Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Review of Hart


My review of David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God appears in Pro Ecclesia, Vol. XXV, No. 1 (the Winter 2016 issue).  (Yes, the book has been out for a while, but the review was written almost a year ago.  The review doesn’t seem to be online at the moment, unfortunately.)

While on the subject of Hart, I might note that many readers have called my attention to William Lane Craig’s recent comments about Hart’s views and mine.  I’ll respond in a forthcoming post.

55 comments:

  1. Craig's most substantive complaint seems to be that if God is a wholly different kind of being (to speak colloquially) then we can't really know about him. But that's right: we cannot really grasp God in any comprehensive way, God is a mystery. However, that doesn't mean we can know anything about God. Our goodness is still like God's goodness (again to speak colloquially). So, I think Craig's argument fails.

    His other argument is that the God of classical theism doesn't match that of scripture. I think our host has dealt with that before.

    However, in some ways, Craig is more of a classical theist than he does allow. He does believe that the world cannot for a moment do without God sustaining it, for example. So, he's more confused than someone who rejects classical theism wholesale. I suspect a lot of "theistic personalists" are like that. I know I was.

    ----

    He also seems to not know the difference between Classical Theism and Thomism. Thomism is one form of classical theism, but it is not the only one.

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    1. Agreed. Dr Craig, to whom we all owe a lot for his intelligent devotion, seems to lose sight of the reasonableness and wonder of God's divine simplicity , which I see as ontologically essential.. pun intended.

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  2. Slightly OT.

    David Bentley Hart sometimes goes out of his way to deprecate the idea that God has emotions. I'm inclined to think that goes too far. If our emotions derive their being from God, then they must reflect something analagous in God. Divine Impassibility isn't really about whether God has emotions per se, but about whether any created being can affect those emotions, and thus cause him to change.

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  3. Unrelated, but I got a C in my constitutional law because I knew a thing or two about Locke from professor Ferer's Locke.
    My mind blocked everything else and it all got mixed up, but this stayed. So thank you professor for your help with my exams.

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  4. Pretty sure that makes you way more qualified to teach constitutional law at any major university in the country than the current occupant of the White House.

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  5. William Lane Craig's account of Thomism seems to crucially leave out the doctrine of the Transcendentals and of participation in general...

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  6. Looking forward to it!

    His biggest issue seems to be that he cannot imagine the God of classical theism being personally relatable as the Father described in the bible. It almost comes across as deistic to WLC.

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  7. @Whitefrozen Yes, Norman Geisler is a Thomist. He has a very succinct defense of classical theism/Thomism in his Systematic Theology. He also wrote a short essay about the compatibility of Thomistic Philosophy with Evangelicalism.

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  8. I listened to the linked material and judged Craig's remarks about as measured and fair as extemporaneous remarks are ever likely to be.

    Most would probably admit that there is much in the Scriptures which could be construed in a "personalist" sense; and that if Craig wishes to draw back a bit when the personalist label is applied to him, they don't see it as a big deal.

    The average Christian man would certainly have a conception of God that is "personalist" in some sense, if not rather anthropomorphic; and that is placing aside the question of the man-God.

    As a narrow "debate" between academic philosophers on how that concept of God abstracted from metaphoric language ought to understood at the limits, it probably is of interest and importance.

    Nothing to get het up about though, I think.

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  9. I listened up to this point in Craig's comments:

    "The God of the bible is described as holy, loving us, the creator of the world, etc., but all of those things are denied by Thomists"

    I am not a committed Thomist, but this comment of Craig's is absurd.

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    1. Agreed.. it was a very, very strange comment. Thomas informs us that God's holiness and love is everything we can imagine and BEYOND.. not absent. Strange comment. Oh well.

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  10. Hey Thursday,

    I'm curious as to what gave you the impression that Hart denies that God has emotions? I've read carefully everything he's published on divine impassibility and he will be a major interlocutor in my dissertation when I treat of the issue, and the strong impression that I have is that he basically sees things the same way you do, viz., that the Trinitarian life of God is flooded with joy, delight, exuberance that is "ever-greater" as the persons give themselves to one another, but, that God transcends creation and the creaturely dichotomy between gift and reception, and that, therefore, God cannot be affected by any external reality (see especially _The Beauty of the Infinite_ on this. When he talks about the divine love not being a "mere emotion," I think he has in mind the petty sentimentalism that predominates popular culture rather than affectivity in a philosophically robust sense.

