The Experience of God : Being, Consciousness, Bliss

by David Bentley Hart

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.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Theology, Nonfiction, Christianity, Spirituality, Christian

365 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion and a philosopher, writer, and cultural commentator, is a fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. He lives in South Bend, IN.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 1 out of 5]

THE EXPERIENCE OF DAVID BENTLEY HART

Rarely have I encountered an author with such an unpleasant personality as David Bentley Hart. Smug, overbearing, pompous, self-regarding and lofty – we should be grateful he has found the energy to explain to us in words of ten syllables just exactly what idiots we all are. Obviously, atheists are idiots, according to this book – I was expecting that – but 99% of all Christians are too. Christians, especially fundamentalists, have been just as stupid as atheists. Their notions about God – e.g. that evolution is unbiblical, or that the Bible is literally true – are ineffably ridiculous. In the world of David Bentley Hart it’s quite difficult to find someone who is not an idiot.

They all just don’t get it! In all their blathering about religion, they’re like children squabbling over a bag of marbles in the playground! Says David Bentley Hart. He has been called in to sort out this toddlers’ playgroup which has so sadly got out of hand, and with deep sighs of aggravation (he could be doing something so much more pleasant, like contemplating which works were misattributed to Athanasius of Alexandria, and exactly who misattributed them) he hands out his tendentious dictats.

He particularly has it in for the Intelligent Design Christians – their breathtaking gormlessness leaves him groping for the right level of invective to pour over their heads. And this whole idea of taking the Bible literally! What fool would do that? (Well, if he looked out the window, he might see several of them right there.)

Everyone gets dished. His Burj Khalifa loftiness towards Stephen Hawking is something to behold. Hawking dismisses the idea of God as “otiose” and this irks the even mightier brain of DBH. Referring to the most lauded of all theoretical physicists he says:

It never crosses his mind that the question of creation might concern the very possibility of existence as such, not only of this universe but of all the laws and physical conditions that produced it, or that the concept of God might concern a reality not temporally prior to this or that world, but logically and necessarily prior to all worlds, all physical laws, all quantum events, and even all possibilities of laws and events. From the perspective of classical metaphysics, Hawking misses the whole point of talk of Creation

You have to give DBH some respect, it takes some balls to curse the world’s most beloved scientist and mightiest thinker in such rude fashion, but he does kind of sound like the kid saying, yeah, well I can think of a bigger number than you – a million million million million million million million million million million AND ONE!

This book gets many four & five star reviews. Mine will I think be the only one star ever. But, you know, a cat may look at a king. I have to elevate my Homburg to the readers who have ploughed through these many pages of asphyxiating prose. They have had to ingest – and they presumably enjoyed – hundreds of sentences like these:

Naturalism is a picture of the whole of reality that cannot, according to its own intrinsic premises, address the being of the whole; it is a metaphysics of the rejection of metaphysics, a transcendent certainty of the impossibility of transcendental truth, and so requires an act of pure credence logically immune to any verification. Thus naturalism must forever remain a pure assertion, a pure conviction, a confession of blind assurance in an inaccessible beyond; and that beyond, more paradoxically still, is the beyond of no beyond. (page 77)

I confess that sentences like those make we want to kill myself by diving into a tank of well-read piranhas.

I would like to see how David Bentley Hart would cope with a zombie apocalypse. I fondly imagine him trying to tell those zombies their ontological assumptions are hopelessly muddled. But the zombies are not impressed. They munch on.

[Tom LA · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a shame that this beautiful book, here on Goodreads, has a superficial negative review as its #1 review, the review’s rating due to its sarcastic value and not to any pondered point about the book’s content, which the reviewer didn’t even touch on.

“The experience of God", drawing from western and eastern philosophies and spiritual traditions, does an excellent job at shedding light on the concept of "God".

The concepts expressed in this book by its Orthodox Christian author are in line with the catholic Church's theology (and most protestant churches as far as I know):
1) an interpretation of the Bible that is only literal is just wrong.
2) only a minority of people understand the concept of God as it was originally meant, and as it had been used by the Christians of the first centuries, as something that exists beyond the reach of our imagination. They are a minority simply because the majority hasn't been studying or researching the matter to an appropriate level of depth.

Hart approaches the subject from a philosophical point of view, however at the end he mentions that it is only through prayer and by engaging all of ourselves that we can truly experience God.

The philosophical approach is very important because it is the bridge that allows religion to be grounded in rationality, and to avoid superstition or conflicts with science (St. Thomas Aquinas).

At the core of Hart's work is the following statement, as found in the first pages:

"Existence is most definitely not a natural phenomenon; it is logically prior to any physical cause whatsoever; and anyone who imagines that it is susceptible of a natural explanation simply has no grasp of what the question of existence really is. In fact, it is impossible to say how, in the terms naturalism allows, nature could exist at all".

Hart spends the first 40 pages getting his frustration with the "New Atheist" movement out of his system.

He's of the opinion that most - if not all - of today's public debates between atheists and believers are fundamentally flawed by a huge confusion about the concept of "God".

I understand his frustration: there is a lot of New Atheist literature and blogs out there, and most of them like to use really nasty tones against religion, while having no credentials at all in theology or philosophy (mostly scientists). Hart addresses some of their main points: for example, the head master of that movement, Richard Dawkins, has the "Five Ways" of Thomas Aquinas completely wrong, and he ended up misrepresenting them.

MILLIONS of people buy into that New Atheist nonsense.

More in general: "If one is content merely to devise images of God that are self-evidently nonsensical, and then proceed triumphantly to demonstrate just how infuriatingly nonsensical they are, one if not going to accomplish anything interesting".

Hart acknowledges that "there would not be so many slapdash popular atheist manifestos if there were not so many soft and inviting targets out there" like Earth Creationists, Evangelicals who take the Bible in a literal sense, or Hindu nationalists who insist that Rama's bridge was actually built by Hanuman's monkeys, and so forth.

"The most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God is the habit of conceiving God as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings in magnitude, power and duration, but not ontologically, and is related to the world like a craftsman is related to his artifact".

At this point, some will say: "We get what you're saying, but this is not the God that we were taught as kids, and yes, ok, the majority of religious people are unable to articulate the concept of God in this way, so is it relevant?".

Hart addresses this point and quickly dismisses it by saying that it is "entirely irrelevant", and then he adds "it is always true, for any shared body of knowledge, or belief, that the principles and logic of the whole "system" are most fully known only to a few individuals who have gone to the trouble to study them". I agree with him there. Today's angry New Atheists are angry with fundamentalists and literalists, as if they represented the totality of religious people or, even worse, as if they represented christian faith as it’s supposed to be.

To anyone who sees this as "insulting to the majority of people", I'm sorry but you're wrong. The author is stating a fact. Christianity can be very intellectually satisfying, and Hart is pointing in that direction. Most people don't care about religion being philosophically strong, that doesn't mean they're stupid at all. Only less curious.

In the following chapters, Hart chooses a structure for his book based on a ternion that he borrowed from Indian tradition: sat, chi and ananda, or "being", "consciousness" and "bliss". The three terms taken together constitute a particularly venerable Indian definition of the "Godhead", and in ancient tradition they certainly influenced Jewish spirituality and, ultimately, Christian faith. He identifies these as the basic elements of the super-natural.

"Being" leads to a fairly straightforward argument: as mentioned above, "there cannot be a natural explanation for existence as such; it is an absolute logical impossibility". Or, as he states a few pages later, "One prejudice that infects religious and materialist fundamentalisms alike is the mistake of thinking that to have described a thing's material history or physical origins is to have explained that thing exhaustively".

For example: what are physical laws, and why can mathematics describe them at all? Why do they exist?

Hart calls up the Priciple of Causation and the Principle of Sufficient Reason. All physical reality is logically contingent, caused, and the existence of the contingent requires the Absolute at its source. Alternatively, says Hart, "reality is essentially absurd: absolute contingency, unconditional conditionality, an uncaused effect".

I found the chapters on "Consciousness" less interesting: he's basically saying that the "first person" phenomenon of consciousness is entirely confined to the experience of a particular mind. "Whatever we may learn about the brain in the future, it will remain in principle impossible to produce any entirely mechanistic account of the conscious mind, and therefore consciousness is a reality that defeats mechanistic or materialistic thinking".

As some other reviewers said, that's Hart stretching beyond his area of expertise, and it's not a good point - unconvincing to say the least. Hart says: "the argument goes: somehow, a sufficient number of neurological systems operating in connection with one another will at some point naturally produce unified, self-reflective, and intentional consciousness, or at least (as strange as this may sound) the illusion of such consciousness".

Actually ... that doesn't sound that strange at all. "Illusion" may sound like a negative word, so you can use "reflection" or "feedback loop" if you like, but that is exactly what our sense of Self is, and, in a certain stretched out sense, our perception of God as well.

Hart is very strong when writing about theology and philosophy, but perhaps not as great when addressing scientific matters.

This is an important and very stimulating read for anyone interested in the topic of God, and how it does not have to be grounded in irrationality or, as Hollywood has been trying to convince you for the last 30 years, in stupidity.

p.s. I uploaded a brief video review on my channel here: https://youtu.be/_JZTFXPeyBk

[Murtaza · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extremely thorough, I would say damning, explication of the fundamental irrationality of scientific materialism. The vaguely self-helpish title doesn't do it justice: this a very scholarly and broadminded review of classical religious thought about the idea of God, and the necessary reality of "supernaturalism" as defined by religious traditions. It does a lot to clarify what "God" exactly is, and needless to say few of us (whether religious or not) seem to know anymore. It's also written in a way which is supremely accessible - not solely by virtue of its writing (which, for what its worth, happens to be excellent) - but by speaking directly to innate psychological and spiritual experiences we all take part in but have become alienated from.

