Week 7Hart, the Experience of God, Pt. 1

Week 7Hart, The Experience of God, pt. 1

David Bentley Hart (1965-) is an Orthodox Christian theologian at the University of Notre Dame. His early work was in Patristics (the writings of the early Christian theologians), but his interests range broadly, and more recently his work has a distinct social focus, and a sharp polemical edge.
Here are some fine examples of the former:

“My basic argument was that a capitalist culture is, of necessity, a secularist culture, no matter how long the quaint customs and intuitions of folk piety may persist among some of its citizens; that secularism simply is capitalism in its full cultural manifestation; that late capitalist “consumerism”—with its attendant ethos of voluntarism, exuberant and interminable acquisitiveness, self-absorption, “lust of the eyes,” and moral relativism—is not an accidental accretion upon an essentially benign economic system, but the inevitable result of the most fundamental capitalist values.” (“Christ’s Rabble,” Commonweal, 9/27/2016).

And,

“Throughout the history of the church, Christians have keenly desired to believe that the New Testament affirms the kind of people we are, rather than—as is actually the case—the kind of people we are not, and really would not want to be. The first, perhaps most crucial thing to understand about the earliest generations of Christians is that they were a company of extremists, radical in their rejection of the values and priorities of society not only at its most degenerate, but often at its most reasonable and decent. They were rabble. They lightly cast off all their prior loyalties and attachments: religion, empire, nation, tribe, even family. In fact, far from teaching “family values,” Christ was remarkably dismissive of the family. And decent civic order, like social respectability, was apparently of no importance to him. Not only did he not promise his followers worldly success (even success in making things better for others); he told them to hope for a Kingdom not of this world, and promised them that in this world they would win only rejection, persecution, tribulation, and failure. Yet he instructed them also to take no thought for the morrow.” (Ibid).

Our book, which is an extended response to a recent development in our societal discussion about religion, the so-called “New Atheism,” contains many examples of the latter. Especially early on in the book, we’ll have to be careful to identify these polemical moments, and tease out from them what Hart’s real concerns and arguments are.

New Atheism
Atheism has been a position advocated in the face of theistic commitment throughout history.
Recently (21st century) there has been something of an upsurge in the number and prominence of people explicitly arguing atheistic conclusions.
There are complex explanations for this. Certainly, since the late 20th century, we’ve seen religious participation and identification decrease in the developed world. This has been accompanied by the emergence of what’s known as secular humanism, a non-religious orientation which takes on many of the functions historically associated with religion (providing a moral/political framework, fostering community, etc.). During the same period, we’ve seen a general increase in people’s assumptions about the power of science to explain the whole of reality.
The New Atheist ‘movement’ is most closely associated with a fairly diverse group of thinkers including, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett. Dawkins is a biologist, Harris is an author and co-founder of the Reason Project, Hitchens was a prominent public intellectual and political commentator, and Dennett is a philosopher.
All of these figures have written very popular books that critique religion and belief in God with a mixture of rational argument and scientific analysis.
As critics have pointed out, there’s not much new that they have to offer on the rational argument side. For the most part, they merely summarize and digest criticisms that have been part of the project of natural theology from the start.
Things might be a bit more promising on the science side, as science has progressed so much since the heyday of natural theology, but here too, critics argue that we should have serious reservations about the supposedly scientific character of the work of the New Atheists, with even other atheist scientists accusing them of misunderstanding both science and religion!

Introduction

The Experience of Godis another response to the emergence of this New Atheism.
It has, according to Hart, a very simple objective. Given what appears to him to be a great deal of confusion, among religious and new atheists alike, about the concept of God, the book’s aim is to offer a definition of the term so as to make sure that atheists, “…have a clear concept of what it is that they claim not to believe” (2).
A couple of notes about method.
Hart aims to be as inclusive as possible. Hart’s account of God is by design intended to speak across religious traditions, including, “…Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, various late antique paganisms…” (4).
Hart does not engage with the New Atheist literature at any length. He is (in my opinion, rightfully) dismissive of most of it, and doesn’t believe it amounts to a coherent position worthy of sustained consideration.
Hart is focused on the classical accounts of the divine, from the tradition of natural theology that we’ve been considering. He grants that most religious people have a much looser, less sophisticated understanding of God, but insists that even in that case, this common understanding is of a piece with the more sophisticated accounts we’ve been considering and just like with physics, it’s the understanding of the experts, not the laypersons, whose positions we should be evaluating.