    At any rate, do let me know if I missed something.

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  11. Just to get onto the e-mail list for comments.

    jj

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  12. Ed,

    Unless I missed something, it looks like review isn't available at the Pro Ecclesia site without a subscription. Is it available anywhere else without one?

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  13. Thursday,

    "Craig's most substantive complaint seems to be that if God is a wholly different kind of being (to speak colloquially) then we can't really know about him. But that's right: we cannot really grasp God in any comprehensive way, God is a mystery. However, that doesn't mean we can know anything about God. Our goodness is still like God's goodness (again to speak colloquially)."

    Is it though? If God is wholly different, then our goodness is not like God's. Our goodness, like everything else, would be wholly different to God's.

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  14. continued...

    Divine simplicity would entail that God's goodness cannot be some extension or part of God, neither contingent. God = Goodness, so if God is wholly different, then his goodness is wholly different.

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  15. @Billy: "Is it though? If God is *wholly* different, then our goodness is not like God's. Our goodness, like everything else, would be *wholly* different to God's."

    "To say that God’s goodness may be different in kind from man’s goodness, what is it but saying, with a slight change of phraseology, that God may possibly not be good? To assert in words what we do not think in meaning, is as suitable a definition as can be given of a moral falsehood. [...] If, instead of the 'glad tidings' that there exists a Being in whom all the excellences which the highest human mind can conceive, exist in a degree inconceivable to us, I am informed that the world is ruled by a being whose attributes are infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, not what are the principles of his government, except that 'the highest human morality which we are capable of conceiving'"[*] does not sanction them; convince me of it, and I will bear my fate as I may. But when I am told that I must believe this, and at the same time call this being by the names which express and affirm the highest human morality, I say in plain terms that I will not. Whatever power such a being may have over me, there is one thing which he shall not do: he shall not compel me to worship him. I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures;* and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go."--Mill, *An Examination of William Hamilton’s Philosophy,* "The Philosophy of the Conditioned, as Applied by Mr. Mansel to the Limits of Religious Thought"

    I brought that up delicately three or four times before. I heard a rumor once that Dr. Feser was going to address analogy, once he got off his plate several of the other big projects already on it.

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  16. OK, but that just means I misspoke in using the word wholly. Dr. Feser may indeed want to discuss analogy and the difference between our being and God's being.

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  17. @Thursday: "OK, but that just means I misspoke in using the word wholly. Dr. Feser may indeed want to discuss analogy and the difference between our being and God's being."

    I hope so. :) Eh, I've been here for years, I can be patient.

    (Yes, I *have* read some other books on the topic.)

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  18. "I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures ..."



    I like it when people talk bold and strident egoistic nonsense like that. Their suffering bothers me so much less, if at all.

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  19. Craig should contemplate Erich Pzywara's Analogia Entis.

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  20. @DNW: "I like it when people talk bold and strident egoistic nonsense like that. Their suffering bothers me so much less, if at all."

    Heh. :)

    ↑That's the attention-getting part. The actual argument comes earlier in the chapter.

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  21. Ed, I hope you interact with his argument he cites in his book, Philosophical Foundations of a Christian Worldview. I can supply you scanned copies of the pages if needed.

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  22. Skyliner:

    I haven't tracked down the source, so perhaps I misheard Hart. Or perhaps he got carried away with his rhetoric at one point. It sounds like him and me are more or less on the same page.

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  23. @ Captain Peabody

    "William Lane Craig's account of Thomism seems to crucially leave out the doctrine of the Transcendentals and of participation in general..."

    I know right; that's my main objection with Craig here. He keeps talking about a soft Agnosticism about God, because we can only speak negatively about him, but that simply isn't Aquinas's position; it's rather Maimonides, who uses this position to restrict all talk of God positively to what is found in the Torah.

    Aquinas however explicitly rejects such an approach; on his view, we can really predicate, analogously and positively, all of the Transcendental notions to God, as well as pure perfections.