Taking a broadly ecumenical view drawn from the major religious traditions (not just Abrahamic), Hart convincingly shows that the definition of "God" is quite consistent across them, and profoundly different from the "god" we are often arguing about today (which is more precisely defined as a "demiurge", from the Latin). God is not simply one supremely ethical or creative or expansive being among beings, but in fact the reflection of the constant, unconditioned, absolute (and therefore non-contingent, unlike *everything* in the material world) values and experiences we take part of in the world.

It strikes me upon reading this, there are very few people who are truly "atheist" according to the classical definition of God. Being alienated from the socio-political manifestations of religion, they claim to disbelieve but actually just seem to prefer to call god "the universe" or something to that effect. There are very few people who can actually adhere to a materialist position which - by its nature - is fundamentally absurd. Disbelieving in some kind of supreme cosmic magician like a demiurge (or an "Intelligent Designer") can certainly be justified rationally, but disbelieving in the God of ancient religious traditions is actually nearly impossible. As Hart points out, many of the people arguing on both sides of this issue (about "god") are arguing from wholly atheistic positions. But neither are actually "atheists".

There's a saying by Ibn Arabi that "Man is the mirror in which God contemplates His Names". In Islamic tradition God has 99 names (The Loving, The Enricher, The Timeless), which all correspond to absolute, unconditioned values. In our contemplation of the world we are all seeking out such absolute values in things, striving towards them and in a sense striving back towards God (again reminiscent of Surat Al-Baqarah 2:156).

In God who is infinite these values are absolute, and in us they are reflected to some finite degree due to our limited nature as finite beings. In attempting to seek them out - inevitably as an ultimate source behind the temporal things we seek in the world - we are seeking our way back to God as it was said we would. The Sufi invocation that "everything is perishing but His face" is also a reminder of the absolute values which manifest around us in purely contingent and temporal ways.

It was really interesting for me to hear these same ideas argued so eloquently and thoroughly from an Orthodox Christian perspective given how familiar they are from Islamic philosophy. It kind of renders meaningless that essentially political question as to "which religion is right" about the nature of reality, since they all have a lot to say about ultimate questions that is similar, albeit taking at times quite different paths to arrive there. They all strive for the transcendent and absolute to some degree, and the oft-heard, facile question along the lines of "What about Zeus etc." is mostly irrelevant (it was irrelevant even in its own time!). In my experience this question of weighing and judging of innumerable different traditions across time and space (also how such a task could be accomplished by any one person is utterly beyond me) is probably what inclines many people to a spiteful materialism, and by taking such a convincingly ecumenical view Hart thoroughly dispatches it. I'm sure he wouldn't take the position that "all religions are right" in their specifics and neither would the follower of any other tradition, but this is just because the question itself is wholly insufficient.

Hart expounds on the Kalam Cosmological Argument of absolute first causes and contingency to the point where I think his characterization of materialism as a superstition is almost unimpeachable. I don't think I can do justice here to how well he does this, but he manages to do it with an amazing degree of erudition and genuine humor as well. It really does strike me that we live in a metaphysically impoverished age despite our material achievements, having forgotten or been rendered unable to comprehend many truths which are timeless and have simply have never lost their absolute rational necessity.

It is an interesting condition of late modernity to assume that everyone in the past had everything wrong about the nature of reality, when its fairly easy to prove that in fact we have it wrong about many of the most important things. We have mistaken technological aptitude for something more profound, in part by making inductive logic (very useful and empowering for exploring the material world) into a new type of metaphysics all on its own. Upon reflection one can see how baldly absurd the result is.

I'll give this book my highest recommendation by violating austerity measures and actually going out and buying it to keep for reference later, it's really a classic and a call to return to a type of timeless knowledge which has been rendered no less true simply by the passing of time or by our declining ability to comprehend it.

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

David Bentley Hart is, by my rough estimate, about three times smarter than I am. The difficulty is that he writes as though he is five times smarter, and I find this off-putting.

Seriously, I rate this book at three stars taking an average of extremes. There are stretches where he is dispatching the bombast of the new atheism in a magnificent way, or puncturing the pretensions of the devotees of artificial intelligence, and so five stars it is. There are other stretches where he is bumping along the one-star bottom, and so that to be thrown into the mix.

The chief difficulty is that what Hart describes as classical theism is a mash-up of Sufi mysticism, Muslim philosophy, Hindu wisdom, Platonism, and Gregory of Nyssa. An entire book about experiencing God, by a Christian, and I am not sure that Jesus was even mentioned once. In these sections, he is describing the god who is the mascot of the smart guys club, and not the God who through Christ toppled the wisdom of the world, which, through all its wisdom, did not know God (1 Cor. 1:21).

Further, Hart makes this mistake while patronizingly dismissing people who could never ever belong to the smart guys club, such as advocates of Intelligent Design. So a Trinitarian creationist can get patted on the head and sent off as a worshiper of an idol while Hart smoothly quotes that great sage Rami Dumbunni. In this, the book is simply fatuous.

[nostalgebraist · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book basically has two intertwined central theses:

(1) a definition of God that amounts to a philosophical God-of-the-gaps, i.e. “God” as the name of the answer (whatever it may really be, and however little we can truthfully say about it) to all the philosophical questions that are truly hard to answer in a naturalistic framework, like “why is there a world at all” / “why qualia” / “where does ethics come from”

(2) a claim that this is not just an ad hoc response to the current state of knowledge, the way an ordinary God-of-the-gaps would be, but is in fact the concept of God maintained for millennia by the the theologies of multiple religion traditions (Christian, Hindu, etc.) – so instead of religion struggling to find space for God not yet touched by science, it’s more like science has finally consumed all the space it possibly can, rendering it all the more conspicuous (via those philosophical problems) that God was taking up some space the whole time

And OK, this is abstractly a pretty cool argument, and a pretty refreshing one in the stale air of the usual religion/atheism debates. The first 100 pages or so give a clear precis of the two theses, and I was genuinely excited to see how Hart would flesh them out, substantiate them, add nuance.

In fact, in the remaining 200+ pages, he doesn't do any of these things. Instead, he mostly just rants about how stupid one would have to be not to accept the two theses, and about particular naturalist thinkers he disagrees with. The rants are occasionally interrupted by restatements of the two theses -- mere restatements, without additional illumination. Indeed, Hart seems almost temperamentally unable to make a claim without restating it half a page later, then again a page or two after that, and then again 10 or 20 pages later (as a brief interruption of some other stream of restatements), and so on, like the Philip Glass of philosophical polemic.

Many writers err on the side of repetition and end up boring the reader, but Hart's case is stranger and more extreme than that; I found myself honestly confused, and even kind of impressed, by his ability to not bore himself. His enthusiasm for his favorite assertions (say, "God is the transcendent ground of all being, not merely some being who created the universe") is priapically undiminished no matter how many times he trots them out for a ride, and the twentieth or thirtieth iteration is delivered with as much verbal and rhetorical gusto as the first. I'm not sure I've previously seen this sheer level of repetitiousness, with this sheer level of sustained zeal, outside of devotional or pornographic literature. Perhaps Hart intends to bring the former to mind (although I doubt it), but since so much of the repeated material has less to do with God than with Hart's own purported intellectual triumphs over naturalist adversaries, I kept thinking uncomfortably of the latter. There is a greedily grasping texture to the prose, the texture of sexual fantasy or addictive behavior: the same beloved pleasure-buttons pressed again, and again, and again (another drink, another pull of the slot machine, another replay of the porn video), never losing their allure.

Enough about all that. So Hart repeats his points -- but what points is he repeating? The core of the book consists of three chapters, covering three distinct philosophical problems which are difficult cases for naturalism (cf. thesis #1), and which also correspond to traditional aspects of God (cf. thesis #2). The first of these, about the question of being (roughly, "why does anything exist?" or "why is there 'existence' at all"?), is actually pretty good. Although Hart does restate some of his basic points (that the question isn't about the need for some "first mover"; that the question can't be solved by physics, because physics can't explain why physical law itself should exist) about ten times more than necessary, he does get around to saying some relevant things about God, for example drawing out the connection between "God is the ground of all being" and the classical notion of divine simplicitly.

Things take a sharp turn for the worse in the next chapter, about consciousness. Here, Hart says almost nothing about God, and what he does say is crammed in right at the end, as in some bad term paper by a student who realizes, with an hour left before class, that they've forgotten to make their main argument. The majority of the chapter is a ~80 page survey of what philosophical naturalists have said about consciousness and the mind, and Hart's disagreements with same. This is both long enough to try the reader's patience -- we were expecting a book about God, not about Dan Dennett and Pat Churchland -- and too short to do any justice to the many substantial topics it covers. So, for example, in his discussion of intentionality, Hart first defines the term briefly (and confusedly), then simply assents to Searle's distinction between original and derived intentionality, without even supplying any argument for Searle's position (whether Searle's or his own). A reader who is unfamiliar with this territory will learn only that Hart agrees with one (atheist) philosopher and not with some others, and learn nothing from this about what God might be, while a reader who does know the territory will come away exasperated with Hart's breezy self-assurance, whatever their own opinions may be.

(In the third and final of these chapters, on "bliss" -- roughly, on ultimate ends-in-themselves like truth, beauty, and goodness -- one gets the sense that Hart is running out of steam. Here we are treated only to that tired old staple, a tirade about the phrase "selfish gene," bookended by some cursory remarks about how seeking ultimate ends-in-themselves is the same as seeking God.)

