David Bentley Hart

I wouldn't say The Experience of God is exactly preachy. But it has that peculiar quality of superficial persuasiveness, carrying one along on the basis of rhetorical suggestiveness rather than really rigorous argument. Unfortunately, I no longer have a copy of the volume to hand; but, relying on my fallible memory, his defense of a modified version of the ontological argument (roughly, God is Being itself or Reality itself, and therefore it would be nonsense to say that Being does not exist or that Reality is unreal) relies on momentarily identifying God with some highly dubious metaphysical abstraction, and then supposing that such an abstraction can nevertheless be ascribed personal characteristics (for the Christian God must be personal, surely). Or take Hart's answer to the problem of evil in The Doors of the Sea. Although he toys with the idea that evil, being negative, has no real existence, his ultimate answer, shorn of rhetoric, is that man is in a fallen state, which has led to the whole of creation being fallen; and when we see the face of a drowned child, we see not the hand of God but that of his arch enemy. For me, this answer raises more questions than it resolves. For example, it is not clear to me how a specific event in human prehistory could have been responsible for the order of nature that preceded it. But because his essays seem designed to be persuasive first and foremost, I think he is too often carried away by his own rhetoric, and I would personally wish that he were a little more precise, and relied more on exact statement and truly rigorous argument. There is a section in The Experience of God in which he rhetorically suggests (it can scarcely be called an 'argument') that existing is a sort of manifesting, or revealing, and this implies that all reality is manifest or revealed to some consciousness (i.e. God). But the whole passage is totally rhetorical. Existence simply does not imply manifestation in his sense of the term. No doubt my opinion is due to my having spent a quarter of a century immersed in the very different philosophical idioms of British Empiricism, and 20th century Analytic Philosophy. Hart is certainly very readable and engaging.