Mainly my issue with Hart is he says many things without hardly saying much of anything. He continues that process throughout the book. His wording is confusing and his logic runs circular for the most part. Its almost as if he's trying to confuse his audience rather than make a clear case for anything. But even if I'm missing something, I don't think he has much here on the question of God. He denigrates traditional Christian belief in God, attacking such a view as virulently as he does a lack in belief in God and castigates atheists for responding to those traditional beliefs. THat's odd. He then claims his god, defined essentially as a hidden mind or power which is the ground for everything, is really the traditional god that every theist society ever worshipped (really old believers are to be trusted but knew modern ones are basically atheists, or something).
His view is there is no such thing to question the existence of God...yet God on his view doesn't exist in the normal use of that term. God isn't a something. He's not a "he" or an "it". He's not a "being", he is only being. He demands there is no possible way anything exists if there is no god. God, on Hart's view, is completely hidden not because he doesn't exist but because he couldn't be seen..there's nothing to see there, and there is no "there" for God anyway. He follows Tillich (whom he never mentions in the book as I recall) in saying God is the ground of all being--using preeminently the argument of ignorance in suggesting since we have no other valid explanation what that ground of being is it must be God--this nothing character who must be there but can't be detected or so you'd think. But a major point of the book is God can be detected. He is detected by sheer presupposition, I guess. He has to be, otherwise there'd be no finding him. He continues to make this point, tells us he's going to explain why that must be, but then never does. His explanation when he gets to it amounts to him repeating himself, in different words, dogmatically claiming he's right because he is right.
All of that is a twisted circular rendition of word jumbles if you ask me. But, there's more. He's adamant, even dogmatically so, in suggesting atheism with it's inherent naturalism, represents the height of irrationality. I can't help but point out his appeal to rationality. He claims to have a rational position, but fails to rationally explain his position. It's as if its not even rational to question his position, on his take. And that somehow demonstrates he's the most rational. That's what it comes off as. He's claiming the most rational position, while failing every rational test, often speaking as if he holds a position that is above rationality. I' guessing I'd use rational differently than he, but he never defines the concept.
Let's take his position on [/i[the supernatural[/i]--or God as he seems to define these:
--pgs 95-96Physical reality cannot account for its own existence for the simple reason that nature—the physical—is that which by definition already exists; existence, even taken as a simple brute fact to which no metaphysical theory is attached, lies logically beyond the system of causes that nature comprises; it is, quite literally, “hyperphysical,” or, shifting into Latin, super naturam. This means not only that at some point nature requires or admits of a supernatural explanation (which it does), but also that at no point is anything purely, self-sufficiently natural in the first place. This is a logical and ontological claim, but a phenomenological, epistemological, and experiential one as well. We have, in fact, no direct access to nature as such; we can approach nature only across the interval of the supernatural. Only through our immediate encounter with the being of a thing are we permitted our wholly mediated experience of that thing as a natural object; we are able to ask what it is only in first knowing that it is; and so in knowing nature we have always already gone beyond its intrinsic limits. No one lives in a “naturalistic” reality, and the very notion of nature as a perfectly self-enclosed continuum is a figment of the imagination. It is the supernatural of which we have direct certainty, and only in consequence of that can the reality of nature be assumed, not as an absolutely incontrovertible fact but simply as far and away the likeliest supposition.
Ten pages later he demures:
And there you have it. God, the supernatural, must be, because if he isn't, then there'd be nothing, "obviously". And we can't have things like infinite regresses or a first contingent cause. It just can't be. We have to have a God--you know the one that no one really believes in, only the one he and other trained thinkers assume is possible. And since possible it must be. I mean since they think he's there, and stuff...he must be. But not "there" there really. Alright I'm getting too cheeky again.In short, all finite things are always, in the present, being sustained in existence by conditions that they cannot have supplied for themselves, and that together compose a universe that, as a physical reality, lacks the obviously supernatural power necessary to exist on its own. Nowhere in any of that is a source of existence as such. It is this entire order of ubiquitous conditionality—this entire ensemble of dependent realities—that the classical arguments say cannot be reducible either to an infinite regress of contingent causes or to a first contingent cause. There must then be some truly unconditioned reality (which, by definition, cannot be temporal or spatial or in any sense finite) upon which all else depends; otherwise nothing could exist at all. And it is this unconditioned and eternally sustaining source of being that classical metaphysics, East and West, identifies as God.
He's stuck in a cause and effect mindset while living in a world of physical laws. What if, for instance, there is no cause to the universe? Where would that lead him?
A whole bunch of words to say nothing (pg 151--concluding chapter 3):
Contemplating the mystery of being is contemplating God, who knows all about us. If God really is just a person's contemplation of being, then what is that being everyone believes in? I mean...whatever.That sudden instant of existential surprise is, as I have said, one of wakefulness, of attentiveness to reality as such, rather than to the impulses of the ego or of desire or of ambition; and it opens up upon the limitless beauty of being, which is to say, upon the beauty of being seen as a gift that comes from beyond all possible beings. This wakefulness can, moreover, become habitual, a kind of sustained awareness of the surfeit of being over the beings it sustains, though this may be truly possible only for saints. For anyone who experiences only fleeting intimations of that kind of vision, however, those shining instants are reminders that the encounter with the mystery of being as such occurs within every encounter with the things of the world; one knows the extraordinary within the ordinary, the supernatural within the natural. The highest vocation of reason and of the will is to seek to know the ultimate source of that mystery. Above all, one should wish to know whether our consciousness of that mystery directs us toward a reality that is, in its turn, conscious of us.