Why, one has to wonder, does Hart spend so much time insulting and critiquing naturalist thinkers? He says, near the start of the book, that he isn't writing a book about atheism or naturalism -- he's writing an expository book about traditional theological concepts of God. Every once in a while he'll cap off 5 or 10 or 40 pages of anti-naturalistic ranting by reiterating this intent, as if reminding himself that he shouldn't be straying off his ostensible topic. ("Dammit, I did it again!")

The book Hart says he is writing -- the book he apparently wants to write -- could be quite good, a phenomenological exploration of the deep mystery one feels when one thinks about these questions yoked to a helpful primer on how those questions have been answered by multiple religious traditions. Such a book would only need to touch on naturalism in order to emphasize that naturalism, having broken with these traditions, suddenly finds itself running aground on precisely these questions. We could even indulge Hart's proclivities and say he's allowed to make that point ten times across the course of the book, and even so, that would occupy maybe 50 pages at max, leaving plenty of room for the actual meat of the book.

In the real book Hart wrote, though, the "actual meat" is squirreled away in little corners here and there, and the rest is just wall-to-wall yelling about naturalism. The book could just as well be titled something like "Atheist Delusions," except that Hart has also written a different book with that exact title -- clearly this is a recurring animus with him. And it really is an animus, not just some gentlemanly philosophical dispute. Hart's tone, when he writes about atheists and naturalist philosophers, is nasty, condescending, and petulant (as Paul Bryant conveys well in his review). It's downright ridiculous, a lot of the time, to be reading a book putatively about contemplation of transcendent things and yet to encounter such preening vanity, such obsessive focus on the author's intellectual superiority to other people (sometimes other specific people), such unsuppressed resentment, such a childish inability to avoid scoring cheap points.

This would all be more understandable, and perhaps more forgivable, if Hart were driven by a moral hatred of atheists. Many Christians are. But Hart (to his credit!) is willing to grant that many atheists are wonderful people. He just thinks they're wrong about what, to me, looks like an almost trivial technical detail.

I doubt you will find many atheists who are unmoved by the deep mysteries Hart discusses. Hart and his opponents agree that these mysteries are deep, and that they are very difficult, perhaps even impossible to solve within the framework of naturalism. Indeed, this is repeatedly emphasized in the very naturalist writing on these problems which Hart brings in for criticism. (I was shocked that he didn't mention Chalmers' "water into wine" turn of phrase, and I'm not sure he even brought up the phrase "Hard Problem of consciousness.") There is a very basic confusion running through the book: Hart believes that these problems are obviously unsolvable in a naturalist framework, and so he assumes that the naturalists working on them must not realize the full severity of the problems. I think they do, and that is precisely why there is so much interest in working on them, and so much excitement over proposed solutions. If you were a young philosopher, which would you want to work on: the plodding completion of some little piece of the dominant system, or on some problem that seems impossible within that system? (Either you prove the potentially-impossible can be done after all, and thereby win eternal glory, or you prove it really is impossible, and overthrow the current order entirely -- either is exciting!)

So: the naturalist philosophers do express awe and bafflement in the face of these issues, and specifically, they avow that they don't even know what an answer would look like, and that it would have to be quite different from any of the answers they've seen before. (On morality, see the "argument from queerness," and on consciousness, see the hard/easy problem distinction.) Since Hart's God is the answer (by definition), it's not surprising that Hart also talks a lot about how different God must be from any other thing or concept.

In fact, Hart’s presented notion of God has virtually no content except for the content it would need to at least potentially be a solution to the philosophical problems. (Well, that plus a bunch of Thomist/Aristotelian stuff about downward causation, which Hart seems to think is supported somehow by modern physics and biology -- which is very silly but this review is too long already.) So you basically get a bunch of negative theology type stuff (God can’t be just any old being if he is to be the ground of all Being, etc.), all of which is just a sort of mirror image of the naturalist impotence in the face of these problems. Atheists say: wow, consciousness is a Hard Problem. Hart says: God is the answer to the problem of consciousness, but gee, it is a Hard Problem, and so look at how marvelous and strange and singular God would have to be, in order to solve it!

I find myself unsure what is even at stake in this distinction, and in fact even unsure if I am an "atheist" at all in Hart's terms (although I certainly am in every ordinary sense of the term). But Hart seems to think that a whole lot turns on the difference, given how angry he is at atheists, so angry, not fire-and-brimstone anger but “someone is wrong on the internet” anger, there on every page, in the same points repeated over and over again sentence after sentence, page after page, onanistically. Naturalism can’t explain Being, naturalism can’t explain consciousness, what a complete idiot you’d have to be to think so, this on and on, when it all seems to come down to this odd, nerdy, technical, almost semantic issue about whether you view life’s deep mysteries as one vase or two faces, which has nothing at all to do with why actual people file into pews, or don’t.

[Nathan Duffy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astonishingly, given the somewhat deceptive (or perhaps inept) marketing of the book, this was Hart's best book to date, which is saying something monumental. What neither the title, nor the jacket cover, nor even the blurb reviews reveal is that the book is primarily a relentless attack on the superstitions and credulous fideisms of materialism. Over and against this decrepit and impoverished philosophy of reality, and in response to its inept attempts to demystify the world, Hart turns to the common theistic metaphysical deposit of tradition for the soothing and compelling antidote.

In the mystery of being, in the mystery of consciousness, and in the manner that they blissfully coinhere as a surfeit of physical reality, the Supernatural, the Absolute, the Good, Beauty, God is immediately present to us in every moment. Yet we dull and numb ourselves to this in innumerable ways, but especially through the barbarisms of the 'mechanical philosophy' that we have inherited from the 'Enlightenment'.

As for the attempts of naturalism to sweep away such an obvious reality, Hart is insistent all such attempts are pitifully incoherent and suffer massive -- probably insuperable -- explanatory deficiencies. While the traditional metaphysical arguments for God, arguing from contingency, for example, are comparatively sublime with scarcely any of the objections lodged against them being worth serious consideration.

Stay tuned for a more complete review, but I can't recommend this highly enough.

[Aeisele · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book for both a certain type of atheist and a certain type of evangelical. Unfortunately neither one probably has enough capacity for expansion of mind to be willing or unable to hear it.

While the book is long with many details, the argument is basically this:

1. The irrationality of naturalism/materialism as a metaphysical premise. The idea, of course, is that naturalism argues that reality is a closed, physical system, and therefore there is no need for any supernatural explanation. The problem? This is not a physical/empirical statement at all, but rather a metaphysical proposition dressed up in pseudoscientific garb. If reality is a closed physical system, there is no way to make a meaningful statement to that effect. It would be like (in his really nice image, 303) someone trying to find the character “Leo Tolstoy” in Anna Karenina while denying that it’s possible to have an author.

2. God is not a thing. This flows, Hart thinks, from both a mechanistic philosophy that mistake metaphor for reality (his prominent example, of course, is “selfish” gene - the pathetic fallacy), and more importantly believes that theology teaches that God is basically a big human who makes a bunch of stuff. So most of the book is taken up with arguing that no classical theistic tradition defines God in this way. He uses a lot of tacks for this - God is Being itself, as opposed to beings; God is not a thing like other things; the three transcendentals of ancient philosophy - the Truth, the Good, and the Beautiful - are the ultimate ground for our motivations for action, and are other words for God as well.

3. Atheism is an opiate for the consumerism. Hart of course is much harder on atheists than Christians, but he actually does think that Christians who believe in Intelligent Design are functional atheists. Yet he thinks that both that type of Christianity and atheists are basically religions, and religions of consolation. He says, “Popular atheism is not a philosophy but a therapy” (305). Atheism in the naturalistic variety has reduced the range of questions that are possible to ask because it insist there can be no knowledge that isn’t empirically verifiable (which is, to put it mildly, one of the most idiotic statements I have ever heard from an atheist’s mouth). Ultimately this reduces the vision of humanity from the Being who is beyond us, and basically creates people who mistake the desire for beauty with pleasure, the desire for goodness with self-interest, and the pursuit of truth with knowledge to control nature. This is perfect, he thinks, for our consumeristic world.

I think this book should be read by atheists who are at least curious to disabuse themselves of the insipid and ignorant views of people like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, or whatever other supposed intellectual who talks about religion. Honestly, it’s rather incredible the breath of ignorance of a tradition of thinking that is common to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and certain forms of Hinduism, all for thousands of years. But I suppose that just illustrates his point - that our culture, in all it’s technological mastery, has become a conceptual poor, and spiritually bereft, culture.

I could make some criticism of this, and it’s the same thing I always feel with Hart - that he could more economic with his language, for instance. The other thing is that I think he really needed to engage more with specific thinkers he was arguing against, at the very least in the notes. He wanted to say that he was just offering a definition of God, not an apology for faith, but the reality is that he was arguing a lot, and he ended up sounding disingenuous at times.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was not so much a defense of theism as a description of it. An attempt to put all of those creaking strawmen to bed once and for all. There may be a tendency to think of some finite creaturely attributes, scale them upwards, and presto – this is what God is like. But God as traditionally conceived is not one being amongst a large inventory of beings (not, as it were, the one less god to believe in than Thor or Wotan that Richard Dawkins defines God as). He is the very ground in which being springs up. Or to think of God as one more thing that exists in a large inventory of all the possible things that exist. But God is that in which all the things that are the large inventory move and live and have their being. Getting that point across was the project of this book.

The train of thought was quite complex at times, at least for me. Unless you have an advanced vocabulary, it might be a good idea to keep a dictionary close at hand (fortunately I was reading an electronic edition so I could look up the words inline). Even so, one thing this book did accomplish is awakening in me a sense of awe. I think it is safe to say that all human beings walk around with a concept of God in their heads. Even atheists are not exempt from this (you cannot reject something without having some conception of what it is you are rejecting). Yet if God is a truly infinite being, it would be erroneous to say that we know one tenth of one tenth of one tenth of one tenth of all that is meant by that simple three letter word. Unless, of course, the concept of limited infinity makes any sense?

