David Bentley Hart responds (poorly and arrogantly) to Adam Gopnik on God

Somehow, in my evening perusal of the Internet, I came across a piece in The American Conservative by Rod Dreher, religionist, former Templeton flack (he ran the “Big Questions” site for a while), and author of some of the most mean-spirited pieces I’ve seen. (In one piece, for example, which has since disappeared from the Templeton site but remains in snippets on my site, he rebukes Chrisopher Hitchens for being blind to Jesus while he, Hitchens, was dying of cancer.) Unable to control my anger, I called Dreher a “contemptible little worm” for that piece. And, apparently, he remains an annelid.

At any rate, Dreher was touting a new column by David Bentley Hart called “Gods and Gopniks” published in the religious journal First Things. As you may remember, Adam Gopnik recently published a critique of Sophisticated Theology™ at the New Yorker called “Bigger than Phil,” an analysis of New Atheist arguments and the theological response. I thought Gopnik’s piece was pretty good, but, in a post on this site that got a surprising number of comments, faulted Adam for his “belief in belief” and his notion that we atheists are, at bottom, sort of religious because we have emotions and humanity and—here he singled me out—have affection for things like cats and Motown songs.  Gopnik considered such affections a form of “irrationality” equivalent to that promoted by religion, thus discerning common ground between belief and non-belief. But Gopnik failed to discern the huge difference between ailurophilia and religiosity. Cats may think they’re gods, but we don’t see them as divine.

Gopnik did, however, call out Hart for his lack of specificity and failure to engage with religion as it is practiced by normal humans. Gopnik used Mel Brook’s analogy, as the “2,000 year old man,” of worshiping a guy named “Phil” as an explanation of the universe:

As the explanations [for why God resides in the gaps of scientific understanding] get more desperately minute, the apologies get ever vaster. David Bentley Hart’s recent “The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss” (Yale) doesn’t even attempt to make God the unmoved mover, the Big Banger who got the party started; instead, it roots the proof of his existence in the existence of the universe itself. Since you can explain the universe only by means of some other bit of the universe, why is there a universe (or many of them)? The answer to this unanswerable question is God. He stands outside everything, “the infinite to which nothing can add and from which nothing can subtract,” the ultimate ground of being. This notion, maximalist in conception, is minimalist in effect. Something that much bigger than Phil is so remote from Phil’s problems that he might as well not be there for Phil at all. This God is obviously not the God who makes rules about frying bacon or puts harps in the hands of angels. A God who communicates with no one and causes nothing seems a surprisingly trivial acquisition for cosmology—the dinner guest legendary for his wit who spends the meal mumbling with his mouth full.

Well you can imagine how that would get Hart’s knickers in such a twist, and it was published in such a widely-read magazine! Hart couldn’t let it stand, and so has answered.

But Hart’s answer is lame, asserting merely that Gopnik didn’t understand his argument, that Adam is not a scholar (the implication is “he’s not as serious as I am”), that modern atheism is devoid of content, and that no discourse is possible between believers and nonbelievers. By “discourse,” of course, Hart means “Discourse centered on my own arguments.”

It’s hard to convey how arrogant Hart’s piece really is. You must read it to get the full effect of his spleen and pomposity. Above all, Gopnik is a man who tries to be measured, and even when promoting non-belief (something he doesn’t often do), he tries to be fair—and even took a swing at atheists like me. Gopnik could never be described as mean-spirited. But Hart’s response is simply to dismiss the seriousness of Gopnik’s argument because Gopnik is a mere—journalist! 

Hart begins with what he considers a bon mot, but is really just nasty. He’s trying to come off as humorous, but, as he often did in his book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, comes off as a puffed-up and pompous windbag, full of deepities as substantive as cotton candy. Here he is on Gopnik:

Journalism is the art of translating abysmal ignorance into execrable prose. At least, that is its purest and most minimal essence. There are, of course, practitioners of the trade who possess talents of a higher order—the rare ability, say, to produce complex sentences and coherent paragraphs—and they tend to occupy the more elevated caste of “intellectual journalists.” These, however, are rather like “whores with hearts of gold”: more misty figments of tender fantasy than concrete objects of empirical experience. Most journalism of ideas is little more than a form of empty garrulousness, incessant gossip about half-heard rumors and half-formed opinions, an intense specialization in diffuse generalizations. It is something we all do at social gatherings—creating ephemeral connections with strangers by chattering vacuously about things of which we know nothing—miraculously transformed into a vocation. . . Still, it seems fair to me to note that what a journalist does for a living does not, in itself, require him or her to be a scholar, an artist, a philosopher, or even particularly good at sorting through abstract ideas. And, really, it is hard both to meet a regular deadline and also to pause long enough to learn anything new, or waste much time even following one’s own arguments.

(Please note that Dreher is also a journalist! Note also that Christopher Hitchens described himself as a journalist.)

