The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart (review)

David Bentley Hart’s most recent book is a theological and literary gem, not only extremely rich and valuable in content but also remarkably beautiful in execution. As his readers have come to expect, this book which purports to identify and describe the self-authenticating experience of God that grounds the theism of the vast majority of humanity, manifests an astonishing erudition that ranges, in depth, over all the major world religions on the topic of God. The Transcendent and human access to this mystery, and across the ages of literate religious history from the axial age to the present. Although not devoid of formidable intellectual and linguistic challenges, it is free of esoteric, academic hair-splitting and in-house jargon. It is plainly intended to be not just admired but understood by educated non-specialists as well as by the more philosophically adept.

The thesis is pellucid: that theism, whether explicitly articulated or implicitly lived, is the only intellectually coherent and defensible position for thoughtful persons attentive to their own experience who do not deliberately barricade themselves in self-contradictory rationalism. The demonstration (not argument, he insists) of this thesis is compelling precisely because it is not a logical proof whose conclusion depends on particular philosophical or scientific presuppositions but an appeal to and analysis of the universally available experience of people, both average believers and philosophically trained specialists. And the style of the discourse is graceful as a ballet whose fluidity is due precisely to its combination of discipline and freedom in response to the ontological music it embodies.

Not everyone will appreciate (as much as did this reviewer!) Hart’s trenchant, at times sardonic, dismissal of the pretensions of contemporary, best-selling atheism and the overblown arguments of its proponents. He judges late modernity to be “a condition of willful spiritual deafness” (312) and observes that “[t]he conceptual poverty of the disputes [over the reality and knowledge of God] frequently defies exaggeration” (302). He makes no pretense of academic neutrality or inclusiveness, declaring simply, “I have to admit that I find it impossible to take atheism very seriously as an intellectual position” (294). However, this is not a fideistic or ideological defense of an orthodoxy. It is the sober judgment of one who has considered the arguments very seriously and found them woefully wanting.

Hart serenely declines (although he actually returns several times to the arena) apologetic engagement with the “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchins, and the like. Because in fact, they are not actually talking about God at all. The object of their rejection is a self-contradictory and purely theoretical construction, a “straw man” which embodies a misunderstanding of the scope and purpose of the physical and social sciences as well as an abysmal ignorance of philosophy, theology, history, and religion. They represent, at least when they engage in theological dispute, the poverty of a thorough-going scientism which does no credit to real science and no justice to humanistic reflection. Whatever they do not believe in, Hart avers, it is not God in any sense recognizable by a competent philosopher, much less a theologian. Furthermore, he dismisses, on two grounds, their argument that what “most people” have in mind when they claim to believe in God is scientifically untenable and thus that their faith in this object is not to be taken seriously. First, Hart says, if one wants to challenge a sophisticated position (such as, relativity or evolution) one does not start with the understanding of the topic by the ordinary “person in the street” but with the understandings of the subject proposed by the best physicists or biologists. So, the atheists should be discussing God with people (such as philosophers and theologians) well-versed in the subject and aiming their denial at the God that informed faith actually professes. And second, Hart claims that, in fact, many if not most “average believers” across religions...