The mind, it boggles.

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

David Bentley Hart's book has a paradoxically audacious and unassuming aim, to explain "God." It is unassuming because, for the most part, he simply sketches in contemporary prose the classical concept of God. It is audacious because the classical, metaphysical concept of God has almost vanished from both the believing and unbelieving sides of contemporary God debates. Hart is relevant because he gives a philosophically weighty perspective on what science and culture can say about God, what they can't, and what they never will.

For me, the chief virtue of the book is its combination of traditional metaphysics with phenomenology. That is, he shows how the ordinary experiences of human life—or perhaps THE experience of human life—offers a window to God, the same God described by metaphysics. This explains his choice of three concepts under which he presents God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. The contingency of perceptible reality gestures toward the Being that serves as its ground and goal. The unity of human consciousness and its remarkable ability to "connect" with physical reality so as to create knowledge points toward ultimate Consciousness and Truth. The moral dimension of human consciousness, that is always oriented toward good-as-such, orients one toward the Good.

This book offers more in the way of description than argument. I have a good idea what Hart believes, but, apart from a few passages of truly remarkable insight, little argumentation is even offered at key points. One wonders if his openly derisive attitude toward analytic philosophy is in any way related to his failure to provide the kind of rigorous argumentation that an analytic philosopher could accept. Worse, while Hart exempts himself from proving premises, he frequently mocks whole groups of intellectuals who disagree with his opinions, and his specific criticisms are often directed at popular-level authors rather than representatives at his own academic level. This basic unfairness contributes to the impression that Hart is trying to get off easy, winning points through brilliant prose rather than brilliant logic, talking over rather than winning over his opponents. Furthermore, I remain unconvinced that Hart succeeds in his central task, integrating the experiential and the ontological.

Despite certain reservations, I still recommend this book. Certainly it's highly informative about ontological approaches to theology and it interacts profitably with modern philosophy at many points.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although this is a book written by one of today’s most prominent Christian theologians, it is not a Christian book. David Bentley Hart’s purpose is to demolish atheism, not to support Christian revelation. Hart’s core point is that all theistic traditions, including the Abrahamic but also the Hindu and Buddhist, and even “various late antique paganisms,” share sophisticated reasoning about God and have arrived at certain conclusions which, if not ironclad, are much more reasonable and much more convincing than atheist arguments, which are, mostly, some combination of simplistic and irrelevant. While I am not the target audience, it seems to me that an honest reader of this book is very unlikely to leave an atheist, even if he entered one, so if that is true, Hart’s book is a success.

That said, "The Experience of God" demands a great deal of the reader. It is not a book to read while distracted—it is basically a book about the epistemology of religion, an inherently difficult topic. I have never been particularly interested in philosophy, mostly because I am bad at understanding and following it, as shown by that, every single time, I have to look up the definition of “epistemology.” (On the other hand, often I suspect that when I can’t understand some exemplar of modern philosophy, say John Rawls, the fault is not mine, but that what I am being fed is gibberish.) Instead, probably due to my own personality combined with the dubious age we live in, what is to be done and how to do it retains my focus. “Action in motion” is my watchword. It has been for a long time, and the world is turning my way, it appears. Still, that requires at least some philosophical justification, so I have focused a bit more on philosophy. I’m still bad at both understanding and following philosophy, but perhaps I can educate myself into being merely mediocre. Here’s hoping.

Unlike the books of the so-called New Atheists (who, of course, are not new at all), this book is not a polemic. Hart repeatedly disclaims that he writes to show their errors, but he keeps returning to point them out, unable to resist, I suppose. His tone is mostly that of a parent trying to show an undisciplined child that everyone would be better off if we just thought through what we were doing, because the truth then becomes obvious. He attributes no malice to the New Atheists, merely immaturity, total ignorance of what theists believe and why, and the intellectual rigor of a wet noodle. Not that he’s particularly kind to them: “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, often nurtured by an infantile wish to live in a world proportionate to one’s hopes or conceptual limitations.” For example, in a semi-famous passage, he abuses Richard Dawkins for completely failing to understand Aquinas’s arguments about the existence of God, and therefore beclowning himself in his book "The God Delusion." Hart doesn’t have much more sympathy with textual fundamentalists, Christian or otherwise, who are a purely modern phenomenon, resulting from the unfortunate spread of “culturally deracinated Christians, raised without the intellectual or imaginative resources of living religious civilization.” It is just as absurd, Hart says, to view the Bible as a “digest of historical data” as it is to think that “science shows that God does not exist.” All these people should instead return to the rich thinking of the theistic traditions, and Hart is here to show us what that is, with his own special spin.

It is nearly impossible to summarize this book, at least for me; the best that can be done, it seems to me, is to note the topics Hart covers, and to make a few comments along the way. He begins by introducing his basic point, that “naturalism—the doctrine that there is nothing apart from the physical order, and certainly nothing supernatural—is an incorrigibly incoherent concept, and one that is ultimately indistinguishable from pure magical thinking.” In considerable detail, and from multiple angles, Hart patiently distinguishes between the conception of God as a demiurge, part of creation, and God as “the transcendent source and end of all contingent reality.” It is as demiurge that atheists (and many Christians) address God, and this is a category error. Unfortunately, Hart says, various strands of thought, such as Deism, have contributed to this erroneous and simplistic conception, on which supporters of “intelligent design” also effectively, and foolishly, rely—making God an argument from probability, not from reason. So what is that argument, or arguments, from reason? That’s the rest of the book.

Hart turns to the history of philosophy and its interplay with reason, as well as with the cultural backdrop of any given time. His major historical focus is the change in the early modern period to viewing the world as a machine, a byproduct of the new scientific and empirical methods. In passing, Hart also casually destroys tropes that are obviously false upon a moment’s consideration, such as that “resistance to Copernicanism in the early modern period was inspired by some desperate attachment to geocentrism prompted by the self-aggrandizing conviction that humanity occupies the center of all reality.” His central claim here is that merely because the “temporally prior physical causes of some object” can be discovered, it says nothing about the “nonexistence or conceptual emptiness of ‘higher’ forms of causality.” Materialism, which claims the contrary, “is a metaphysics of the rejections of metaphysics, a transcendental certainty of the impossibility of transcendental truth, and so requires an act of pure credence logically immune to any verification. . . .” Nor is materialism the default position, both because logically it is not, and because we do not, in fact, have any actual direct experience of the material world, only “an immediate perception of phenomena—appearances, that is—which come to us not directly through our senses, but through sensations as interpreted by thought, under the aspect of organizing eidetic patterns.” Hart is not trying to prove this higher causality directly; he is, he says, merely pointing out that rationality does not dictate any particular view of reality, including the materialist view.

From here, Hart focuses on “being, consciousness, and bliss.” “[T]hese three words are not only a metaphysical explanation of God, but also a phenomenological explanation of the human encounter with God.” I really can’t do any of this justice in a short writeup, but I’ll say a few things. As to being, Hart’s basic point is that the universe is “absolutely contingent.” “Nothing within the cosmos contains the ground of its own being.” To our minds, this a mystery, graspable only in an occasional unbidden sense of wonder, but still something about which we can reason. (And have reasoned—Hart is the first to admit that none of his thoughts here are in any way original, and in fact all are very old, though his presentation is compelling.) Naturalism/materialism, though, can say nothing at all about the contingent nature of reality. Theories of how the universe could arise from nothing are not to the contrary, for “nothing” is not the same thing as “not existing.” “The distance between being and nonbeing is qualitatively infinite.” Hart develops this at length, citing various theistic traditions for illustration. God is not a being, he is “beyond being” (and univocity is false). Hart discusses Saint Anselm and Alvin Platinga. He discusses time, and eternity as the transcending of time (a particular fascination of mine), noting that “temporal things are [not] really ‘simultaneous’ with God at all—he has no time to be simultaneous with—but rather they are present to him in a radically different way.” He talks about the infinite simplicity of God, in whom “there is not even any distinction between essence and existence.” All this is very dense, and very compelling.

Hart says of Stephen Hawking, for example, “It never crosses his mind that the question of creation might concern the very possibility of existence as such, not only of this universe but of all the laws and physical conditions that produced it. . . .” As it happens, just before I read this book I was paging through Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell, sitting on my library table (the kids were reading it) and was struck by the desperation with which he talked around this problem, nattering on that “the universe need have no beginning or end in imaginary time.” (By imaginary time he does not mean “unreal,” but time somehow multiplied by imaginary numbers, such as the square root of -1, though that’s unreal enough.) Hawking triumphantly announces that if he, Hawking, is right about this, “The universe would be entirely self-contained; it wouldn’t need anything outside itself to wind up the clockwork and set it going. Instead, everything in the universe would be determined by the laws of science. . . .” As to where those laws come from, and why their pre-existence is not “outside the universe,” Hawking is completely silent, which pretty much proves Hart’s point.

On this book’s sections on consciousness and bliss, I’ll be honest—I found both chapters difficult to comprehend. Parts, yes, but the whole was difficult for me. That is more likely my fault than Hart’s. Certainly, consciousness fascinates me, and the idea that consciousness may exist outside the brain is compelling. We know very little about consciousness, but that itself is not Hart’s point, or something he relies on. He talks about qualitative experience at length, the relationship of abstract concepts to consciousness, and much else, all to the point of making “inductive approaches to a nonmaterialist conception of the mind.” This is essentially a parallel to his point about higher orders of causality. He rejects various attempts to show consciousness does not exist—“the illusion of consciousness would have to be the consciousness of an illusion”—although he sees why men like Daniel Dennett feel obliged to deny the reality of consciousness, since its existence tends to undermine their materialist claims.

