Naturalism is a transcendental certainty of the impossibility of transcendental truth, and so requires an act of pure Credence logically immune to any verification (after all, if there is a God he can presumably reveal himself to seeking minds, but if there is not, there can be no ‘natural’ confirmation of that fact.) -- David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God, pp 77

I just finished the book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness and Bliss by David Bentley Hart. Written as a rebuttal of sorts to the “New Atheists” (or any atheists for that matter), Hart’s book is meant to simply define God in classical theist terms, and not as the anthropomorphic “god” attacked by atheism and even espoused by many fundamentalist Christians. In so doing, he also provides a pretty sound logical “proof” for God along three lines of reasoning: God is the source of being, God enables consciousness, and goodness for goodness’s sake (i.e. bliss) must be transcendental. This first line of reasoning, that God enables and is existence itself, shares a lot in common with a lot of the ideas in the Apology but has some really compelling nuances.

Hart’s main argument in the “being” category is that God is the “first cause” or the end of the line for “contingent” things, which everything is: Something that is contingent depends on something else for its being (e.g. the materials that comprise it, its relationship to other things, its creation). But here’s the interesting nuance: He’s not referring to the first cause of “the universe” (i.e. the Big Bang), which is what most people think of as the “first cause”. He’s talking about the first cause of existence: Both 14 billion years ago and also right at this moment. In other words, he’s answering the question, “Why existence?” See, we tend to think of causes as being synonymous with how things are made (i.e. only their creation). If someone asked me “What caused this car in the driveway?” I could explain that it was manufactured from steel, plastic and glass, roughly eight years ago in such a way that it can burn fossil fuels to move (i.e. the material cause). This somewhat explains the creation of the car but also assumes a very narrow context and a lot of inference by the listener, like why this car for you? Or why are there any cars? The “why” of the car could also very well be that it was built in Germany, put on a boat, shipped here and then bought by me several years later (i.e. the efficient cause)… or that I need a convenient way to get my family and their gear around Toronto (i.e. the formal cause)… or the cause of the car was a more convenient and efficient solution for transportation than horses (i.e. the final cause). If we think about the causes of existence this way, it’s insufficient to simply explain everything with “because the Big Bang just happened”. Or as I heard recently from a scientist, “Give us one miracle and we’ll explain the rest.” We’re really only explaining one thing (the creation of spacetime and matter) from a purely materialist/naturalist worldview (how it was created), which is a very narrow description.

And even if we do take a purely materialist view of the cause of something, there’s simply no logical reason that the atoms which make up that car, which consist of protons, electrons and neutrons, which consist of quarks, which consist of… quantum potentialities?… nothing?… should exist at this moment at all, except if those quarks are “contingent” on something that is “contingent-less”. And what about the formal and final causes of existence itself? Shouldn’t we consider what something is meant to be, or what purpose it serves, when we explain its “why”? We explain most other things this way. So what are the formal and final causes of “being”? And a materialist explanation doesn’t even apply to the physical and mathematical “laws” that govern the universe starting 0.000001 seconds after the Big Bang. Were those “created”? What are the formal or final causes of trigonometry? As Hart puts it, “Chaos could not produce laws unless it were already governed by laws."

The atheist will say that it doesn’t help explain the Big Bang or the existence of space, or mathematics, or the speed of light to say that “God caused it”, because “What caused God?” But I’ve got to side with Hart on this one: The atheist view that “math just happened” or “the Big Bang just happened” or “we just happened” doesn’t explain things any better. The belief in something that transcends experience, that had and has no cause, and in which all things have their being, seems like the more cogent position to take. As Hart states frequently throughout the book, the difference between existence and non-existence isn’t quantitative or a matter of degrees like the difference between something and nothing. For something to “be” from something that “isn’t” is an infinite difference.

Really, we should be in constant awe that we are at all.