by William Carroll
The embrace of a materialist and mechanistic view of the world, taking its inspiration from the rise of modern science, results in a loss of the sense of transcendence. But God is not simply some finite object in a universe of other objects—he is reason, being, and order itself.
One can imagine the emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD) sitting at night in his tent, pitched on one of the far-flung frontiers of the Roman Empire, making yet another entry in what would become his famous Meditations. A quintessential Stoic, the emperor believed that the universe was governed by an all-pervading Reason and that, accordingly, whatever happened in the external world must be good. The appropriate goal for every human being was to attain a proper interior attitude toward the world: to live in such a way as not to be troubled by the ebb and flow of events.
In the Meditations, Marcus Aurelius would remind himself that, when he was tempted to react in anger or sorrow to what he experienced, he should: “Consider the alternatives afresh, namely ‘Providence or atoms,’ and how many proofs there are that the universe is like a city community.” For Aurelius, “atoms” meant randomness, chance collocations. Order or chaos; purpose or chance; these are mutually exclusive (and exhaustive) possibilities for our world, and for a Stoic like Aurelius it was clear that, as soon as one reflects on such a dichotomy, one realizes that there really can be no alternative to Providence.
In his new book, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, and Bliss, David Bentley Hart, although not a Stoic, offers what he himself calls a series of “meditations on the meaning of the word ‘God.’” Hart’s meditations occur in the midst of considerable cultural confusion about what “God” means: a confusion that is itself part of a broader, and often unexamined, commitment to a mechanistic and materialistic understanding of the world. In a way, the intellectual world of contemporary materialism is much like the ancient variety Marcus Aurelius encountered. Like the Stoic emperor, Hart seeks to console himself and his readers with the strong medicine of philosophical reflection.
Hart’s central claim is that the God made manifest in the classical theism of Christianity and, indeed, in all the great religious traditions, is “the unconditioned and transcendent reality who sustains all things in being, the one in whom all that nature cannot contain but upon which nature depends has its simple and infinite actuality.”
He notes that "... any argument for or against the reality of God not so understood—any debate over an intelligent designer, or a supreme being within time and space who merely supervises history and legislates morals, or a demiurge whose operations could possibly be rivals of the physical causes describable by scientific cosmology—may prove a diverting amble along certain byways of seventeenth-century deism or eighteenth-century “natural history,” but it most definitely has nothing to do with the God worshiped in the great theistic religions or described in their philosophical traditions, or reasoned toward by their deepest logical reflections upon the contingency of the world."
This passage is a good example of Hart’s elaborate prose.
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The ascendancy of mechanism was reinforced by the ways in which Darwinian and Neo-Darwinian evolutionary thought has been deployed in its service. In the midst of a mechanist picture of the world, it was (and is) easy is to see that natural selection among living things must mean that it is not God but only mindless forces that are the source of the great variety and bounty of life.
The ascendancy of mechanism was reinforced by the ways in which Darwinian and Neo-Darwinian evolutionary thought has been deployed in its service. In the midst of a mechanist picture of the world, it was (and is) easy is to see that natural selection among living things must mean that it is not God but only mindless forces that are the source of the great variety and bounty of life.
Thomas Nagel, in Mind and Cosmos: Why Neo-Darwinian Materialism Is Almost Certainly False, offers a trenchant critique of the materialist metaphysics associated with contemporary evolutionary theory and argues for a renewed appropriation of some form of teleology in nature. For Nagel, however, it is a teleology without God. But the God who has no role in Nagel’s picture is the deistic demiurge which, as Hart observes, is not the God of classical theism. Hart agrees with Nagel’s criticism of materialism, but broadens his analysis to much wider metaphysical, epistemological, and aesthetic realms.
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