I’m currently 3 chapters into David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. Here are a few brief observations.
- Hart offers here a timely and trenchant critique of the New Atheism. He pulls no punches, referring to philosophical atheism as a kind of “superstition, often nurtured by an infantile wish to live in a world proportionate to one’s own hopes or conceptual limitations.” Hart’s book is an extended version of a kind of transcendental argument against naturalism. Being, consciousness, and bliss–all of which Hart identifies with the being of God–are necessary preconditions of our experience of the material world. Thus, Hart shows the irrationality of a purely physicalist understanding of reality.
- Hart’s book also offers an able defense of classical theism and a critique of what Brian Davies calls “theistic personalism,” the latter of which understands God as simply one discrete (albeit maximally great) being among others. I agree with much of what Hart has to say here. His critique of these revisions to classical theism points up the limitations of analytic philosophical method as well as the dangers of rejecting the doctrine of divine simplicity. If God is simply one logically possible being among others–even if the maximally great being–and if his being is composed of various, distinct properties, then how can God’s being remain unconditioned and independent? Wouldn’t God then be dependent upon some metaphysically prior reality and the properties that constitute his being? If the danger of affirming divine simplicity is reducing God to a property, as Alvin Plantinga has argued (a danger, in any event, only present given the self-imposed constraints of analytic method), then the danger of rejecting divine simplicity is positing causally inert properties as the ultimate reality, rather than God’s being itself.
- Having said that, I am waiting (no doubt in vain, given Hart’s stated purpose for this book) for Hart to defend an explicitly Christian version of classical theism. The Christian tradition has simultaneously affirmed the classical conception of God that Hart is defending (a God who is infinite, a se, metaphysically simple, atemporal, immutable, impassible, etc.) and the biblical and creedal understanding of God as a tripersonal agent who loves, judges, and redeems his creation. These latter affirmations aren’t merely metaphorical descriptions of the ultimately unknowable divine reality. They are real (even if accommodated and analogous) self-revelations of the one true God, and are no less true of him than the philosophical affirmations of classical theism. The need to show the consistency of this classical Christian understanding of God is especially pressing for Hart, who seems to conflate the theistic claims of all the major world religions, including Eastern pantheisms.
So far, I think The Experience of God is an important and helpful book in many ways, but one with some serious limitations from a Christian perspective. If you’ve read it, let me know what you think.