The experience of God
Despite the recent ferocious public debate about belief, the concept most central to the discussion "God" frequently remains vaguely and obscurely described. Are those engaged in these arguments even talking about the same thing? In a wide-ranging response to this confusion, esteemed scholar David Bentley Hart pursues a clarification of how the word "God" functions in the world's great theistic faiths. Ranging broadly across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, Hart explores how these great intellectual traditions treat humanity's knowledge of the divine mysteries. Constructing his argument around three principal metaphysical "moments" -being, consciousness, and bliss- the author demonstrates an essential continuity between our fundamental experience of reality and the ultimate reality to which that experience inevitably points.
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- Not OP, but I am a Christian convert. I was raised an agnostic/atheist, but converted due to a combination of philosophical and emotional reasons. Contrary to what is commonly believed, there are not that many intellectually serious religions to chose from. If you are curious about it, I would suggest you check out The Experience of God, by David Bentley Hart (https://www.amazon.com/Experience-God-Being-Consciousness-Bl...).
- > He dismisses the idea of a divine Mind as not “scientific” (“It’s not all that different from saying ‘just because.’”).
The alternative is just as much of a 'just because'
David Bentley Hart's The Experience of God does a pretty good job of laying this out from a religious perspective: https://www.amazon.com/Experience-God-Being-Consciousness-Bl...
Unfortunately, the book is in some ways kind of a lengthy introduction to what it actually purports to be, but it does a needed job nevertheless.
Anyways, interesting about this Flew guy. Few people change their mind about anything--let alone core beliefs like this.
And I think where he actually landed also offers a pretty good example of what should be obvious: that religion as we know it should not be equated with belief in God, and that one can easily believe in some form of "God" without accepting the postulates of various religions.
- The Experience of God by David Bentley Hart
Any of David Foster Wallace's books of essays such as A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster
- > I was raised atheist and I've always felt like a believe in the supernatural doesn't mix with an intellectual, scientific view on the world. This is of course completely due to my upbringing; there are plenty of great scientists who believe. I think this is an interesting inner conflict which I'm sure I share with many others.
Yep, this was pretty much me up until a year ago when I started actually studying theology and the philosophy around it more rigorously. What I realized was that this notion of science being in opposition to religion I had, was effectively at least as much of a faith based position promoted to me by modern society, as theism was to religious people. Because when taking a hard honest look at myself, I saw that I had never actually bothered to really study any religious literature to justify coming to such a bold conclusion, in large part because I had prematurely dismissed such an endeavor as being an uninteresting waste of time. But in reality, I should've known my position was questionable ages ago from my long time fascination with the history of science and mathematics. I had conveniently rationalized or outright ignored the fact that the giants upon whose shoulders modern science rests, have all been rather disproportionately theists, because "things are different now"/"we've progressed beyond that". Yet the more I thought about those excuses, the more I realized they were completely unjustified hand waving, because I couldn't find any compelling arguments for why that should be the case, nor why such smart people of the past couldn't have come up with the relatively straightforward arguments for atheism the likes of Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al. came up with (as I had read most of the "4 horsemen of atheism" books already). None of the best arguments for atheism actually hinged on time or technological/scientific progress, so why did many smart people like Leibniz, Newton, and Darwin not only fail to discover such simple lines of thought, but instead often times went in the exact opposite direction and made arguments for theism? Note that I'm not making an argument appealing to past greats being theists, but rather describing my own thought process that led me to question "wtf is going on here?". John Lennox has a lot of interesting books and talks relevant to this particular line of inquiry[0].
But anyways, long story short(er), the watershed moment didn't actually come for me until I stumbled upon a small pastor's YouTube channel [1], and gradually started working my way through several books, including:
- Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
- Miracles - C. S. Lewis
- The Abolition of Man - C. S. Lewis [2]
- Heretics - G. K. Chesterton
- Orthodoxy - G. K. Chesterton
- Nihilism - Seraphim Rose
- The Experience of God - David Bentley Hart
- The Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant
I'm still technically somewhat agnostic and unaffiliated with any particular religious denomination, but I couldn't reasonably go back to my previous atheism after that rabbit hole. I think it's ultimately this illusury distinction between "the natural" vs "the supernatural" that our materialist society has, which makes it so easy to fall into atheism/nihilism. It lulls us into a false sense of confidence about what we "know" as being "natural", as if it were a well-defined "solved problem", all while the purpose of science itself explicitly acknowledges it's not. What makes the illusive grand unifying theory of physics less "supernatural" than a deity, the hard problem of consciousness[3], or the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics[4], for example? The mere assumption that it's more within reach of our understanding? Seems a bit unsatisfying for a premise to form such a large dichotomy around. In that sense, you could argue theism is partially an analogy of Gödel's incompleteness theorems[5] applied to world views. We might be able to kinda/sorta work around such limitations, but it seems silly to just completely ignore they exist, much less turn around and use them as some form of justification against theism a'la "god-of-the-gaps" argument[6].
[0] for example: https://youtu.be/v0AKUTHcI04
[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/paulvanderklay
[2] here's a good series distilling it, since the book itself is a bit dense: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlZfP0L6b41iCKzdQt-Gk...
[3] http://scholarpedia.org/article/Hard_problem_of_consciousnes...
[4] https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.htm...
[5] Gödel of course, was also a theist himself, and thought a lot about the implications of his discoveries. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/
[6] here's a good rebuttal to such arguments which may resonate with HN people: https://youtu.be/CltwD0Ek9Kk
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- Interesting article!
I'm reminded of the introduction to The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart. [0]
It explains the central goal of the book—to provide a definition of God. Hart essentially argues that many of the discussions about religious beliefs (especially in the modern-era) aren't fruitful because of the imprecision of language.
The publisher's blurb [1] can provide a better overview than I can, but the book definitely influenced my understanding of "the Divine" as it relates to the human condition in many different cultures.
In a similar manner, this article examines the disconnect many people (even intellectuals) have when discussing high-level concepts. So often, we talk past each other and get frustrated that our viewpoint isn't even being heard.
Perhaps, before we get too frustrated when engaging in sensitive discussions, we should make sure we're at least sitting at the same table (metaphorically speaking).
[0] - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17802922-the-experien...
[1] - "Despite the recent ferocious public debate about belief, the concept most central to the discussion—God—frequently remains vaguely and obscurely described. Are those engaged in these arguments even talking about the same thing? In a wide-ranging response to this confusion, esteemed scholar David Bentley Hart pursues a clarification of how the word “God” functions in the world’s great theistic faiths.
Ranging broadly across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, Hart explores how these great intellectual traditions treat humanity’s knowledge of the divine mysteries. Constructing his argument around three principal metaphysical “moments”—being, consciousness, and bliss—the author demonstrates an essential continuity between our fundamental experience of reality and the ultimate reality to which that experience inevitably points.
Thoroughly dismissing such blatant misconceptions as the deists' concept of God, as well as the fundamentalist view of the Bible as an objective historical record, Hart provides a welcome antidote to simplistic manifestoes. In doing so, he plumbs the depths of humanity’s experience of the world as powerful evidence for the reality of God and captures the beauty and poetry of traditional reflection upon the divine."