Chapter 1‘God’ Is Not a Proper Name

Hart begins his attempt to define God for believers and non-believers alike by making his presumptions clear.
The first one is a fine example of his polemical approach to the discussion, “…I do not regard true philosophical atheism as an intellectually valid or even cogent position; in fact, I see it as a fundamentally irrational view of reality, which can be sustained only by a tragic lack of curiosity or a fervently resolute will to believe the absurd” (16).
He also reveals his affinity for inductive proofs for the existence of God, “…I am convinced that the case for belief in God is inductively so much stronger than the case for unbelief that true philosophical atheism must be regarded as a superstition…” (Ibid.).
Finally, as he sees it, there are actually three positions one can take on the ‘big’ question: belief, unbelief, and embracing absurdity.
The last two positions obviously need to be distinguished.
Hart identifies unbelief with what is known as naturalism.
Hart characterizes naturalism as a metaphysical commitment to the, “…doctrine that there is nothing apart from the physical order, and certainly nothing supernatural…” (17).
While many naturalists, both philosophical and otherwise, would accept this characterization as a starting point of a discussion of their metaphysical commitments, few philosophical naturalists, classical or contemporary, would be happy to remain there.
This is a fine example of the problems with Hart’s polemical approach. He paints the naturalistic impulse in 19th, 20th, and 21st century philosophy with an overly broad and essentially false brush.
There are in fact many varieties of naturalism, and while all would deny the supernatural, that does not mean that they are all reductive, insisting that everything is a feature or product of physical, material nature.
Indeed, what Hart is really criticizing is not ‘naturalism’ but something we could call ‘physicalism’ or ‘materialism.’
For example, many naturalists would insist on the reality of the experienced connections between things (experience as a mosaic), while denying that this experienced connection is reducible to or explainable by the things related (worldly objects or subatomic particles).
Of course, he’s not a philosopher, and perhaps he should be excused for the relative lack of sophistication. We’ll be better able to assess the significance of his critique of philosophy in our discussion of Chapter Two.
On the basis of the [limited, even false] characterization he offers, Hart rehearses a common objection to ‘naturalism:’ there can be no naturalistic justification of ‘naturalism,’ no reference to the physical order itself can explain why the physical order is what it is.
What would a Humean response to this objection be?
The embrace of the absurd is a quite different position.
It amounts, on Hart’s understanding, to committing oneself to the ultimate meaninglessness of what is.
One ‘path’ to this conclusion is what is known as the ‘Problem of Evil.’
Another is via an ‘honest’ naturalism.
“…it makes sense to believe in both reason and God, and it may make a kind of nonsensical sense to believe in neither, but it is ultimately contradictory to believe in one and not the other…” (19).
On Hart’s view, unbelievers are thus dishonest naturalists.
Hart then turns to the issue of the ‘new atheism,’ taking a few swipes at individual thinkers, but primarily focusing our attention on the cultural conditions which explain its emergence. They come down to two related factors: the poverty of the cultural conversation about belief in God, and a kind of fundamentalism that encourages and supports uncritical, rigid, and sloppy thinking.
Lest we think that this fundamentalism is limited to the unbelievers, Hart lays a portion of the blame on contemporary religious culture, which is plagued on his view by both the fundamentalism of the broader culture and specifically religious forms.
As an example, he offers us a short history of biblical interpretation which shows us how ahistorical, uncritical, and simplistic literalist interpretations of scripture can be.
One last issue that needs to be addressed before the project begins concerns the concept of God that is at issue.
To help clarify things, Hart turns to the familiar distinction between God and gods. He employs it not as the distinction between monotheism and polytheism, but as a distinction between the absolute and the relative, the unlimited and the limited, the transcendent and the immanent.
In this form, the distinction would be accepted, or even required, by many polytheisms.
God is the ‘creator’ or source of all that is, while being neither one thing among many (a being), nor just the sum or ‘all’ the beings.
Rather, God is Being itself (cf. 30-1), “…the ground of the possibility of anything at all” (33).
The ‘gods’ on the other hand, are just superior forms of beings, and thus belong to the world rather than transcend it.
It is God, not ‘gods’ that Hart seeks to define.
Immediately, we can understand one reason to reject many versions of atheism: they amount to denying the existence of ‘gods,’ and thus miss the point.
“Yet the most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God…is the habit of conceiving God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings…who is related to the world more or less as a craftsman is related to an artifact” (32).
This is an error also made by the advocates of “Intelligent Design.”
Bringing these preparatory matters to a close, Hart offers a positive characterization of God: Being, Consciousness, and Bliss.
He’s borrowed them from a compound word from Sanskrit: satchitananda: sat means being or truth, chit means consciousness, and ananda means bliss.
He’s chosen this trio of concepts for their resonance with the traditional theological characterizations of God, for their compactness, for their alignment with the characteristic ways we experience the divine, and for the fact that these terms name regions of human experience which ‘naturalism’ seems unable to adequately account for.