    So Craig I think is attacking the wrong system by mistake; he's going after Maimonides's view rather than Aquinas's.

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  24. Classic Theism rules. Theistic Personalism sucks more than anything that has sucked before.

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  25. Geisler has written an entire book on Aquinas, Thomas Aquinas: An Evangelical Appraisal. In the book he writes, "I gladly confess that the highest
    compliment that could be paid to me as a Christian philosopher, apologist, and theologian is to call me 'Thomistic.'"

    Having said that, I will say that I disagree with Geisler at some points in his reading of Aquinas; he appears to want to make Aquinas a sort of early Protestant.

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  26. Hard to get much out of the Bentley Hart portion of your post since the review is, as you say, not there. But unless it's dramatically different from the view I pick up from this -- http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/05/d-b-hart-and-terrorism-of-obscurantism.html -- I'm going to guess I already catch your drift.

    But if so, then I'm confused.

    By coincidence, I started reading his book last night and am liking it very much, just as much as I did TLS, and I'm finding that his and your stuff together produce an alloy more effective at smacking down New Atheists than either one of you do on your own (although in each case you do admirably well). Yours came first, and I found the precise, rigorous, analytic approach a refreshing change from my past experiences with the "Catholic Charismatic Renewal", particularly its anti-intellectual emphasis (in my experience anyway), that saw me drop for a while out of theism and into agnosticism (although never down to Dawkinsism and the other forms of New Atheism.) But on my path Back In (I'm not at all there yet), I'm finding find that DBH's approach is not only speaking deeply (although for the life of me I can't articulate why), but it is amplifying and making more potent *your* approach.

    For example, your stuff got me over such nonsense as "So what caused God? Nyah!", or "There can too be an infinite temporal regress!"; led me to grapple with the idea of God as being itself; showed me that it is possible, natural theologically, to get from Prime Mover to the usual Omni attributes; and therefore, and I have to say quite fear-inducingly, is forcing me to face the fact that from Prime Mover, via Omni-this-and-that, the path may lead inevitably to the reality of the fall, sins both mortal and venial, and, in the end, the truth and urgency of the need for salvation.

    Perhaps most valuable of all to me, since it underpins all the rest, was that you encouraged me along a line of thinking that eventually enabled me to see, for perhaps the the first time (despite over three decades as a Catholic before what may now end up being only me taking a break rather than a permanent termination) the metaphysical water in which we swim, so as to see that scientific materialism is so poorly-formed as to be "not even wrong". But the operative word there, used twice, was "see". Which is why DBH's "a certain way of seeing things” makes perfect ... OK, well "sense" is going to be pushing it, but that's the point. You're bringing the sense, and he's adding the poetry. And his addition is proving invaluable.

    While reading DBH, something clicked for me about what with your stuff had been merely (although that understates the significant help you've provided me) a growing understanding of the silly errors being made regularly by people like Jerry Coyne and friends. The DBH-induced clicking, in contrast with but building upon your argument, left me gasping over the vast landscape of a worldview so f*ckwittedly braindead I almost laughed out loud; and not *at* the NA's as I'd done with you, but at the simultaneous vastness and irrelevance of their view. The feeling brought to mind the part in C.S. Lewi's "Great Divorce" where we realize that the dark city from which the bus and its occupants had come, including the ravine and cliff face up which they flew, was the merest sliver of a crack, smaller than a tiny glade of grass.

    I can't see that combined Feser-Bentley-Hart impact as anything but a Good Thing. And so neither, I guess, can I see why you appeared so grumpy with him in your above-mentioned 2015/05 post.

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  27. Kyle:

    Feser and Hart have some vigourous disagreements on specific issues, but they are both classical theists and agree on more than they disagree.

    I concur that Feser/Hart is a potent one-two punch. It was actually only after readying Hart's Experience of God that I started to fully get Feser was saying. It's often best to get more than one perspective, as individual authors tend to have their own blind spots, if only in how they present things.

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  28. @Thursday:
    "David Bentley Hart sometimes goes out of his way to deprecate the idea that God has emotions."

    There's probably scope there for fuzziness in exactly what is meant by "emotions". I certainly hope that God does *not* have that represented by one common use of the word, but that he does have another. I'm thinking of something analogous to the distinction the Buddhists make between pain and suffering -- latter bad, former good (well, they'd say "skillful", you know what I mean).