Bliss is viewed as part of the package—the point is, I think, that “in God, the fullness of being is also a perfect act of infinite consciousness that, wholly possessing the truth of being itself, forever finds its consummation in boundless delight. . . . God is the one act of being, consciousness, and bliss in whom everything lives and moves and has its being; and so the only way to know the truth of things is, necessarily, the way of bliss.” Variations on this perspective appear intertwined with thoughts on why this is so, combined with analogies and examples of relevant thought from everyone from Sufi philosophers to Plotinus.

All this is internally coherent and highly rational, though not, and not meant as, airtight logical proof of the existence of God, as conceptualized here. It does compel the conclusion that materialism must be rejected. The effect is to prepare the educated mind to engage in further thought on the specifics of revelation that may be combined with theism, which Hart has as conclusively demonstrated as it is likely to be to a mass audience. From here, for those interested in the further derivation of Christianity, specifically, I’d turn to something like Robert Louis Wilken’s "The Spirit of Early Christian Thought," which explicates the rational bases for core Christian beliefs, and the relationship of that to faith (as well as what faith is). But "The Experience of God" is invaluable to anyone who has never been exposed to anything but the malevolent pablum that is usually encountered when talking about theism as the opponent of materialism.

[David Mosley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hart's The Experience of God is a wonderfully written book expressing the basic need to understand what the major religions mean when they use the word God. Hart pulls from Judeo-Christian, Hindu, and Islamic sources to show that God does not mean a being among beings but the source, the font of all being. Hart goes on to talk about God as both consciousness and bliss, that is, the source of consciousness and bliss.

For Hart, many arguments surrounding the existence or non-existence of God have centred around misconceptions (willful or otherwise) about what we mean we use the term God. In this, Hart critiques both atheists who define God as a being among beings and some theists who have taken to arguing for God's existence in those same terms. It is to give the wrong kind of concession to argue in this fashion (deism and Intelligent Design theory tend to be at his forefront in these moments).

Instead, Hart would have us talk of God as classically defined: as source of being, consciousness, and bliss. It is in these terms that one must argue for against God's existence, recognising that for theist God's non-existence would call into question the existence of existence; or that if God is not the source of consciousness why are we conscious. In terms of bliss, Hart rightly asks why we seek happiness if materialism is true. For Hart, a materialism or naturalism cannot answer these questions. They cannot provide reasons beyond the physical for existence, consciousness, or bliss and purely physical reasons are impoverished reasons.

This is an excellent book and ought to be read by theist and atheist alike. Atheists may eschew Hart's own understanding as to the why or non-physical source questions, but the God he describes is the one they need to argue against, not the strawman so often constructed by them. I cannot recommend this book enough, though you may need a dictionary on hand as Hart has a tendency to use difficult, but usually perfectly placed words.

[Christina “6 word reviewer” Lake]

Bombastically, but forcefully, bitch-slaps atheism.

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally----a book that gives me a God I can believe in.

In this intelligent look at concepts such as consciousness, bliss, and being, David Bentley Hart shines with the brilliance of an astute philosopher and with a style that is strongly reminiscent of David Foster Wallace. I've read most of the arguments in this book before, but nowhere have I seen them amplified with such insight.

I especially love the way the author draws on Hindu, Judaic, and Islamic spiritual texts, as well as Christian, to make points and describe how the concept of God has changed over the years. If one didn't know that Hart is an Eastern Orthodox, one might gather from this that he is a professor of religion in general, or perhaps a specialist in Hinduism.

His arguments regarding Being, specifically why there is existence instead of none, is brilliantly done. I learned from his treatment that our post-Fregean society has fouled up thinking about "first cause" and "being" by treating Everything as "instances," such as THAT Tiger is *really* an INSTANCE of A tiger. That and David Lewis' All Possible Worlds stuff (which I was once attracted to and now have doubts about) makes us miss the point when thinking about unique "things" (as I am doing by referring to God as a thing).

As Deepak Chopra said on Twitter last night "According to ... science NOTHING exploded for no reason creating precise laws , space, time, matter & life." Sums it up pretty well. One can speculate that our universe might have arisen from a quantum mechanical point source, but one has not answered where the laws of quantum mechanics and gravity came from. (Note: normally I am not a fan of Chopra, but I think he hit this nail pretty squarely on the head.)

Anyway, I cannot repeat the fullness of Hart's arguments, and can only recommend that you give his book a look yourself. He is a most extraordinary writer.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading a David Bentley Hart book is to pull your chair up to the grown-up table and feast on tasty delicacies you had previously not realized existed. This is especially true of his latest book in which he argues both atheists and many Christians do not speak about God in the right way. God, argues Hart, is not just the most powerful being in the universe, someone like us only much bigger. Unfortunately, much debate about God kind of portrays God like this, really as a cosmic demiurge who is incredibly powerful but not infinite. So atheists ask silly questions like "who made God" and intelligent design advocates rope off a few jobs that God can do after allowing nature to do the rest.

This is not just Hart's opinion or some new argument, instead he shows that what he is saying is the long traditional way of speaking of God. Hart draws on the depths of not just Christian tradition, but Jewish and Muslim and Hindu. Thus this is not a Christian book, though Hart is a Christian. Hart argues that all these traditions commonly speak of God not as a really powerful being who got things moving, but as Being itself. In other words, God is not a thing among other things. Rather, God stands wholly apart.

A large portion of Hart's work is critiquing naturalism/materialism which he argues is irrational. Naturalism claims to be an all-encompassing philosophical view, but when challenged it falls far short. The problem too often is that it is simply assumed, rather than challenged.

Hart tends to come across as arrogant, which may put off some readers. He also uses many words when he could use few, as well as using words normal people, and even many who read books like this one, have never heard of. That said, this may be his best book. Compared to The Beauty of The Infinite, this book is easy. I highly recommend Hart and I definitely recommend reading this book before that other one (though I'd say The Doors of the Sea and Atheist Delusions could also be read before this one).

Be warned though - this book does not easily fit into a category. It is kind of apologetics, for Hart is arguing against naturalism and in favor of theism, but it is more than just that. Hart is not putting forth logical arguments like a Plantinga, for example. Instead he writes in an engaging style, painting a picture of two types of reality and arguing for why one picture (theism) makes much more sense. If anything, I would say those who like Christian apologetics should read this because Hart's style and theology could serve to correct much that is wrong with modern apologetics.

Hart's book is also for those who appreciate philosophical theology. He is not arguing for Christian theology and there are very few quotes from the Bible. Instead he is going big picture, theism as opposed to atheism. I enjoy such works, though I could see some, especially American evangelicals, who get upset for what Hart does not say. If you realize his purpose in writing though, it makes sense.

Overall, this is probably a top-five of all time book for me. Absolutely fantastic.

[Graychin · Rating 3 out of 5]

When he’s not getting carried away with his own vocabulary or intellect (both of them impressive), Hart can be an engaging writer. This is my third of his books and there are moments in The Experience of God which find him almost – but then not quite – Chestertonian. He’s not writing, like Chesterton, for a broad or general audience, in my opinion. He seems to be writing in the present title for current and former philosophy majors; theists of the old (as in medieval) school; theists of the newer, post-Enlightenment school in need of a history lesson; and any of the so-called “New Atheists” that may want to bone up on the opposition. The premise of the book is that in all this shouting over whether or not there’s such a thing as God no one really bothers to say what they mean by “God” – and when they do try to say what they mean they end up meaning something very different than what historical Christianity (of, say, the second to the seventeenth centuries) meant by the term, or what most major religions throughout the world have historically meant. Though modern-day theists and atheists alike fall into the trap of imagining otherwise, God is not, according to the best of the old traditions, a thing among things, a dweller in the sky, a mere prime mover, or the demiurgos of a clockwork universe. Rather, to borrow some phrasing from Aquinas (which, as Hart shows, finds impressive resonance in Jewish, Islamic and Hindu traditions), God is the “ground of being,” the condition upon which anything whatsoever exists, the creative, continuous act by which all things are held in existence from moment to moment. Through meditation on being, on consciousness, and on beauty, Hart believes, we begin to experience the God of historical theism and to unravel the false intellectual conditioning of myopic modernity. If Hart doesn’t earn an unhesitating ovation from me it’s because I think that while the book is well-packaged and well-argued, its contents are necessarily nothing fresh. Plus, Hart gets a bit too smug and polemical, while pretending not to be. Also, the book is too long. He might have compressed it into something just a tad longer than his earlier The Doors of the Sea and done everyone a favor.

[Raoul G · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll start this review by saying that this book definitely had a huge impact on my philosophical perspective. After having grown up Christian, I was a quite convinced naturalist for almost three years. This book finally made me aware of some of the loopholes of naturalism / materialism and gave me a better understanding of Classical Theism, which Hart presents as a rival theory for explaining the great mysteries of existence: being, consciousness and bliss. Classical Theism is obviously much older than naturalism, and, as Hart shows in this book, a vision shared by all the great monotheistic religions. The goal of the book is to argue that it additionally is also much more coherent. Let's tackle some of the points Hart makes.

Naturalism
Naturalism is the worldview that there is nothing apart from the physical order, and especially nothing supernatural. This implies the notion of nature as a closed system entirely sufficient to itself. The problem is that this claim can in turn not be deduced or verified empirically from within the system of nature, which makes it a metaphysical claim just like, for example, Classical Theism. Similarly, existence itself (why anything exists at all), is not a natural phenomenon. It is logically prior to nature, as there could be no nature without existence. In conclusion, Naturalism requires belief, just like Classical Theism, and in Hart's opinion, even more so.