Chapter 2Pictures of the World

As we saw in Chapter 1 of Experience, Hart seems to ignore many of the developments of 19th and 20th Century philosophy. In Chapter 2, something like an explanation for this becomes clear.
From the opening lines of the chapter it becomes clear that Hart is as contemptuous of much of contemporary philosophy as he is of the ‘new atheists.’
‘Much’ does not mean all.
The style of philosophizing that Hart is critical of is what is known as [Anglo-American] Analytic philosophy.
The version of analytic philosophy against which Hart expends so much vitriol is caricatured as realist, physicalist, and linguistically oriented.
While such commitments were true(r) of early analytic philosophers, this caricature is certainly inadequate as a characterization of the whole of analytic philosophy, and is obviously false of analytic philosophy as a whole at least since the 1950’s.
Hart might insist I’m quibbling here. He certainly believes that the caricature is true enough of the “majority of academic philosophers” (48). While I disagree, it’s instructive to consider how he approaches his real target: materialism.
We’ve seen the basic criticism already, and he will pursue it at length in Chapter 3: materialism is self-contradictory, and blind to its own presumptions. Only theistic metaphysics is defensible.
What we get in chapter 2 is an attempt to historically situate the position Hart is seeking to discredit. It comes in the form of an intellectual history.
Some key elements of that history.
The unity of the ancient and traditional Christian picture of reality (50-53).
The biggest change in the modern era was not the rejection of the geocentric conception of the universe, but the rejection of formal and efficient (as well as what Hart calls “ontological”) causality (55).
The implication? Some positive (57)
Mostly negative: “…the new anti-metaphysical method soon hypertrophied into a metaphysics of its own” (Ibid.).
The result is a radical transformation of our ‘picture of the world.’ Rather than a mutually implicative whole, where there was an overarching reason for everything, we came to understand ourselves as a brute fact in a collection of other brute facts, a collection that was itself merely a brute fact.
Most of the errors in thought that seem endemic to our ‘God-Talk’ as well as to all sorts of other intellectual bankrupt tendencies (misapplication of Darwinian categories) can be traced to this transformation.
We often think of science as the clearest and most perfect expression of this modern ‘world picture,’ but that is to confuse the methods of science with the truth that science reveals.
It is as a method that the focus on material and efficient causality shows its value (cf. 70-71).
Why does Hart go to such links to distinguish science in its methodological purity from the wider and more deep rooted commitment to metaphysical materialism?
In emphasizing its metaphysical independence, Hart leaves some space for an alternative conception of reason’s role.