Damon Linker praises David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God for dismantling the New Atheist view of God as merely “the biggest, most powerful object or thing in, or perhaps alongside, the universe”:
Scientists are heroically proficient at detecting the laws that govern the natural world. They interrogate phenomena, trace effects back to their contingent causes, and then those causes back to even prior causes, developing and testing theories that seek to explain the temporal sequence. In the case of cosmology, that sequence extends all the way back to origins of the universe — to the first contingent cause of every subsequent cause over the past 13.82 billion years or so.
God concerns something else entirely. He is certainly not one of the many contingent causes within the natural world. But neither is he the first contingent cause, setting off the Big Bang from some blast-resistant fallout shelter lodged, somehow, outside of and prior to the universe as we know it.
On the contrary, according to the classical metaphysical traditions of both the East and West, God is the unconditioned cause of reality — of absolutely everything that is — from the beginning to the end of time. Understood in this way, one can’t even say that God “exists” in the sense that my car or Mount Everest or electrons exist. God is what grounds the existence of every contingent thing, making it possible, sustaining it through time, unifying it, giving it actuality. God is the condition of the possibility of anything existing at all.
He goes on to note Hart’s provocative argument “that faith in this classical notion of God can never be ‘wholly and coherently rejected'”:
The deeper reason why theism can’t be rejected, according to Hart, is that every pursuit of truth, every attempt to be good, every longing for beauty presupposes the existence of some idea of truth, goodness, and beauty from which these particular instances are derived. And these transcendental ideas unite in the classical concept of God, who simply is truth, goodness, and beauty. That’s why, although it isn’t necessary to believe in God in some explicit way in order to be good, it certainly is the case (in Hart’s words) “that to seek the good is already to believe in God, whether one wishes to do so or not.”
In a recent interview, Hart also expressed his scorn for the way Intelligent Design enthusiasts understand God:
My real problem with the movement is the disastrously silly picture of the universe and God that one finds lurking between the lines or in the last chapters of their books. ID theorists merely repeat the mechanistic narrative about physical reality and then reinsert an intelligent designer—a deist God—into the picture, one whose role is little more than that of a discrete causal agency among others, making periodic interventions in a reality outside himself. But such a God could be removed from the picture again just as easily, by the rise of another scientific paradigm, and (more to the point) such a God is not the fullness of being that classical theism sees as the logically necessary source and ground and end of all finite things.
Previous Dish on Hart’s work here.
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