Aristotle's four categories of causation
I want to briefly mention Aristotle's four categories of causation as I think they are very interesting and Hart nicely explained their relation to Naturalism. The four categories are, basically categories of explanations (or causes) of existence. A material cause is understood as the underlying matter from which any given thing is formed. A formal cause is what makes a particular substance the kind of thing it is (the attributes of the thing). An efficient cause can be understood to be the prompting agency that brings form and matter together into a single substance. A final cause, is the ultimate aim, purpose or effect of a thing, for example the use it was intended for, the consequences to which it is directed.
Now back to the topic of naturalism. Hart says: "To identify the material and the efficient causes of a thing could never be proof of the absence or logical superfluity of formal and final causes; and, even today, no advance in the sciences obliges us to think otherwise... After all, the sciences can shed no light upon the origin of the lawfulness that informs material nature, since they must presume that lawfulness as the prior condition of all physical theories"
Additionally to the four aristotelian causes, there is a fifth (theistic) form of causality: This ontological cause refers to the infinite source of being that donates existence to every contingent thing and the universe as the whole. And with this we have fully arrived at the core of Classical Theism.

Classical Theism
Before going on, maybe it would make sense to present Hart's rival theory to Naturalism a bit more in depth. For those not familiar with it, Classical Theism understands the nature of God through the relation between God and the order of finite being. Concretely this involves that all things receive their being continuously through God, while God himself is beyond being (meaning he is not a discrete finite being). He is being-itself, the absolute, or to borrow a term from Paul Tillich the ground of being. This, of course, is in stark contrast with notions of god as a mechanical cause or creator located within the continuum of nature. Hart calls this picture of god, god as a demiurge: a divine world-maker who intelligently designs the world but is still subject to divine principles that are outside and above him (see also: Euthyphro Dilemma for some related input). Hart thus contends that "God, properly conceived, is not a force or a cause within nature, and certainly not a kind of supreme natural explanation". In this way, funnily enough, in many of the debates about the existence of God between Atheists and fundamentalist Christians (e.g. proponents of the Intelligent Design theory), neither of the sides are talking about God in the way he is classically understood, but about a god as merely a being with superpowers.

Consciousness
The relation between brain and mind raises a lot of questions: How can matter produce subjective awareness? How can sequences of purely physical events in the brain correspond with processes of reasoning or deliberation? Does the brain produce the mind or does the mind make use of the brain? Naturalism finds itself in a dilemma here: it either believes in a ghost mysteriously animating a machine or in a machine mysteriously generating a ghost. Some thinkers try to avoid this dilemma by denying the existence of consciousness at all, but I think most readers will intuitively know that this can't be right. Explaining the qualitative dimension of experience, the existence of abstract concepts, reason and intentionality from a purely naturalist perspective is impossible. To rehash the old cogito ergo sum, in some sense it can be said that we are more certain of the existence of consciousness than we can be of anything else: "Of the material world we have compelling evidence, of course, but all of it consists in mental impressions and conceptual paradigms produced by and inhabiting the prior reality of consciousness. Of consciousness itself, however, our knowledge is immediate and indubitable. I can doubt that the world really exists, but I cannot doubt that I have intentional consciousness, since doubt is itself a form of conscious intention. This certitude is the imperturbable foundation of my knowledge of anything else."
In contrast to naturalism, God not only explains the existence of the universe, but also what Hart calls the transparency of the universe to consciousness, and the coincidence between reason and reality.

Transcendentals
Desirable things are almost always desirable in respect to to some more elementary desire. You may for example desire money, but underlying this desire there is, most of the time, a desire for, say, power and prestige. And why do we desire those? Probably, because we want happiness or some form of fulfilment. Ultimately these desires can then be traced back to the desire to participate in the goodness of being. According to Hart there is only a small number of such abstract, universal and unconditional ideals to which all other desires can be traced back. He calls those transcendentals and they mainly are truth, goodness and beauty, but also being and unity. The latter two are a bit more abstract, but I think most are familiar with what is meant by the first three in this context. The idea is that these transcendentals constitute an absolute orientation for thought. For example, "the human longing for truth involves moral constancy, a loyalty to an ultimate ideal that beckons from beyond the totality of beings". These transcendentals have the power to move us beyond the things that are imperfectly desirable in themselves towards object that we even regard as intrinsically undesirable. The desire for truth may lead us to force ourselves to hear and accept an unwelcome truth. The desire for goodness may lead us to undertake enormous efforts in the service of others (even strangers) at great personal cost. The desire for beauty may lead us to be drawn towards objects of aesthetic contemplation with no practical value for us. What this means is, that in questions of truth, beauty and morality we are ultimately dependent on a dimension of reality which is not to be found within the physical order. This is why, in Classical Theism, they coincide with that which is beyond physical order, namely God. The transcendentals form the essence of God, and to be drawn to them is already implicitly to be drawn towards God.

Conclusion
There are many nuances and even entire subjects I did not illuminate further, that Hart mentions in the book. He is a very elaborate writer and his language is highly philosophical, which made for a difficult but rewarding read. As I said in the beginning, a consequence of reading this book is that I am now more open to belief in God, even though it has to be said that the meaning I associate with this word now is totally different from that of my former beliefs. Hart helped me to open my eyes to the still existent mystery of it all and has shown me that the names attributed to it, all around the world, for hundreds of years already, all point to the same reality. I want to finish this review with a longer quote from the book that I find quite fitting here:
"If one is really to seek 'proof' one way or the other regarding the reality of God, one must recall that what one is seeking is a particular experience, one wholly unlike an encounter with some mere finite object of cognition or some particular thing that might be found among other things. One is seeking an ever deeper communion with a reality that at once exceeds and underlies all other experiences. If one could sort through all the physical objects and events constituting the universe, one might come across any number of gods (you never know), but one will never find God. And yet one is placed in the presence of God in every moment, and can find him even in the depth of the mind's own act of seeking"

[Brooks Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Positive: 1) Innovative---Hart attempts to synthesize the various traditional metaphysical schools. 2)Hart properly distinguishes the demiurge from the source of being. 3) I largely agree with Hart's conclusions drawn throughout the book.

Negative: 1) Too long---could have been half the length. 2)Only occasionally engaged with his opponents---and when he did, he tended to brush them aside without actually engaging with their ideas. 3)Frequently asserts that his position is just obvious if one gives it some thought.

[Matthias · Rating 1 out of 5]

"The Experience of God" starts out very promisingly. The entire (a)theist controversy, says Hart, has become terribly muddled, because the concept of God averred by late pagan, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu philosophers - a stance that has seen some revival under the heading of "classical theism" - has passed from popular understanding, leaving us with an overanthropomorphized God that fails to pass philosophical muster. The task he sets for this book is not even to argue for, but merely to reconstruct, the classical theist conception of God, so that thoughtful atheists can be brought into dialogue with an older tradition. The whole book is written with verve, full of both passion and wit; Hart clearly cares, and knows, a great deal about this subject.

So why did it suck? Because, having tasked himself with explaining classical theism without necessarily arguing for it, he proceeds to argue for it without much explaining it; for for all that Hart cares and knows about the putative subject, there is another matter that he cares much more, and knows much less, about. The vast majority of the book elaborates an implicit modus tollens:

1) The only viable metaphysics are classical theism and naturalism. (He offers no arguments for this, just asserts it a lot.)
2) But actually, naturalism isn't viable either. (He makes a LOT of arguments for this.)
3) Ergo, classical theism.

If the arguments buttressing (2) had merely been off-topic, they might have been saved by being persuasive (indeed, if they had been, this book would be an immensely important one); if they had merely been unpersuasive, they might have had some value in being original; if they had merely been unoriginal, Hart might have at least bothered to be polite about it. What we get instead is bilious, familiar, and ranging from atrociously bad to suggestive-at-best. And it's very nearly the whole book.

The style in which all this has been written (and which has, I confess, seeped a little into this review,) so often delectable in shorter formats, is in a book of this length merely exhausting. Have you ever read Ayn Rand's marginalia on C.S. Lewis' "Abolition of Man?" It's both intentionally and unintentionally hilarious to read someone in so high a dudgeon. At a much greater length than that it's about as entertaining as, well, her full-length works.

Throughout this book, not only in the introduction, are hints of a much better one: about the history of philosophy, about alternate ways of thinking about the concept of "existence," about mysticism. Go read something (actually) about those instead.

[David Glasgow · Rating 3 out of 5]

David Bentley Hart is too smart for his own good.

Actually, that's not a statement I can make with authority. I can say that Hart is too smart for my own good, or at least that, if this book represents Hart’s invitation to readers into relationship with a transcendent Source of Being, Consciousness, and Bliss, then it will be much smarter individuals than I who recognize and respond to this invitation.

And I should clarify further: there are many, many exciting, challenging, even appealing moments to be found in these 332 pages. My Kindle copy is well highlighted and commented, and it would be not mere overstatement but simply wrong to say that I gained nothing from reading this text. But while most spiritual traditions assert that the devoted life is one of disciplined struggle and deliberate grappling, I’m not at all sure navigating Hart’s self-congratulatory loquaciousness is the kind of struggle they have in mind.

Hart’s premise—or, at least, the statement with which he chooses to begin and end his treatment—is that “atheism may really be only a failure to see something very obvious.” And were such gentle enticement the predominant idiom in the book, it might have been a most powerful tool for persons of faith seeking loving productive conversation with naturalist/humanist/atheist colleagues and friends. But Hart instead swaddles the “being, consciousness, and bliss” he would have us celebrate with mind-numbing academic logorrhea.

