The Reality of God

I have been utterly convinced by David Bentley Hart's book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (as anyone who has talked to me in the last little while likely knows). I've now read it three times. Hart's aim is to define the word "God" with the hope that it can help clarify both for theists and atheists what it is that they claim to believe or not believe in.

This book has become my main way into conversations with atheists at Kwantlen. Part of what makes it so effective for this task, I think, is that it is simply intellectually rigorous on a philosophical level. The aim is not to prove the scientific truth of the Bible (or any other religious text) but to talk philosophically rather than historically or scientifically. The result is that conversations with atheists can reach a higher level of sophistication and importance. The meaning of the word "God," Hart suggests, accounts for three essential and pervasive topics that pure materialist atheism has a very hard time dealing with: Being ("Why is the something rather than nothing?"), Consciousness ("How is it that I can perceive and know anything?"), and Bliss ("Why do we seek and enjoy the good, the true, and the beautiful?")

Interestingly, Hart's argument draws on numerous philosophical and religious traditions: it is not confined just to Christianity (though Christian thinkers are certainly not excluded, either). In Greek philosophy, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Christianity, Hart finds resources to define the word "God." God is not a being among other beings, and so cannot, in principle, be an object of science. God is not a being, but is rather Being itself, the source and ground of all that it. God is not merely "good" but God is goodness itself. Based on the subtitle of the book, we might define the word "God" as: infinite Being, infinite Consciousness, infinite Bliss.

What is wonderful about my conversations with atheists around campus is how this discussion opens onto my own particular faith, too. How God, the source of all that is, has become fully human, has come to dwell among his creatures and effect our salvation. Of course, questions about the Bible quickly arise, too: how can a God this abstract make himself known in the particular way that he is presented in the Christian scriptures? That is a question I will need to keep wrestling with. But I am completely convinced that nothing in this definition of "God" prevents God from personally communing with human beings in the way described in the Bible.

In fact, I think this definition of the word "God" is the only one that makes any philosophical sense. For if God were simply the greatest being among all beings, rather than the ground and source of all being itself, then the question could be legitimately asked "Who made God? What is the ground of God's being?" But if God is the ultimate, infinite, un-caused, and unconditioned source of all being, all consciousness, and all bliss, then such a question is unintelligible. This, truly, is the God who has come to us in Christ.