Some books fade over time, but others seem to grow in their significance. It's not that I can remember the details, it's more like this pull to keep going back to them and appreciating the way they convey Truth to me with a deeper richness. I'm sure there's reciprocal relationship going on here; between myself, the author, and the space in between.
I've been watching some videos on David Bentley Hart, and that's what made me revisit his Experience of God. (I also plan to read another book by him very soon.) When I see him on video, I can pick up on the cantankerousness and cynicism at times, but along with the lucid and exalting articulation. So he may not have the transmission of a saint, but I'm okay with that. Moreover, his writing style is so beautifully impactful, that I am willing to give him a pass on his humanity.Let's look at some highlights. On the idea of alternative facts (before the phrase became fashionable), he makes this interesting quip:
“In the end, pure induction is a fantasy. The human mind could never arrive at an understanding of reality simply by sorting through its collections of bare sense impressions of particulars, trying to arrange them into intelligible and reiterative patterns. It must begin the work of interpretation at even the most elementary of levels, by attempting to impose some kind of purposive meaning upon each datum.”
We can't live on facts alone! Especially when we all have those narratives living our lives. And on those who believe the only things that can be known to be True must be verified:
“Most of the things we know to be true, often quite indubitably, do not fall within the realm of what can be tested by empirical methods; they are by their nature episodic, experiential, local, personal, intuitive, or purely logical.”
If you really think about it, the things we value the most can't be quantified. And for those that want to believe life is one big random contingency:
“As a brilliant physicist friend of mine often and somewhat tiresomely likes to insist, “chaos” could not produce laws unless it were already governed by laws.”
Doh! Who created the order in the chaos? And don't tell me it's turtles all the way down! And how about the process/evolutionary types who believe God evolves along with us:
“God cannot change over time, moreover, as he would then be dependent upon the relation between some unrealized potentiality within himself and some fuller actuality somehow “beyond” himself into which he may yet evolve; again, he would then be a conditional being... it means only that his knowledge or bliss or love does not involve any metaphysical change in him, because it is not based on a privation; it is not a reactive but a wholly creative power, not limited by that difference between active and passive states to which finite beings are subject. God’s knowledge of something created is not something separate from his eternal act of creating that thing; so he is not modified by that knowledge in the way that we are necessarily modified when we encounter things outside ourselves.”
I couldn't say it better myself. And on the concept of progress itself:
“But there really is no such thing as general human progress; there is no uniform history of enlightenment, no great comprehensive epic of human emergence from intellectual darkness into the light of reason. There are, rather, only local advances and local retreats, shifts of cultural emphasis and alterations of shared values, gains in one area of human endeavor counterpoised by losses in another.”
“We have imposed the metaphor of an artificial mind on computers and then reimported the image of a thinking machine and imposed it upon our minds.”
And...
“All computation is ontologically dependent on consciousness, simply said, and so computation cannot provide the foundation upon which consciousness rests. One might just as well attempt to explain the existence of the sun as the result of the warmth and brightness of summer days.”
Ha! Also...
“When Kasparov lost his game in 1997, he was defeated not by a machine but by a large alliance of human opponents, himself among them.”
And when he gets to the topic of consciousness...
“Consciousness does not merely passively reflect the reality of the world; it is necessarily a dynamic movement of reason and will toward reality.”
And...
“Individual psychology is complicated, but subjective consciousness is simple.... [It] perfectly possesses the end it desires.”
Beautifully said. And then on God:
“Whatever image of God one abjures, it can never be more than an idol: a god, but not God... God is the source and ground of being and the wellspring of all consciousness, but also therefore the final cause of all creation, the end toward which all beings are moved, the power of infinite being that summons all things into existence from nothingness and into union with itself; and God manifests himself as such in the ecstasies of rational nature toward the absolute.”
Also...
“God is known in all experience because it is the knowledge of God that makes all other experience possible.”
I believe that earns a mike drop. Boom!