, we’d know a hell of a lot more about God than we do now. Hart is Eastern Orthodox. How does he know that the tenets of his faith are right, and that those of Islam and Judaism are wrong? Regardless of what he says about God, even the God he himself worships is more than a Ground of Being.

Hart’s tactic of distilling the essence of God from all religions, and then insisting that we talk about that, is equivalent to distilling the essence of “politics” from observing Western democracies, and then insisting that we talk not about Obama’s policies, or about the Republican denial of women’s rights, but about the nature of “politics” itself. It’s a useless, scholastic endeavor, suitable for an arrogant fellow like Hart to discuss at teatime, but not one that’s of much relevance in our world.

Finally, in his own piece, Dreher, champing at the bit, can’t wait for Hart to eviscerate me:

I do hope that Hart will not wait quite so long to have the fatuous atheist critic Jerry Coyne for lunch.  The rigidly ideological Coyne is one of the least-interesting critics of theism, precisely because he routinely gives scant evidence of understanding the position of his opponents (see Edward Feser on this point). His New Republic piece dismissing Hart’s book is on par with Gopnik’s, except that Gopnik, to his very great credit, is a marvelous prose stylist and a generous human being, and does not write as if he were delivering his message while standing on a bench in Hyde Park.

Really? Do Hart and Dreher routinely give evidence of understanding the New Atheist position, particularly the part about lack of evidence?  Why do I have to discuss the matter on their turf? Why not do it on mine: the turf of evidence. At any rate, Dreher’s criticisms of my prose aside, I’d respond in this way to both of these goddies: “Bring it on!”

One thing I’ve learned from this (as if most of you didn’t know it already): Christians may try to emulate Jesus with kind and saintly behavior, but the minute their faith is questioned they turn into grouchy old men chasing the atheists off their lawns. Deprived of the racks and thumbscrews they once used to keep their critics in line, they now resort to insult and invective.

Atheism of the gaps

April 21, 2014 • 7:14 am

I’ve realized that what religious people and faitheists have been doing to atheists lately is putting us on the defensive: insisting that we read this or that book; we answer this or that argument—and if we don’t, well, then they won’t pay us any attention. (As if they would anyway!) And I also realized that we can turn the tables on these people. After all, they’re the ones making unevidenced truth claims, not us.  So I propose two strategies for nonbelievers:

1. Make believers read about unbelief before you listen to them. This one I’ve suggested before. Tell believers that we won’t pay any attention to their superstitions, or their criticisms of atheists, until they’ve read The Very Best of Atheist Thought.These works must include the books of the Four Horsemen (one would think the faithful would already have read these, but their misunderstandings about The God Delusion lead me to believe otherwise), the complete works of Robert G. Ingersoll, selected readings from Mencken and Bertrand Russell, Christopher Hitchens’s The Portable Atheist, selected writings of Hume, Walter Kaufmann’s The Faith of a Heretic and Critique of Religion and Philosophy, and Herman Philipse’s God in the Age of Science: A Critique of Religious Reason (I highly recommend the last book, which is fairly new). I’m sure readers can think of others.

If people can fault us for not reading Aquinas, Augustine, Origen, Tertullian and (ugh) Alvin Plantinga and David Bentley Hart, well, then, we can do the same to them. If they haven’t read extensively in the honorable intellectual tradition of nonbelief, then they have no credibility as believers. Frankly, Salon should publish a piece that says this.

2. Make atheism-of -the-gaps arguments. Religionists often float God-of-the-gaps arguments, saying that God must lie in the interstices of our scientific understanding.  Well, we can play that game, too.  There are huge gaps in believers’ understanding of God, and in those lacunae, I claim, lies strong evidence for No God. Here are some of those religious gaps:

  • Why would the Abrahamic God, all-loving and all-powerful, allow natural evils to torment and kill people? Why can’t he keep kids from getting cancer? How did the Holocaust fit into God’s scheme?
  • Why, if God wants us to know and accept him so much, does he hide himself from humanity?
  • Why would an omnibenevolent God consign sinners to an eternity of horrible torment for crimes that don’t warrant that? (In fact, no crimes do!). The official Catholic doctrine, for instance, is that unconfessed homosexual acts doom you to an eternity of immolation in molten sulfur. And would the Christian God really let someone burn forever because they were Jews, or didn’t get baptized?
  • Why is God in the Old Testament such a jerk, toying with people for his amusement, ordering genocides in which women and children are killed en masse, and allowing she-bears to kill a pack of kids just for making fun of a prophet’s baldness? How does that comport with the God worshipped today?
  • Why didn’t Jesus return during his followers’ lifetime, as he promised?