    I recall an explanation a Buddhist mother once gave me for how her spiritual practice had affected her relationship with her baby daughter. I'd asked her for more detail because an initial comment by her sounded, superficially at least, as if she had lost the ability to have any kind of emotion in her care for the little girl (in which, practically, she never waivered). But as she explained it, and I began to grasp the idea of equanimity, I realized that what she was describing as her way of relating to her child was a superb real life example of agápē.

    If she with her daughter is even the tiniest hint of what God is to us, then for sure he has emotion, but not EMOTION!!!!, if you know what I mean. If Hart was referring to the latter, I'd hope he was right, but that still leaves him plenty of room for God having the former, which I can quite well believe He does.

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  29. @Thursday:
    "It was actually only after readying Hart's Experience of God that I started to fully get Feser was saying. "

    That's exactly my experience. It's not so much that each is giving different pieces of the puzzle but rather, as I said and I think you're confirming, Hart is amplifying Feser. I was (am) already making huge strides with Ed's stuff, but in reading David I'm now realizing that I was seriously underestimating just how big those strides are.

    And I have to say that one of the most intriguing aspects is the extent to which I'm downsizing my frustration with the Coynes and Loftuses etc. It's not so much a "poor them" as a, "I've clearly got so much work to do to *really* figure out this God dude, I just don't have *time* for Coyne and pals". That's quite pleasant. At the risk of getting just plain gooey, there's a distinct hint of another piece of Lewis, this time Narnia and The Last Battle:

    “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now...Come further up, come further in!”

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  30. Two questions for Willam Lane Craig: Since when is David Bentley Hart a thomist? Why do people keep talking like divine simplicity is some sort of uniquely thomist doctrine when it is clearly taught by the church Fathers and is the unanimous teaching of the church prior to the Enlightenment?

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    1. It's probably also worth pointing out that the Augsburg Confession (Lutheran), the 39 Articles (Anglican), the Belgic Confession, and the Westminster Confession (Reformed) all explicitly teach the doctrine of divine simplicity.

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    2. @Nathanael, yes, which is what I find confusing about Craig.

      Also, I used to obsessively watch his debates and I am positive he has defended divine simplicity before, because atheists bring it up as incommensurable with the idea of God (because they surmise, wrongly, what is meant by divine simplicity in connection with other attributes of God).

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  31. If anyone is interested, Eleonore stump addresses this exact topic in the newest podcast from the Thomistic Institute. It's titled "The personal God of classical theism".

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    1. Would you happen to have a link you could post for the Stump podcast?
      Thanks.

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    2. https://soundcloud.com/thomisticinstitute/dr-eleonore-stump-the-personal-god-of-classical-theism-4416

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  32. Enough!!

    "God's love is a mystery." The mystery of this or that. God’s goodness shows his love. Blah, blah, blah. I'm a believing Catholic, but I can't stand these nonsensical terms religious thinkers/leaders use. We need answers short and to the point so we "laypersons" can understand. No offence, but not every Catholic has the time to read Summa.

    Can anyone here, in a short sentence for each, answer these questions:

    • What is the most important idea to take from Thomas Aquinas, that is, what is Thomism?
    • How is God good?
    • How do we know God loves us?
    • How should a Catholic understand our ‘soul’?
    • Where is God and where are the souls of the departed?
    • Why is God hidden?
    • What’s the reason for God allowing suffering (evil)?
    I challenge you.
    Grazie,
    Cranky Catholic

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  33. Guadalupe de Los AngelesApril 15, 2016 at 9:32 AM

    To the Cranky Catholic, I shall strive to answer those questions. If I fail, please correct me. Understand, though, that not everything can, nor should, be simplified. There are some things that cannot be reduced. To say that everything can be reduced to a few scant variables is to hold the pretense of knowledge. To those that would dispute this, I ask that you go look at F. A. von Hayek's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, "The Pretense of Knowledge".

