Delusions & Commitments

Of all the books I've read in the last year or so, one of the best was David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions. Hart is an Orthodox theologian of immense historical knowledge and logical skill. One of my friends recently remarked that he thought Hart had written a book about the positive contributions of Christianity to culture and politics - and then, as an afterthought, or by way of a persuasive editor, tacked on a critique of New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. I think that's probably true, although it's difficult for me to say which of the two parts comprising this book I like more. I find the critique of new atheist arguments compelling and immensely entertaining, but I am particularly enthusiastic about Hart's claims concerning the political implications of Christian doctrine.

Alas, I don't have time for a full review of this book now, but I want to point you to Hart's recent article, Believe It Or Not, in First Things. This picks up a number of his arguments from Atheist Delusions, but goes even farther in with respect to criticizing new atheist logic. Hart's style is a bit abrasive, meant I think to match the style of the new atheists, and his critiques withering, but knowledge and logic give one confidence, I suppose.

One of the things that stands out to me in the article is Hart's confident assertion of the positive role traditional Christianity played in shaping contemporary notions of liberty and equality. Another point, perhaps more powerful in the book length argument, is the positive role that Christianity played in shaping western notions of science. The thing that we should take away from all of this is the realization that religion is probably not going to go away - precisely because humans want their lives to have meaning, to be meaningful, and we shall probably never develop a scientific way of understanding religion - because religion, as it's lived and experienced, is primarily hermeneutic. Science is very good for discovering some kinds of truth, but making and understanding meaning is not one of them.

Another crucial point that Hart makes is that most of what atheists argue against is nothing at all what religious people believe. In this sense, many of the arguments against God are often arguments against a particular version of God that no one believes in. Thus Hart:

But something worse than mere misunderstanding lies at the base of Dawkins’ own special version of the argument from infinite regress—a version in which he takes a pride of almost maternal fierceness. Any “being,” he asserts, capable of exercising total control over the universe would have to be an extremely complex being, and because we know that complex beings must evolve from simpler beings and that the probability of a being as complex as that evolving is vanishingly minute, it is almost certain that no God exists. Q.E.D. But, of course, this scarcely rises to the level of nonsense. We can all happily concede that no complex, ubiquitous, omniscient, and omnipotent superbeing, inhabiting the physical cosmos and subject to the rules of evolution, exists. But who has ever suggested the contrary?

It's also refreshing that Hart is willing to grant nearly everything to serious-minded atheists, but what he feels compelled to reject are half-hearted or dogmatic believers in nothing who want to live with few serious commitments. For this reason, he recommends Nietzsche as the kind of atheist to be - one who understands full and well the deep import and meaning offered by Christianity, but still rejects it, rather than the kind that superficially and wrongly defines Christianity then turns away to their own dogmatic assertions that there is no God as if this constituted an argument against dogmatic religious belief.