Now what is the point of that, except to impugn Gopnik’s credentials from the outset? It’s mean-spirited, and in fact it’s wrong. Gopnik can be quite thoughtful at times; what Hart is doing here is acting like a lawyer, going after Gopnik for irrelevant reasons simply because they’re on opposite sides and Hart wants to win. 

Before getting down to his own defense, such as it is, Hart bemoans the lack of serious discourse in modern arguments about belief vs. non-belief. As we hear so often, he decries the lack of Serious Modern Atheists compared to our supposedly lugubrious predecessors like Camus and Sartre (but what about Russell and Mencken? Was Mencken more “serious” than Sam Harris or Dawkins?).

Hart:

Simply said, we have reached a moment in Western history when, despite all appearances, no meaningful public debate over belief and unbelief is possible. Not only do convinced secularists no longer understand what the issue is; they are incapable of even suspecting that they do not understand, or of caring whether they do.

Which he continues at the end:

Nothing is happening here. The conversation has never begun. The current vogue in atheism is probably reducible to three rather sordidly ordinary realities: the mechanistic metaphysics inherited from the seventeenth century, the banal voluntarism that is the inevitable concomitant of late capitalist consumerism, and the quiet fascism of Western cultural supremacism (that is, the assumption that all cultures that do not consent to the late modern Western vision of reality are merely retrograde, unenlightened, and in need of intellectual correction and many more Blu-ray players). Everything else is idle chatter—and we live in an age of idle chatter. 

. . . What I find so dismal about Gopnik’s article is the thought that it represents not the worst of popular secularist thinking, but the best. Principled unbelief was once a philosophical passion and moral adventure, with which it was worthwhile to contend. Now, perhaps, it is only so much bad intellectual journalism, which is to say, gossip, fashion, theatrics, trifling prejudice.

This is not an argument; it’s a grumpy old man telling kids like Gopnik to get off his lawn, and longing for an age that never existed—an age when atheism was far more “serious” than it is now.

In fact, Hart’s real defense against Gopnik is both brief and thin. In essence, it’s this:

Excuse the sigh of vexation; I cannot help it. Setting aside the nonsense about desperately minute explanations, which cannot possibly be relevant to any argument of mine, the God described in my book is the creator of everything, who communicates with all persons in a constant and general way, and with many individuals in an episodic and special way. Whatever originality I might claim for certain aspects of my argument, its metaphysical content is entirely and ecstatically derivative: pure “classical theism,” as found in the Cappadocians, Augustine, Denys, Thomas Aquinas, Ibn Sina, Mulla Sadra, Ibn Arabi, Shankara, Ramanuja, Philo, Moses Maimonides . . . well, basically, just about every significant theistic philosopher in human history. (Not to get too recherché here, but one can find most of it in the Roman Catholic catechism.)

Well, excuse me, but that’s a bit of a distortion, for I’ve published quotes over the last week showing what Hart considers God, and it’s hardly a God who communicates with “all persons” constantly (perhaps Hart means that God is there in the beauty and rationality and consciousness we all have and perceive, but that we stupid atheists can’t perceive it), and “many individuals in an episodic and special way.” What Hart means by the latter is opaque to me, especially because he refuses to say what he thinks about miracles. The kernel of Hart’s argument, which Gopnik did discern (Hart has the temerity of claiming that Gopnik didn’t read his book), is that the essence of God, distilled from all religions, is that of an ineffable Ground of Being that doesn’t have any anthropomorphic traits. (If that’s true, how does he “communicate in an episodic and special way”? Isn’t communication of that sort a human quality?) What Hart pushed in his book was not “classical theism,” but deism, or rather pantheism.

And even if we take that as Hart’s only message, do we need to waste our time debating it as the “proper conversation” about religion and atheism? Frankly, if Hart wants to find a common essence of God in all faiths (and, not being acquainted with all the world’s religions, I’m not sure that he has), more power to him. That doesn’t get us very far for one reason: all the world’s religions also have add ons to that abstract Ground of Being, and that includes theologians like Aquinas, Augustine, Whitehead, and Alvin Plantinga (sensus divinitatis, anyone?). That is what Gopnik was harping about in his piece.

If we’re going to engage belief, we should engage it as it’s practiced, and Hart’s “essence of god” is only a tiny fraction of what believers (including theologians) take to be true.  Even Hart himself believes more: he’s an Eastern Orthodox Christian, and that means he accepts a lot more than the Ground of Being. But what that is he doesn’t say.

I see no point in arguing with Hart’s pantheism, for it’s like trying, as they say, to nail Jell-O to the wall. If we’re going to engage with belief, let’s engage with belief as it is believed, including the various Gods with their add-ons like the resurrectd Jesus, the Trinity, the strictures of the Qur’an, the reincarnation of Buddhism, the sequestration of menstruating women in Orthodox Judaism, the strictures against gays in Islam, and so on ad infinitum. Is that not a serious endeavor? Believe me, those are the beliefs worthy of engagement because those are the beliefs that have real consequences in our world. The battle against religion is not a rarified argument over sherry about a Ground of Being.

