A God That Grounds All Things, Ctd

Oliver Burkeman expands on Damon Linker’s reading of David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God.  He calls Hart’s work “the one theology book all atheists really should read”:

God, in short, isn’t one very impressive thing among many things that might or might not exist; “not just some especially resplendent object among all the objects illuminated by the light of being,” as Hart puts it. Rather, God is “the light of being itself”, the answer to the question of why there’s existence to begin with. … Since I can hear atheist eyeballs rolling backwards in their sockets with scorn, it’s worth saying again: the point isn’t that Hart’s right. It’s that he’s making a case that’s usually never addressed by atheists at all. If you think this God-as-the-condition-of-existence argument is rubbish, you need to say why. And unlike for the superhero version, scientific evidence won’t clinch the deal. The question isn’t a scientific one, about which things exist. It’s a philosophical one, about what existence is and on what it depends.

But too often, instead of being grappled with, this argument gets dismissed as irrelevant. Sure, critics argue, it might be intriguing, but only a handful of smartypants intellectual religious people take it seriously. The vast majority of ordinary folk believe in the other sort of God.

As Hart points out, there are two problems with this dismissal.

First, you’d actually need to prove the point with survey data about what people believe. But second, even if you could show that most believers believe in a superhero God, would that mean it’s the only kind with which atheists need engage? If a committed creationist wrote a book called The Evolution Delusion, but only attacked the general public’s understanding of evolution, we’d naturally dismiss them as disingenuous. We’d demand, instead, that they seek out what the best and most acclaimed minds in the field had concluded about evolution, then try dismantling that. Which is also why atheists should read Hart’s book: to deny themselves the lazy option of sticking to easy targets.

Isaac Chotiner is less convinced that Hart’s book poses a serious challenge to atheist thought:

I cannot speak for everyone, of course, and the amount of time I have spent with deeply religious people (Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims) is relatively limited. But I have talked somewhat extensively with people in each of these religions and not a single one of them has ever described his or her belief in God in anything like these terms. As Jerry Coyne puts it in response to Linker, “Yes, it turns out that the 99% of believers who see God as an anthropomorphic being are wrong, and only the theologians—that is, some theologians—truly know what God is.” (Ideas such as answered prayers, or the parting of the seas, don’t really mesh with what Linker is laying out.)

But let’s say Linker is right and many people do believe in this type of God. He still seems to be conceding that less “transcendent” beliefs in God don’t make much sense, or at least that atheists who confront these beliefs are not confronting a strong case for God. This is a giant concession.

Linker fires back at Chotiner and Coyne:

The charges against me (and Hart, whose book neither Chotiner nor Coyne has read) boil down to two: Practically no one holds the view of God that I sketched in my review, and even if they did, that view is nonsensical. The core of my response is simply to say that the classical theism that Hart elaborates in his book and that I cursorily laid out in my review is far more widely held than Chotiner and Coyne appear to believe. It is found, in varying forms, in the work of Christian (Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Thomas Aquinas), Jewish (Maimonides), and Muslim (Avicenna) theologians, as well as numerous Hindu and Sikh sages. All of these sundry thinkers, and many others, describe a God who is (in Hart’s words) “the infinite fullness of being, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, from whom all things come and upon whom all things depend for every moment of their existence, without whom nothing at all would exist.” Chotiner and Coyne are free, of course, to follow A.J. Ayer and other strict logical positivists in saying that such language is meaningless mumbo jumbo. But they should understand that in taking that tack they are going easy on themselves in the way that people always do when they dismiss their opponents rather than engage with them.

Coyne rejoins the debate:

[I]t’s obvious that the bulk of harm committed in the name of religion is done by those not who see god as a Ground of Being, but rather as an anthropomorphic entity who has a personal relationship with his minions and supplies them with a moral system. For it is the belief that God has wishes for humanity, and a code of right and wrong, that drives people to do things like oppose abortion and stem cell research, deny rights to women and gays, burn “witches,” throw acid in the faces of schoolgirls, and torture Catholics with guilt about masturbation and divorce.

The vast majority of believers don’t even read theology, and are barely aware of the arguments for God made by Sophisticated Theologians™. So is it our duty as atheists to refute those arcane theological arguments, or to prevent instead the harm done by religion? To me, the latter course is preferable. Still it’s both fun and intellectually profitable to read and refute the arguments of theologians, for it’s only there that one can truly see intelligence so blatantly coopted and corrupted to prove what one has decided beforehand must be true. Theology is the only academic discipline where people get paid not to investigate their beliefs, but to rationalize them. Certainly it’s more useful for atheists to point out to “average” believers the lack of evidence for their faith—and that is precisely what Dawkins did in The God Delusion—but it’s more fun to chase the tails of obscurantists like Alvin Plantinga and John Haught.