The book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness and Bliss by David Bentley Hart lays out a rational description of God. And while I deliberately refrain from using reason as an explanation for God in the Apology, I have to say that Hart’s thorough argument is pretty compelling, if not unequivocally triumphant. His first premise, that God is the non-contingent source of all being, is the strongest one and is discussed in the previous post here. The second hinges on the premise that there will never be a material/naturalist description of consciousness, which I honestly find a little weak. Hart essentially dismisses the notion that there will ever be a self-aware AI (which I could buy), but annoyingly never addresses the different levels of consciousness/awareness in nature: From the amoeba, which senses the world through simple mechanistic processes, to a dolphin, which is most certainly “conscious”, there is no clear line between which organisms are conscious and which are not, so doesn’t that mean that consciousness does result from increasingly complex physical processes? Putting aside the “Consciousness” argument then, allow me to summarise the “Bliss” argument, which isn’t directly addressed in the Apology at all and is actually pretty hard to refute.

Essentially, Hart’s argument is that Beauty / Goodness / Bliss, are all transcendental / supernatural, can’t be explained by a materialist / naturalist worldview, and are manifestations of humanity’s yearning for God. This makes much more sense to me than the explanation that whatever we find aesthetically or morally preferable has been “programmed” into us by natural selection, which seems to be the prevailing “scientific” view. Maybe I could buy that the affection we show for our children could be “programmed”, but there are simply so many things that we find “beautiful” or “right” that could never have provided an evolutionary advantage. Conversely, there are many things that most certainly would have provided an evolutionary advantage, and yet we find them ugly or abhorrent. For example, why art? Music, literature, and sculpture can’t be rationally explained. And no one, but no one, can provide a consistent formula for what makes a piece of art beautiful to the individual or to a community. What’s more, we don’t even choose what we prefer. Whether we like Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir or Beethoven’s Seventh, we have an idea of what’s “good” that we don’t fully control. And have you ever been to a concert when everyone just “connects”, you lose yourself in the music, and become one with the performer and the audience? Go ahead and tell me that art isn’t transcendental. On the flip side, why is killing so abhorrent? Throughout pretty much the entirety of our evolutionary history, the ability to kill other creatures was pretty much the most important thing to survive: You had to kill animals for food and kill other people for security. Why don’t we find killing beautiful? And I don’t mean vicarious / fake killing like watching a slasher movie… I mean actually killing… actually causing an animal or person to die violently. It is not beautiful. But it should be if we think that survival alone programmed our idea of beauty.

Finally, even if we are genetically programmed to be nice to each other, what actually compels me to be kind at this moment if I know it’s programmed? Why would I return a wallet I found, or be truthful on my insurance claim if no one will ever find out? Surely this programming doesn’t over-ride what’s best for me, if again the most important virtue is survival and procreation. “I’m kind because I want others to be kind to me” isn’t a good reason either, because there’s no good reason to expect others to reciprocate — especially if one has ever experienced cruelty from an individual or a community. If you really, truly believe that your moral compass is genetically bestowed upon you by evolution, or imposed upon you by society, then rationally you should lie, cheat and steal to get ahead. What’s stopping you?

What is that niggling little thing in your heart that guides you? That conscience? It’s certainly not “nature”. It is something more than your natural inclinations. It is beyond the material and natural. It is supernatural by definition.