    1. The most important idea to take from Thomas de Aquinas, I think, is God for he is perfect.
    2. Thomism is a school of philosophy with a basis in the thought of Thomas de Aquinas, and by extension in the thought of Aristotle.
    3. God is good because he is Existence Itself. Since existence is convertible with goodness, due to its nature as a transcendental, He is also Goodness Itself.
    4. We know God loves us because he revealed it to us. I forget where, though.
    5. A Thomist would understand the soul as the form of the person which would be understood in the traditional Aristotelian way, I think.
    6. To be omnipotent means to actualize all potentials. To be in space means to be limited to the space He occupies. To be an object in space would mean that God is not omnipotent, merely arbitrarily potent. Since we know He is omnipotent, He cannot be in an object in space.
    7. The souls of the departed depart from our bodies.
    8. God is hidden because you have not found him.
    9. Implicit in the next question is this: "Is suffering evil?" It is not a pure evil, for suffering exists, not as a substance in its own right, but virtually within other substances. Anything that has some existence has some goodness. Therefore, suffering has some good.
    10. God allows lesser goods that a greater good comes from it.

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  34. Anonymous @ 7.45 AM,

    There's no royal road to theology. If you're so curious, start with natural philosophy, then to metaphysics. If you survive, you may then go on to theology.

    Good luck.

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  35. About divine simplicity: how far back does it go? I know it is not uniquely Christian, but is it's origination in Christianity?

    I've been reading some Irenaeus of Lyons (who is, as you all may know, 2nd century) and he mentions simplicity. But, not sure how much further back the idea spreads.

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  36. 'Would you happen to have a link you could post for the Stump podcast?
    Thanks.'

    Have not heard it yet but am very appreciative of Stump's consistently excellent work.

    www.thomisticinstitute.org/lecture-recordings



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  37. Mr. Weaver and Mr. Nathaniel.

    I don't think Mr. Craig rejects divine simplicity, full stop. But one construal of divine simplicity; one that affirms God's properties are *identical* to each other.

    If my wisdom is *identical* to my temperance, or my will *identical* to my rationality that makes it very to difficult, if not impossible to say how they differ from each other.

    What does it mean to say God is wise and just if they are identical to each other? How can we both say they are identical and yet, at the same time, distinct attributes? It's easy to sympathize with Craig here, even if one thinks he's wrong.

    Charitably, I'd say craig upholds divine simplicity or better yet, divine unity in terms of lack of separability.

    God's omniscience is distinct from his omnipotence but inseparable from the divine essence. His wisdom is distinct from his justice but not a separate part of God. The son is distinct from the father in that the son proceeds from the father, but he's not a different God, etc.

    Divine unity or divine inseparability is a weaker thesis than saying that God has no distinctions.

    Now, the problem here lies is how to explain distinctions without destroying divine simplicity. How is wisdom distinct from justice? is it a conceptual distinction? A formal distinction? A modal distinction? and how does it protect divine simplicity?

    Sadly, Mr. Craig never gets around this problem.

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  38. • "What is the most important idea to take from Thomas Aquinas, that is, what is Thomism?"

    To Anonymous: I would respond to your first question in this way: Central to Thomas's work is the idea that the God who is discovered in natural theology, that is, through the light of natural reason, is the exact same God who is revealed in (explicitly Christian) supernatural theology. Since Christ is both the Creator of all and the Savior of the world, Aquinas's thought is centered around Christ as the terminus of both rational investigation and receptive faith. Fides et ratio, in other words.

    That's it for tonight. Bye.

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  39. My copy of the latest issue of Pro Ecclesia arrived yesterday. I briefly posted about it on a FaceBook forum:

    My copy of the new issue of Pro Ecclesia arrived today. It contains Ed Feser's review of *The Experience of God*. I would characterize it as a mildly positive review. In his judgment it is a "good book" with "significant weaknesses." He names the following weaknesses:

    1) Rhetoric: "Hart writes elegantly, but occasionally he tends toward prose that is too purple, too precious, or simply too obscure. ... Hart can also be prolix and repetitive, his constant reiteration of his key thees threatening to annoy the reader more than enlighten him."

    2) Failure to develop his argumentation: "Too often, Hart speaks in metaphors that he leaves uncashed, and makes assertions that are insufficiently backed by argument." Assertions need to be supported by good argument, not just repeated and repeated.

