Review of David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven and London

Michelle Rebidoux

One thing, certainly, can be said about David Bentley Hart’s book and it is this: that its author takes atheism very seriouslyor rather, the “New Atheism,” as it is called, a recent ideologico-cultural “movement” whose proponents are mainly scientists who, through the publication over the past decade or so of a string of popular (and often best-selling) books, seek to debunk the “God theory” within the context of a strictly materialist / naturalist understanding of the world. But don’t get me wrong: when I say that Hart takes the New Atheism seriously, I do not suggest that he himself sits within its camp. Rather, the whole point of Hart’s book is, in a fairly lively and (admittedly often humorously) caustic polemical spirit, to, first of all, debunk the New Atheists’ own debunking by demonstrating that their definition of “God” (or rather, lack of coherent definition) is not only distressingly unsophisticated, but also, in their clear lack of interest in even trying to learn anything at all about what the major religious traditions of the world actually say about “God,” appallingly infantile; and secondly, to offer instead a more sophisticated definition of “God” deeply rooted in the traditions and (which is most to the point) adequate in its address of the three experientially intractable phenomena that a strictly naturalistic explanation of the universe is finally simply incapable of accounting for: namely, being, consciousness, and bliss. Indeed, says Hart, a truly adequate appreciation of these three phenomena as the basis for a more philosophically refined definition of God ultimately renders naturalism (and with that atheism) itself incoherent as a position: “Faith in God is not something that can ever be wholly and coherently rejected, even if one refuses all adherence to creeds and devotions” (p. 287).