Closer to Truth: David Bentley Hart — Atheism’s Best Arguments?
Robert Lawrence Kuhn: David, you believe in God and argue for God’s existence. Part of that is attacking those who deny God’s existence, atheists. So, when you hear atheistic arguments, what are your reactions to them?
David Bentley Hart: Depends on how good they are. In recent years, we’ve seen a little cottage industry spring up in marketing very bad arguments for atheism. So, then my reaction is ill-concealed scorn.
Closer to Truth, “David Bentley Hart — Atheism’s Best Arguments?” (September 28, 2019)
I like David Bentley Hart. I like Robert Lawrene Kuhn. That’s on a personal level. Hart is a refreshing sophistication and recognition of nuance not found in so much of the garbage passing for discourse in the online media. Kuhn is sharp, an acute interviewer. They’re both a pleasure.
I enjoyed listening to them and transcribing this sliver of him. Given the modest elevation in the conversational tone, Hart can be met there, seems fair. Hart does have an open sense of derision against arguments against God’s existence in terms of the industry arising around it. His contempt sits there.
Hart does reference the single most common issue in dealing with the formal arguments against God’s existence, not in the ontology of the theity, or in biblical critique. Rather, it’s the problem of evil and suffering in the world. Let’s continue:
Kuhn: Let’s differentiate. Let’s start with the bad arguments. What are some of those?
Hart: The sort of arguments you would find in Richard Dawkins, in which he clearly misunderstands claims about ontological contingency and thinks you can conjure them away by having a sufficiently comprehensive cosmology. Or when he says something like, ‘Evolution answers the question of existence,’ that’s actually something he says. I mean, you realize there that you’re dealing with category errors so profound that they verge on the infinite. So, those are bad arguments. And in general, my list of fine atheist philosophers in the 20th century is a small one. Mackey would probably be it, really, but Sobel, in the English-speaking world. I think there was a greater age of atheism in the 19th century. Profounder arguments simply because they were based on a deeper knowledge of what they were attacking. Nietzsche understood Christianity, not every aspect of it. I mean, he had a distinctly Protestant view of it, generally. But his attacks were an attack directly on the ethos and the self-understanding of Christianity. On the whole, though, I think the only really solvent atheist argument isn’t one from modal logic or from any of the sort of questions that are typically classified in philosophy of religion as being about the existence of God. I think it’s the argument from evil. You know, that’s the one that I don’t think can be shown to be internally incoherent. That, you know, we exist in a world of monstrous evil and monstrous suffering. And the theist traditions as one tell us that behind all this is a God of infinite justice, mercy, love, and intellect. And there seems to be such an implausible contrast between experience and that claim that if nothing else, even if logically that doesn’t do away with the notion of an absolute, it certainly seems to do away or could do away potentially with vast regions of the typical theistic picture of God.
“Monstrous evil and monstrous suffering,” there, certainly, is a lot of that. The question: Why is there evil and suffering so vast in a world of such plenty and if designed by a benevolent and just God? It seems implied so deeply into the ethos of the Christian majority countries and historically Christian majority countries of the world so as to present sincere quandary.
We age. We suffer. We break. We die. Loved ones die. Everything diminises. All perishes in an extrapolated heat death of the universe. If you apply a personal standard to cosmic injustice, you’d assume an egoistic insult, of course. That’s entirely fair. However, it’s the wrong step.
If you pick the flight of stairs in the build next door, then it means an individual existence is fleeting as a flower, and a bloom is beautiful not because it lasts, but because it exists in the first place. Temporality, in a sense, becomes the basis to derive valence itself, so-called meaning. God could be evil or worse, indifferent, not good. Hart is correct in the concern.
Their conversation continues:
Kuhn: And in that, the argument from evil, which is the atheistic argument, it would be both naturalistic evil, which is non-sin, if you will, with earthquakes.
Hart: Or when a child dies from cancer.
Kuhn: Or if you go back further, animal suffering during hundreds of billions [sic] of years of evolution. It was a continuous pain and suffering for animals. And so you have to deal with both of those. And so how do you deal with that?
Hart: Generally, I try to avoid it. Well, it shows it’s a good argument if you try to avoid it. Well, you see, as I say, it succeeds not at the level of the logic of ontology, say, but it definitely succeeds at the level of devotion and moral theology. All traditions, all of them, start from the assumption that there’s something broken, something has gone wrong in creation and its relation to God that has either a moral or a spiritual root. I mean, I have no patience for fundamentalists. So obviously I don’t believe that 6,000 years ago there was a specific transgression involving a snake. But I do believe that that and the other legends of the fall, which are sort of a universal human type of story, do touch upon a sense that the reality we experience in all of its dimensions, even in those that in terms of cosmic history preceded the human, have to do with an original alienation from God, the nature of which is impossible to understand except in light of its negation, which would be reconciliation with God. But it’s not an argument I ever try to sleight or pass on. It’s the one argument I never pretend can be swept away or defeated. And it’s the one for which I hold the greatest respect, and the one that I find intermittently convincing myself.
The one sense of the conversation derived from the interaction and Hart’s wrestling with the emotions in an honest manner is a reverence. He has a moderate awe for the possibility of God’s evil. Even further, he dismisses himself from so many Christian colleagues and believers in the rejection to a ‘specific transgression 6,000 years ago,’ as many believe in this formulation of God. The point about the fallenness and brokenness of the world within the foundations of the Christian faith, is true. If taken as the root of the theological belief, then this becomes difficult. I mean emotionally. It is something significant, powerful, singular. How do you fight against eternal, persistent degradation? It’s distressing. What I note in this clip is, in fact, Hart referencing in a sort of reverse reverence the problem of evil, its challenges to Christianity, distancing himself from many other Christian narrative identities, and reiterating God’s story in the biblical narratives as one of reconciliation, while, at the same time, he doesn’t deal with the issue. What Christians term “evil” is the recognition of human suffering and, in a wider purview, universal suffering and death, if there is no response to nullify it, then it stands; and if it stands, then it’s, in a sense, conceded as true by Hart. Ergo, this type of Abrahamic God, quietly, does not exist.