    3) Fideism: "Why devote hundreds of pages to emphasizing the rational deficiencies of naturalism and the rational superiority of the classical theist conception of God and the classical philosophical conception of nature, only to end up adopting a position that seems to flirt with subjectivism and fideism? My guess would be that the Eastern Orthodox Hart, worried about sounding too much like a Scholastic rationalist, wants to give the last word to mysticism."

    In sum, Feser agrees with the central assertions of the book, but does not believe that Hart has provided convincing arguments to support these assertions.

    My personal assessment of Edward Feser's review of *The Experience of God*:

    I think that his criticisms of the book are, at least partially, based on the fact that David did not write the book Feser would have written. Feser believes that the book would have been immeasurably stronger if DBH had carefully elaborated each of his arguments for the existence of God with the kind of careful reasoning that a trained philosopher would find convincing. But the trained philosopher is not the book's intended audience. Nor, I suspect, did David write the book to persuade convinced atheists of the poverty of their position, though I'm sure he doesn't mind them buying and reading the book. So for whom did he write the book and what is its purpose?

    I'll leave the first part of the question to others (but clearly his audience is not the academic elite), but I do have an idea about the second part. Certainly David hopes to persuade others that belief in God is reasonable, that there are cogent reasons why we should believe in a transcendent Creator; but I also suspect that ultimately he does not believe that arguments alone suffice or even should suffice. That's why he begins each part of the book with a vignette on dreams. Hart, I believe, is hoping to evoke a shift in awareness, and his writing style, which Feser sometimes finds annoying, is integral to this goal.

    And this is why some of us have found *The Experience of God* so helpful and challenging. It's unlikely that I would ever invest myself in a long explication of Aquinas's Five Ways (but never say never--I might one day read Feser's book on the topic after it comes out). At this point of my life, I know that these kinds of arguments are virtually irrelevant to my faith. I need to be led, day after day, into openness to Transcendence and thus into wonder and Mystery.

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  40. Hi Fr. Kimel, thanks for your comments. It seems to me, though, that you missed the point of what I was saying in the review, which is precisely that the content of classical theism cannot properly be understood apart from the arguments for it. So while of course, as I realize, Hart is trying to address mainly the former rather than the latter, my point is that this very project is misguided in the nature of the case. Furthermore, since Hart also persistently hammers on the rational superiority of classical theism over atheism (rightly), but at the same time (a) declines to spell out the arguments for classical theism in much detail, (b) too often resorts to high-flown rhetoric, and (c) also occasionally says things that at least come across as fideistic, he inadvertently opens the door to the atheist to accuse him (however wrongly) of bluffing.

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  41. Most would probably admit that there is much in the Scriptures which could be construed in a "personalist" sense; and that if Craig wishes to draw back a bit when the personalist label is applied to him, they don't see it as a big deal.

    The average Christian man would certainly have a conception of God that is "personalist" in some sense, if not rather anthropomorphic; and that is placing aside the question of the man-God.


    Skipping much of a great discussion to return to this, I think we see a historic element of vocabulary in defining how the ancients understood Classic Theism. 'Personal' ideas of faith and sin were understood most directly even in the days of the Exodus Hebrews, but it was was the added Hellenestic vocabulary of new philosophical confreres during the first diaspora (see the distinction betwion the halves of Isaiah) that began to define the full understanding of what became understood of Judeo-Christian divinity (see the Platonic, Aristotelean, and Stoic contributions to moving beyond seeing the divine as somehow personal of anthropomorphic).

    We see, in Church history and broader human history, the coming-together of the classical theist position over time. It makes sense that that the unique Jewish identity with the divine needed to meet with the unique Greek understanding of the metaphysical.

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  42. Hello again. Reading over my previous comment, about four comments up, I realized that it could be mistakenly read so that it sounds like I said Christian salvation could be arrived at through rational investigation. That is not the case. Christian salvation requires revelation and faith. However, the God seen through rational investigation is the same God Who grants us salvation through Christ. That's all I meant.

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  43. Hart has some very recent remarks of interest on intellect and will:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQdcH5qLWEw

    Hart says he is working on a book on the soul, with reference to modern philosophy of mind.

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  44. An earlier, but related talk, that Hart references:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swmKqWcCG5A

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