More:
pag 256Simply said, if there were no God, neither would there be such a thing as moral truth, nor such a thing as good or evil, nor such a thing as a moral imperative of any kind. This is so obviously true that the need to argue the point is itself evidence of how inextirpable our hunger for a transcendent moral truth even is, even when all our metaphysical convictions militate against the existence of that truth. So, yes, it certainly is not the case that one needs to believe in God in any explicit way in order to be good; but it certainly is the case, as classical theism asserts, that to seek the good is already to believe in God, whether one wishes to do so or not
"Screw you or anyone who dares think morality can persist without God"--or that humans can seek morality if there is no god. If they try to be moral and address what is moral they are only seeking God. Heads Hart wins tails you lose. I mean...whatever.
He spends a good portion of the book talking about consciousness, the mind/body problem. It's probably the best parts of the book, I'd say. But on the topic of the book I don't think he made much of a case there--the consciousness problem doesn't give reason to think there's a God and he somewhat admits that after spending much ink trying to make it be one of his main points.
He conlcudes his consciousness discussion with more of his wordy pile of nothingness--his vague allusion to things as if he's making a solid case:
hmm....If indeed to exist is to be manifest—to be intelligible and perceptible—and if to exist fully is to be consciously known, then God, as infinite being, is also an act of infinite knowledge. He is in himself the absolute unity of consciousness and being, and so in the realm of contingent things is the source of the fittedness of consciousness and being each to the other, the one ontological reality of reason as it exists both in thought and in the structure of the universe.
So what makes the universe ontologically contingent? What if the universe is not contingent on anything? How would he know? And I don't think he ever really talks about how his presuppositions easily demonstrate the frailty of his position. This is a problem he never wants to acknowledge. On the consciousness issue, he dismisses the problem initially pointed out by Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia in responding to Descarte--if Cartesian dualism is true how do we account for the immaterial spirit interacting with our material brains? Hart dismisses it, like Descartes, by saying in the whole of traditional views religionists simply didn't see a problem here. The spirit was not necessarily seen as immaterial but *it* was the self. Somehow old traditions that came around before Descartes shows there really isn't a problem to deal with. To be fair he acknowledges it as a problem, but then dismisses it and continues to speak as if it's not really a problem anymore. The issue I have here is if he's going to maintain the problematic view it carries no higher ground than say monism simply because he wants to dismiss it. he still has the problem--he has an introduced item to the equation, a spirit, that he can't account for, and just assumes it can magically cause the physical processes to work. Because of god; because of being.God explains the existence of the universe despite its ontological contingency, which is something that no form of naturalism can do; but God also explains the transparency of the universe to consciousness, despite its apparent difference from consciousness, as well as the coincidence between reason and reality, and the intentional power of the mind, and the reality of truth as a dimension of existence that is at once objective and subjective. Here, just as in the realm of ontology, atheism is simply another name for radical absurdism—which, again, may be a perfectly “correct” view of things, if reason is just a physiological accident after all, and logic an illusion.
I'd say while his view is possible, it hardly makes it more likely. At least a monism view doesn't introduce an unknown to the equation. He has to account for the unknown item (spirit) and then account for the interaction. Instead of saying something about we don't know, he concludes he must be right. Mechanical forces, he dogmatically delcares, can't possibly account for imagination, thought or consciousness. So in place of our ignorance he places God, and declares it most likely.
In concluding the book he references Plato's allegory of the cave saying:
Except, of course, in the allegory that which demonstrates reality is perceptible. The sun is perceptible. Hart tells us he perceives a god and others are stuck in a cave. His explanation of his perception is he imagines there's a God so there must be.The greatest metaphysical allegory of Western tradition, to which all our philosophies explicitly or implicitly respond, is Plato’s allegory of the cave in The Republic, which tells us that the world most of us inhabit is really only an illusion, and that the true world lies beyond what our ordinary vision can perceive.
All I can say is I suppose I ain't woke unwilling to surrender to something that becomes apparently only if we first assume it, treat it as real, pretending only by it can we ever really be. His imagined other world isn't real simply because he really wants it to be, and hopes it grounds our world.wisdom is the recovery of wisdom at the end of experience. It may be the Wordsworthian Romantic in me, but I do believe that all of us, as persons and as cultures, enjoy an initial state of innocent responsiveness to the mystery of being, a spiritual dawn unburdened by presuppositions and interests, when we are aware of a truth we can express (if at all) only by way of a few imaginative gestures—stories or myths or simply guileless cries of fear and delight. We stand amazed before the gratuity of being and the luminosity of consciousness and the transcendental splendor that seems to shine in and through all things, before indurated habits of thought and will can distance us from the radiant simplicity of that experience. We see the mystery, are addressed by it, given a vocation to raise our thoughts beyond the apparent world to the source of its possibility. In time, though, we begin to seek power over reality and so become less willing to submit our minds to its power over us. Curiosity withers, ambition flourishes. We turn from the mystery of being to the availability of things, from the mystery of consciousness to the accessible objects of cognition, from the mystery of bliss to the imperatives of appetite and self-interest. We gain what we can take by relinquishing what we can only receive as a gift, and obtain power by forgetting that dimension of reality we cannot dominate but can approach only when we surrender ourselves to it. And late Western culture may well be the social order that has ventured furthest away from being in its quest to master beings.
The path to true wisdom, then, is a 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. We shall then be able clearly to see how the contingency of finite existence directs our thoughts toward an unconditional and absolute reality, and how the intentional unity and rationality of the mind opens up to an ultimate unity of intelligibility and intelligence in all things, and how the ecstatic movement of the mind and will toward transcendental perfections is a natural awareness of an ideal dimension that comprehends and suffuses the whole of existence. 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, is the end 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 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.