(I’m sure that readers can add other gaps, including the dozens of inconsistencies in Scripture.)

Now it’s no use for believers to respond “God is mysterious. Perhaps some day we’ll know the answers.” For that is precisely the answer they won’t accept about scientific puzzles—like the oft-touted mystery of consciousness—that they adduce as evidence for God.  If we were to respond, “The brain works in mysterious ways,” or “Evolution works in mysterious ways,” theists like David Bentley Hart would just sneer and say that materialism could never provide answers.

Well, theism doesn’t even begin to provide credible answers to the goddy puzzles above, and, unlike science, has never made a bit of progress in attacking them. So, I claim, we can find good evidence for atheism in the gaps of religious understanding. And that tactic trumps religious God-of-the-gaps arguments, because the gaps in science grow smaller as we learn more (neuroscience is one example), while the gaps in theism are always the same size.

 

David Bentley Hart tells us that God is bliss and consciousness, not to mention reality

April 19, 2014 • 1:28 pm

A riled-up theologian, whom I shall neither name or link to, has written a diatribe about my remarks on David Bentley Hart’s book: The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss.  This theologian says that I’ve completely misunderstood the book, which was, as Hart claimed, to distill the essence of God from all faiths, and not to give evidence for that God. The captious theologian says that Hart spends only a very small portion of his book giving evidence for God.

That’s bogus. Most of the book is in fact devoted to adducing such evidence, which resides in the existence of consciousness, rationality, mathematics, our search for truth, our love of beauty, and the Fact that There is Something Instead of Nothing. And when he’s not adducing this “proof”, Hart’s making fun of those who claim that these phenomena can be based on naturalism. But none of them, argue Hart, can be explained by science, ergo God. (We never learn how Hart concludes “Ergo Jesus and my own Eastern Orthodox Faith.”)

Part of Hart’s tactic is to assert not only that consciousness, rationality, bliss, and so on are evidence for God, but are in fact God, a grifter’s trick if ever there was one.  It’s a form of pantheism, something that almost no believers accept.

Now bear with me while I quote a page from the book that shows not only Hart’s sophistry, but the relentlessly annoying and pompous style of his prose. This, my friends, is what you must deal with to get your Official Credible Atheist Card. Do note how Hart shows off as often as he can, liberally sprinkling this paragraph with signs of his erudition. And please read it, because, after all, I had to copy it out from pages 248 and 249.

Seen from the perspective of a variety of theistic traditions, this [“the indissoluble bond between the intellect and objective reality” that is a “kind of love” and “a kind of adherence of the will and mind to something inexhaustibly desirable] is nothing less than the reflection of absolutely reality within the realm of the contingent. It is bliss that draws us toward and joins us to the being of all things because that bliss is already one with being and consciousness, in the infinite simplicity of God. As the Chandogya Upanishad says, Brahman is at once both the joy residing in the depths of the heart and also the pervasive reality in which all things subsist. The restless heart that seeks its repose in God (to use the language of Augustine) expresses itself not only in the exultations and raptures of spiritual experience but also in the plain persistence of awareness. The soul’s unquenchable eros for the divine, of which Plotinus and Gregory of Nyssa and countless Christian contemplatives speak. Sufism’s ishq or passionately ardent love for God, Jewish mysticism’s devekut, Hinduism’s bhakti, Sikhism’spyaar—these are all names for the acute manifestation of a love that, in a more chronic and subtle form, underlies all knowledge, all openness of the mind to the truth of things. This is because, in God, the fulness of being is also a perfect act of infinite consciousness that, wholly possessing the truth of being in itself, forever finds its consummation in boundless delight. The Father knows his own essence perfectly in the Mirror of Logos and rejoices in the Spirit who is the “bond of love” or “bond of glory” in which divine being and divine consciousness are perfectly joined. God’s wujud is also his wijdan—his infinite being is infinite consciousness—in the unity of the wajd, the bliss of perfect enjoyment. The divine sat is always also the divine chit, and their perfect coincidence is the divine ananda. It only makes sense, then—though of course it is quite wonderful as well—that consciousness should be made open to being by an implausible desire for the absolute, and that being should disclose itself to consciousness through the power of the absolute to inspire and (ideally) satiate that desire. The ecstatic structure of finite consciousness—this inextinguishable yearning for truth that weds the mind to the being of all things—is simply a manifestation of the metaphysical structure of all reality. God is the one act of being, consciousness, and bliss in whom everything lives and moves and has its being; and so the only way to know the truth of things is, necessarily, the way of bliss.