Note, too, Hart’s reference to the Roman Catholic catechism, and how that also contains his God. But is he kidding? Not only is that Catechism pure theism, with lots of factual assertions, but it hardly paints the picture of God as a ground of being (have a look at the catechism here.) I’d accuse Hart of changing his argument, but he’ll just claim that I didn’t understand him in the first place.

Finally, Hart fulminates against materialism, giving a list of scientists who were also religious. The point of this eludes me, since many of those scientists lived in a time when nearly everyone was religious, and today the majority of good scientists are simply garden-variety atheists. To go after materialism, Hart first quotes Gopnik’s perfectly reasonable claim:

“[Unbelievers have] a monopoly on legitimate forms of knowledge about the natural world. They have this monopoly for the same reason that computer manufacturers have an edge over crystal-ball makers. . . . We know that men were not invented . . .; that the earth is not the center of the universe . . .; and that, in the billions of years of the universe’s existence, there is no evidence of a single miraculous intercession with the laws of nature. We need not imagine that there’s no Heaven; we know that there is none, and we will search for angels forever in vain.”

and then Hart responds in this ugly way:

Did Gopnik bother to read what he was writing there? I ask only because it is so colossally silly. If my dog were to utter such words, I should be deeply disappointed in my dog’s powers of reasoning. If my salad at lunch were suddenly to deliver itself of such an opinion, my only thought would be “What a very stupid salad.” Before all else, there is the preposterous temerity of the proprietary claim; it is like some fugitive from a local asylum appearing at the door to tell you that “all this realm” is his inalienable feudal appanage and that you must evacuate the premises forthwith. Precisely how does materialism (which is just a metaphysical postulate, of extremely dubious logical coherence) entail exclusive ownership of scientific knowledge? Does Gopnik think he can assert rights here denied to Galileo, Kepler, and Newton? Or to Arthur Eddington, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac, Anthony Zee, John Barrow, Freeman Dyson, Owen Gingerich, John Polkinghorne, Paul Davies, Stephen Barr, Francis Collins, Simon Conway Morris, and (yes) Albert Einstein?

Yes, all of those scientists, as far as I know—save Einstein—were or are religious, but I doubt that Einstein abjured materialism or naturalism.  If you read Hart’s book, you’ll know that he, along with many modern theologians, goes after naturalism and materialism as incoherent on philosophical grounds. What he doesn’t realize is that the pantheon of scientists he lists made wonderful discoveries about the universe using only the assumptions of naturalism and materialism. They didn’t need, or use, God as a hypothesis. Just because Francis Collins and Simon Conway Morris mouth the fictions of an ancient book on Sundays does not somehow constitute a criticism of materialism.  For if the rejection of materialism, and the acceptance of revelation and deism, were a route to knowledge, we’d know a hell of a lot more about God than we do now. Hart is Eastern Orthodox. How does he know that the tenets of his faith are right, and that those of Islam and Judaism are wrong? Regardless of what he says about God, even the God he himself worships is more than a Ground of Being.

Hart’s tactic of distilling the essence of God from all religions, and then insisting that we talk about that, is equivalent to distilling the essence of “politics” from observing Western democracies, and then insisting that we talk not about Obama’s policies, or about the Republican denial of women’s rights, but about the nature of “politics” itself. It’s a useless, scholastic endeavor, suitable for an arrogant fellow like Hart to discuss at teatime, but not one that’s of much relevance in our world.

Finally, in his own piece, Dreher, champing at the bit, can’t wait for Hart to eviscerate me:

I do hope that Hart will not wait quite so long to have the fatuous atheist critic Jerry Coyne for lunch.  The rigidly ideological Coyne is one of the least-interesting critics of theism, precisely because he routinely gives scant evidence of understanding the position of his opponents (see Edward Feser on this point). His New Republic piece dismissing Hart’s book is on par with Gopnik’s, except that Gopnik, to his very great credit, is a marvelous prose stylist and a generous human being, and does not write as if he were delivering his message while standing on a bench in Hyde Park.

Really? Do Hart and Dreher routinely give evidence of understanding the New Atheist position, particularly the part about lack of evidence?  Why do I have to discuss the matter on their turf? Why not do it on mine: the turf of evidence. At any rate, Dreher’s criticisms of my prose aside, I’d respond in this way to both of these goddies: “Bring it on!”

One thing I’ve learned from this (as if most of you didn’t know it already): Christians may try to emulate Jesus with kind and saintly behavior, but the minute their faith is questioned they turn into grouchy old men chasing the atheists off their lawns. Deprived of the racks and thumbscrews they once used to keep their critics in line, they now resort to insult and invective.