And this attempt (as I assume it is) to connect his assertion with the minds and souls of other philosophical and theological traditions throughout history more than fails; instead his relentless insertion of untranslated vocabulary words, his picking of nits in the writings of other philosophers, and (most frustratingly of all) the categorically disdainful condescension with which he speaks of atheism, come across as the desperate babble of an insecure pupil—as though he hopes the sheer volume of his words will preempt any attempt to disagree or develop upon his thoughts. Has Hart ever experienced Bliss, I wondered more than once, or has he only read about it?

As a philosophy textbook, this tome might be valuable. For a reader seeking the language to communicate timeless truths in a pluralistic society, it leaves much to be desired.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great affirmation of the traditional theism against the materialism and atheism of modernity. As scientific and materialist oriented moderns, we lost sight of the great mysteries of our existence that point to God (for example: being as the fundamental and transcendent cause of all beings, conscience as the first person/unity that is directed and rationalizes reality, bliss as the conscious experience of being, the pursuit of truth in itself, moral standings, and so on) and live in the dogmatic and simplified reality of beings as presented by natural science, technology, their ontology and methods. In other words, we take a grotesque semblance of reality for reality and are convinced that we definitively and with good reasons dismissed God. Moreover; most of the current Christianity that seeks proofs for God's existence in the real world and follows the positivist and scientific line of argument (for example the whole counter-movement of “intelligent design”), completely lost sight of the theistic God-head and fell into materialism and atheism.
The entire ontological argument presented in this book boils down to the ontological difference between being/God and beings – being gives existence to all beings, but is not itself a being. Moreover, we cannot arrive at God by understanding beings. The modern sciences and their methods, are just oversimplified and dogmatic tools to comprehend and manipulate specific and limited beings. As such, any extrapolation and pretense to use them in order to comprehend the rest of beings or to dismiss any transcendence is out of order and absurd.
The book is quite polemic and anchored in the current debates (for example against books like “The selfish gene”, “The God delusion”, and so on). As such, when these books go out of fashion, this book will probably follow them -- and this is a pity since this book takes the argument much deeper. Moreover, there are out there even more fundamental critiques of modernity and its projects, of the limits and poverty of modern sciences, the rejection of progress and the need of recovering the tradition, and so on – and all of these without the need to employ and defend concepts like – infinity, subject and object, real and objectivity, truth as certainty or correspondence, logic as method, reason as essence, substantiality of the real and the spirit, and so on.

[Josh Issa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow okay I have a lot to say about this book.

David sections the book into three parts: 1. The difference between God and gods 2. The meaning of the word God 3. The experience of God.

1. This is probably my favourite section of the book where he clarifies a misunderstanding a lot of people have: by God we do not mean a specific god here or there or some cosmic Creator, but that which we live, move, and have our being in. He very provocatively (though correctly) identifies that all the major religions (ancient Greek, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, Buddhist, and Hindu) have the same fundamental understanding of that which sustains reality itself.

2. This part is split into three further sections of being, consciousness, and bliss where by God we mean that which serves as the ontological source and sustainer of these three categories. The first category is extremely high quality and really brings out a clear understanding of God not as some Intelligent Designer but that which truly gives existence to things. The next two categories suffer more from David spending too much time arguing for supernatural reality and not enough time on how they pull out the meaning of the word God.

3. The final part, David argues that the picture argued for by atheism is empty and bleak (on top of being intellectually wrong), but that living in the reality of God actually gives meaning to things. He explores and recommends the shared religious practice of contemplative prayer as a way to connect to and experience God.

“If one could sort through all the physical objects and events constituting the universe, one might come across any number of gods (you never know), but one will never find God. And yet one is placed in the presence of God in every moment, and can find him even in the forth of the mind’s own act of seeking.”

“Contemplative prayer is the art of seeing reality as it truly is; and, if one has not yet acquired the ability to see God in all things, one should not imagine that will be able to see God in himself.”

[Joni · Rating 2 out of 5]

smug in the extreme and moderate in eloquence. convincing only in its argument against acnic fedora materialism which critique, however, being standard fare within the profession, is conveyed through a makeshift collage of recycled insights taken, sillily, to anticipate the recurrence of rational religion while in reality destroying its relevance in full. his pseudo-ecumenical concept of god (the violent dissemination of which seems to be the text's only errand) he managed to stammer forth 67 times without the slightest variation before the argument was left off hanging like an unsalved pagan corpse, self-strangled, deliverance-denied, drained of grace. i expected little and, remarkably, got nothing. the concluding chapter is a sentimental aggregate of hopeful vignettes comparable to those spontaneous outpourings of deep feeling that sometimes surface at creationist after parties, only less restrained in speculative nerve. for those who think their faith can stand the perils of outrageous shrinkage: read it and shake

[Evan Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

This should be required reading for a person before they say “I don’t believe in God” or even “I believe in God”. This book made me realize that most people (myself included) do not have a great understanding of the concept of “God” as traditionally defined by the major theistic philosophies & religions down through history. Thankfully I learned a ton from DBH on this. He is also a fantastic writer which made this read fun. I will say the chapter on consciousness is very dense. It probably requires a basic understanding of the philosophy of mind (which I do not have). I’ll revisit it eventually because I trust it’s worthwhile to grasp since literally everything else in this book was.

_______
“Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the end of experience…the path to true wisdom, then, is the path of return, by which we might find our way back to the knowledge of God in our first apprehension of the inseparable mysteries of being, consciousness, and bliss. Our return to that primordial astonishment, moreover, must be one in which we bring along all we learned in departing from it, including the conceptual language needed to translate wonder into knowledge.”

“More simply, we shall arrive at a way of seeing that sees God in all things, a joy that encounters God in the encounter with all reality; we shall find that all of reality is already embraced in the supernatural, that God is present in everything because everything abides in God, and that God is known in all experience because it is the knowledge of God that makes all other experience possible. That, at least, we should seek. For the most part, though, we pass our lives amid shadows and light, illusions and revelations, uncertain of what to believe or where to turn our gaze. Those who have entirely lost the ability to see the transcendent reality that shows itself in all things, and who refuse to seek it out or even to believe the search a meaningful one, have confined themselves for now within an illusory world, and wander in a labyrinth of dreams. Those others, however, who are still able to see the truth that shines in and through and beyond the world of ordinary experience, and who know that nature is in its every aspect the gift of the supernatural, and who understand that God is that absolute reality in whom, in every moment, they live and move and have their being - they are awake.”

[Paul H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may sound a tad hyperbolic, but Experience of God should probably be required reading for the entire human race. Everyone should read this book at about age 12 or 13, just to clear up the incredibly persistent misconceptions in popular culture about what God is or is not.

The title is a bit misleading; Hart rarely talks about the experience of God. Rather, this is a defense of theism against materialism, and also an apologia for theism as such. Even if you disagree with theism, you should at least attempt to understand what you're disagreeing with.

I've read a lot of theology (across the Catholic, Orthodox, etc., traditions) but it's hard for me to think of any single volume that is as essential or well-argued as this one, at least for the layman. (Also, Hart thankfully pared down his usual pretentiousness for this book, likely at the advice of his editors.)

[David Withun · Rating 5 out of 5]

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[Scriptor Ignotus · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book touched me in all the right places. I laughed; I cried; I made "ontological" an integral part of my daily vocabulary. I read the entirety of this book aloud to my ailing grandmother, and I plan on distributing copies to all of the children in my neighborhood on Halloween. At the moment I finished it, a bald eagle named Thomas Aquinas flew into my room and shed a single tear.

All joking aside, this is a very important book, and if enough people read it, as everyone should, it would do much to elevate our pitiful popular discourse about religion and the transcendent.

As the subtitle suggests, the book addresses three major topics and how they are understood in the context of classical theism. These terms are Being, Consciousness, and Bliss. The subtitle was taken from the composite term Satchidananda. Being (sat), Consciousness (cit), and Bliss (ananda), according to Vedantic Hinduism, are the three subjective modes through which one experiences Brahman: the ultimate, universal, transcendent reality of all things. Hart, as an Orthodox Christian, probably enjoys how close this conception comes to the classical Christian theology of the Holy Trinity, but he is commendably reserved about his particularly Christian mode of belief. Instead, he references some of the great thinkers of Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike to refer to an ontological conception of God which, tragically, has been either entirely forgotten or deliberately obfuscated by the forces of mechanistic modernism. This work is a gesture towards its revival.

To start with, Hart gives us a brief intellectual history in which he relates how the various metaphysical visions of being and matter espoused by the ancients were pushed aside, beginning mainly in the seventeenth century, by a purely mechanistic approach to reality. Whereas philosophers like Plato and Aristotle and theologians of all the great religious traditions conceived of a universe in which the particulars of materiality were both sustained and transcended by some ontological source of being, and physical objects and processes were considered in relation to their immaterial forms, and all of existence (and the life of man within that existence) was oriented toward some sort of teleological finality, the advent of the modern scientific method led to a new approach to reality in which the ontological questions of form and finality were simply bracketed out of the discussion, and science became a field for the purely empirical observation of mechanistic physical processes within the material universe.

This wasn't inherently a bad thing. To the contrary, the spectacular success of scientific method within the last four centuries was made possible in large part because of the limited scope of its explanatory ambition and its lack of conjecture on extra-physical topics like ontology or teleology.

The problem is that during the Enlightenment, this bracketing out of form and finality, this abstention from metaphysics, was championed as a comprehensive metaphysics of its own. Mechanistic materialism (or naturalism; Hart uses the terms interchangeably) was arbitrarily raised up by its proponents from being a limited method of observation to the status of ultimate, cosmic truth. There was nothing to be reckoned with outside of matter. Religion, instead of resisting this intellectual shift, instead became swept along by it, and God was reintroduced into this mechanistic universe as merely the first and greatest physical cause; the demiurge; the deistic god who set the material universe in motion and now sits on his cloud and watches events unfold, rather than the transcendent God of classical theology: the ontological source and sustenance of being itself. Not a thing from which other things are derived, but that which is responsible for thingness itself.