I’ll add a bit more for you budding scientists:

In any event, I do not believe the physicalist narrative of reality can ever really account for consciousness and its intentionality (or, alternatively, eliminate the concepts of consciousness and intentionality from our thinking); still less do I believe that it can account for the conscious mind’s aptitude for grasping reality by way of abstract concepts; and I am quite certain it can have nothing solvent to say about the mind’s capacity for absolute values or transcendental aims. All of these things lie outside the circle of what contemporary physicalism, with its reflexively mechanistic metaphysics, can acknowledge as real. In one’s every encounter with the world, one is immersed in the twin mysteries of being and consciousness; and, in the very structure of that encounter, a third mystery appears: that of the absolute. . . In the very midst of our quotidian acts of awareness we are already placed before the transcendent, the infinite horizon of meaning that makes rational knowledge possible, and thereby presented with the question of God.

See what you’re missing? If you can’t give a naturalistic account of consciousness (indeed, just by thinking about that problem), you’re giving evidence of God.

If this sort of bullpucky is not not God-of-the-Gappism, I’ll eat my hat. And speaking of eating, I’m contemplating a fine dinner tonight, which, I suppose, is also evidence for Hart that there is a God. Indeed, my enjoyment of that meal will be God himself!

There will be one more quote tomorrow and then I’ll leave you in peace.

My new Republic post on Hart and Douthat is up

April 16, 2014 • 11:53 am

As I’ve always claimed, I learn more from the commenters at this site than they learn from me. When I put up a post like Monday’s piece on Ross Douthat and David Bentley Hart’s views of God and religion, I pay attention to the readers’ comments, seeing whether I’ve made a misstep, been unclear, or missed some good points.

So let me offer the readers some kudos for the rewritten version of that post which just appeared in The New Republic under the title, “Religious believers’ favorite new book is a failed argument for God.” It’s been tightened and clarified, and my beef with Hart (and Douthat) is now disseminated more widely.  If you wish, go over to the site and give it a click, or perhaps engage in some discussion. It still delights me that such a prominent venue is willing to promulgate fairly explicit secular points of view.

I’m not sure I’m going to post a full review of Hart’s book here, as my comments are long and complicated, but I’ve begun pointing out its weaknesses, and will try to continue that by presenting and analyzing a few of Hart’s quotes over the next week. Suffice it to say now that this is NOT the book that you need to come to address if you’re to be a credible atheist. You’ve already encountered the main arguments before. They are these:

1. God is an ineffable Ground of Being who is neither anthropomorphic nor refutable by any empirical observations. He is the creator of all things, the sustainer of all things, and is immanent in everything. In fact, he could be considered to BE consciousness, bliss, and rationality.

2. Despite that, there is palpable evidence for God—in our consciousness (which, according to Hart, defies and will always defy scientific explanation), in our rationality and appreciation of beauty (also inexplicable by science), and in the fact that something exists instead of nothing. Hart gussies up these God-of-the-gaps arguments with fancy modern language, but, despite his denial of Gappism, that’s what his arguments boil down to.  And he’s also incorrect in denying that he’s not presenting evidence for God, but only clarifying the conception of God common to all religions. In fact, most of the book comprises the evidence for God that, says Hart, is so palpable in this world that you’d have to be deranged to remain an atheist.

If you’ve read Karen Armstrong and her apophatic theology (which says stuff about God despite claiming that you can’t say anything about God), you needn’t read Hart.