The modern debate over the existence of God has revolved almost exclusively over this demiurgic God of western modernity, and for that reason it is entirely fatuous. As Hart puts it in one of many eloquent passages:

"Thus in the modern period the argument between theism and atheism largely became no more than a tension between two different effectively atheist visions of existence. As a struggle between those who believed in this god of the machine and those who did not, it was a struggle waged for possession of an already godless universe."

So what is wrong with an entirely materialistic conception of reality? What is wrong with declaring that matter is all that there is? According to Hart, such a conception is rendered inadequate by its own premises. Paradoxically, a strict materialist has no grounds on which to claim that materialism is true. Since it is only concerned with matter, and can only address propositions based on material observation, materialism as a supposed ideology cannot make any declarative statement, either affirmative or in denial, about anything beyond the material plane. As Hart says in another great passage:

"[Naturalism] is a metaphysics of the rejection of metaphysics, a transcendental certainty of the impossibility of transcendental truth, and so requires an act of pure credence logically immune to any verification...Thus naturalism must forever remain a pure assertion, a pure conviction, a confession of blind assurance in an inaccessible beyond; and that beyond, more paradoxically still, is the beyond of no beyond"

According to Hart, merely by knowing nature, we have already gone beyond the limits of naturalism as a closed, self-explanatory continuum. Merely by registering that a natural object is, we have taken onboard an ontological claim about existence itself. Thus we cannot really access "nature" at all; as Hart says, "we can approach nature only across the interval of the supernatural."

Hart then uses this revival of classical ontology to critique the recent efforts of neuroscience to "materialize" the phenomenon of consciousness. Hart suggests that to attribute the "illusion" of consciousness - the sense of true subjectivity and selfhood, the sense of "what it is like" to experience something as a subjective entity - as the sum total of electrochemical processes within the brain may be just as fruitless in explaining consciousness as the genetic fallacy of mechanistic materialism is in explaining the ontological reality of being itself. One may find, in short, that the gap between consciousness and non-consciousness may be just as categorical and un-traversable by the physical sciences as the ontological gap between being and non-being.

Everyone should read this book. Whether or not one accepts Hart's arguments, they certainly elevate the discussion far above the prosaic Dawkins vs. William Lane Craig paradigm of religious debate.

[Ethan Zimmerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

To call this book "life-changing" would be premature given that I just finished it. Nevertheless, it was paradigm shifting - no doubt in part because it brought together, clarified, and strengthened seemingly disparate personal ruminations from the last several months.

Here DBH clarifies what is meant by the term "God" across the great metaphysical religious traditions through three phenomenological moments - being, consciousness, and bliss. While he aims to be primarily descriptive, he also engages apologetically in contemporary debates over atheism, theism, intelligent design, and materialism. It's highly enlightening and invigorating.

My main complaints are that DBH, more frequently than I wish, engages in polemics instead of argumentation. His writing can be caustic, self-absorbed, and repetitious such that some find him insufferable. But if you stick with his arguments, you will likely find his wit and reason tremendously sharp and challenging.

[Simon Stegall · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think a lot of religious folks (at least the intellectually brave ones who engage with the current body of scientific knowledge rather than just inventing a cult cosmology that keeps them comfortable) are often intimidated by the ever more complex advances in the sciences and the seemingly deterministic world they reveal. How can we take religious experiences seriously when they can be reliably induced in a lab by zapping the brain? Why should we think that consciousness is not simply a complex flow of neurological data, no different from a computer's algorithms and no less determined? How can we assert personal responsibility in the face of the sovereignty of the genes? Why should we believe in God when science, in Laplace's words, has "no need of that hypothesis?"

David Bentley Hart dispatches these ideas with the dismissiveness they deserve. The fact is that science and metaphysics are (almost by definition) fields which have very little to say about each other. Whether or not God exists (not as some demiurge permeating the vaccuum and fashioning nebulae for fun, but as the a priori from which all matter sprang and continues to draw its being) is not something that science, being necessarily restricted to the material world, can address. Neurological impulses can induce a "religious experience" just as they can induce the "sensation" of hearing "music," but this does not mean that music is actually being heard by the zapped patient, but merely that the brain is an organ which can be deceived by a clever technician. No prolonged examination of conscious thought can maintain the pretension that anything a computer does remotely resembles thinking. And genes are far less well understood than the popular atheists would have us believe.

A lot of the confusion about science's ability to answer the fundamental ontological questions stems from logical as well as categorical flaws. David Hart does a wicked job of demonstrating this in (sometimes tiresome) detail. But the alleviation of science's metaphysical burden is only the first step. The real questions come next: if science can only address the physical, what reasons do we have to suppose a metaphysical? And this is where the great religions of the world (much maligned in our modern times) have volumes- libraries, in fact- to say.

DBH believes (and I happen to agree) that the existence of God is logically obvious and more or less irrefutable (unless one accepts an innately absurd and meaningless universe in which rational thought is not possible and even this sentence is only presenting the illusion of language; which is a perfectly consistent, although nihilistic and miserable, position). The ontological question- why does anything exists? what is being? -can only be answered, logically, by supposing an infinite Being, perfectly simple, perfectly good, outside matter and time. This is not a question of the temporal beginning of the universe; if we suppose (for instance) that the universe has always existed, that still does not answer the question of why it exists. There are other avenues to God: the phenomenon of beauty, the mystery of consciousness, the teleological bent of all human will, etc. These are things that proponents of a deterministic materialism cannot explain (not that that stops them trying).

This book is essentially a very long proof for the existence of God- not the God of Christianity or Islam, necessarily, just God as the a priori wellspring of Being. To that end, it's a very persuasive book. DBH is not in the least dismissive of science proper- he clearly has researched the topics at hand and knows more about genetics and quantum theory than I ever will- but he does relegate it to its proper category, and allows logic and existential experience to carry us into realms the empirical method cannot touch. He does ramble a bit in the middle sections, but rarely for long, and his logic is intuitive, inescapeable, and steeped in the ancient theistic traditions from Sufi mysticism to the Abrahamic religions. Obviously not everyone will be convinced; but I truly think everyone preoccupied with these questions should give this volume a try.

[Banner · Rating 5 out of 5]

What do you mean by the word, "God"? Or more specifically what is your definition of the word, "God"? A person's answer to that question would be based on a whole set of ideas, one's worldview and culture. Our author seeks to answer this question from the viewpoint of the classic beliefs of the major religions of the world. While this is a daunting task, the discussion is limited to the strict understand of "God". There is a vast well of knowledge pulled from classical western philosophy, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Christian traditions.

Hart begins with a statement of purpose, which secondarily would include polemic vocabulary. If you attempt to define God, according to the stated parameters, then it goes without saying that you believe God exists. However, I want to stress that this is not work of apologetics. Yet, it does have this flavor but I believe only incidentally.

One of the elements I found most illuminating, were the discussions on the limits of the materialistic worldview to understand all of reality. This thread ran throughout the book, but was introduced comprehensively in this beginning section. Science is an extremely valuable method of understanding reality, however much of current western culture has transformed this valuable method into the only way to view reality. At this point I found dialogue that would be fruitful to all truth seekers (regardless of one's view on theism). This concept, as presented was truly mind expanding and refreshing honest in the approach to understand reality.

To understand what is meant by God, we have to examine our experienced reality. Now at this point many (including myself) are skeptical. I view ultimate reality, as we would seek to explain through the scientific method as one that, yes while experienced, is also qualitatively definable. A theist at this point, might appeal to the Intelligent Design concept of reality. Hart rejects this concept of God as limited and not satisfactory explanatory of reality as we experience it.

Three concepts of reality are introduced to help us understand and define God; Being, Consciousness and Bliss. These concepts go way beyond a Webster's definition of these words. Again, my skepticism was present when I brought a preconceived definition to the table (I was thinking New Age, eastern mysticism). Now sciences contribution to understanding these concepts are not rejected off handedly, but examined and questioned quite effectively. The majority of the research in these areas are presented in the footnotes.

To quote one sentence in the concluding section, "Knowledge of any reality is to be sought out in terms appropriate to the kind of reality it is." He encourages us to seek God or to understand reality (which is ultimately the same thing) not through just one method, but through experience; which is how we can only understand anything about reality, regardless of the method or approach in learning that we use. Similar to the other concepts discussed, the concept of experience is not defined in traditionally religious language. Experience is how we understand all reality, even that discovered empirically.

This was an extremely thought provoking, challenging and yes I'll say it again, mind expanding read. The language was academic and the concepts were labyrinthine. But it is one of the most rewarding books I have read. And though it may sound cliche, this is a truth seekers book.

[Samuel Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Too polemical by half, this wonderfully entertaining and deeply considered book seems to me Hart's "mere Theism", parallel to Lewis's "mere Christianity." While he makes various minor errors and over-reaches, and there is altogether too much bluster in the book, I found myself recognizing a kindred mind in its pages. Stripped of the polemics, this is a highly readable, elegant survey of the core claims of most theism over the span of human history. Even as I live and love a religious tradition that distinguishes itself in notorious ways from classical theism, I found myself moved and delighted by this polished consideration of the witness to truth, beauty and consciousness in classical theism. I think the polemical tone will make this book uninteresting to most agnostics or atheists, even though it could serve usefully as a primer to classical theism at its best and clearest. For many beleaguered believers, the polemics may serve a useful service as counter-balance to the strident non-sense of Teh Ditchkens, so I'm not persuaded that the book should have been written without the polemics.

As a believer and skeptic by temperament, I loved the book, even if the archly polemical tone got old, for me, after about 10 pages.