David Bentley Hart's book Atheist Delusions is almost the top recommendation to New Atheists to hear the "other side."
Hart seems to lean towards something akin to the Pope's outlook in the 2024 movie Conclave. "He never lost faith in God but struggled with faith in the Church." Don't forget that if you really have faith in God you can trust him to work through even a bad false Church for you. Conclave like Hart is a bit influenced by Oprah illogic.
Hart admits to admiring some forms of atheism but does not seem to like Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris. It seems he feels their arguments are bad. But he needs to tell us about the good arguments too. That is not done. He slams Harris for writing that fundamentalists think Jews will be eradicated when Jesus comes back. But it is true that some Christians do believe exactly that and nothing positive is said about any living Jew as a Jew in the New Testament. Putting it all together, only those who expressly and properly follow Christ will be spared at Armageddon. That clearly includes Jews even if they are not explicitly mentioned.
Dennett is accused of saying that no claim should be taken seriously unless it can pass a scientific test which would amount to saying we have no reason to think that the battle of Salamis ever happened. The fact remains that taking things seriously is a spectrum. Science says the white stuff on your lawn is snow. That needs to come even before the battle of Salamis. It does not amount to saying we can neither believe or disbelieve that the battle happened.
In talking about Dennett's Breaking the Spell he thinks Dennett condescendingly tells believers that they do not believe what they think they believe or if they do believe they do not understand.
Now believers might think the same thing of atheists and sceptics. So it is not fair to call either side deliberately condescending. It depends on who is right. If Catholics are right to think that about us atheists then there is no patronising. They are simply recognising us as intelligent beings who like everybody else imagines they believe certain things. It may be like, "He is too smart to really think that. He just needs to deal with that all too human problem, confusion." That is a compliment.
Hart is being very manipulative. He then a few pages later actually accuses New Age people of faking devotion to their gods unlike the pagans who took them seriously. So he is telling people himself that they do not believe what they say they believe. Most New Age people put more money and time into their faith than Catholics do theirs. What does that say?
It is interesting that he tells us about the writer about inventions Peter Watson. The New York Times asked him what the worst invention ever was. Watson stated, “Without question, ethical monotheism…this has been responsible for most of the wars and bigotry in history.”
Hart says this is nonsense. Many would say that Watson is partly right about the wars but totally right that monotheism has led to the most insatiable bigotry.
Hart remarks that loads of wars over religion and supported by religion happened when the culture had many gods. He tries to say that the lower number of wars under those who affirmed one God means something. Why should it? He does not say. God or gods. It does not matter. It is still supernaturalism, the higher intelligence thing, and that is still harmful.
Most people have been polytheists worshipping the most unseemly deities so it stands to reason if pagans waged more wars than monotheism which is virtually a novelty in the scale of human history. It is not down to any inherent theological moral superiority.
“The vast majority of history’s wars have been conducted in the service of many gods; or have been fought under the aegis, or with the blessing, or at the command of one god among many; or have been driven by the pursuit of profits or conquest or power” and mentions that wars happened too under systems that had no religion or gods at all.
He seems to think that faith in God can harm but that other things are as bad and worse. There is a difference between saying faith can harm and what you think is faith can harm. But to say that faith inspired by God, he may prompt you to serve him light of a Bible he has ultimately authored and inspired, harms is saying that God and faith and prayer are not necessarily good and that depends on the person not them. They are harmful for many.
He seems to realise this. “Does religious conviction provide a powerful reason for killing? Undeniably it often does. It also often provides the sole compelling reason for refusing to kill, or for being merciful, or for seeking peace; only the profoundest ignorance of history could prevent one from recognizing this. For the truth is that religion and irreligion are cultural variables, but killing is a human constant.” As man is supposedly the image of God, then God designed that constant. People carry a homicidal rage that won't go away even with prayer so if there is a God he is more to blame than they are.
There are problems with his saying that monotheistic religion and/or faith in God (they don't have to be the same thing) are not the worst for causing wars.
First it is a lie for he is obviously ignoring Islam with its top command to wage jihad. While he consorts with those who say that Christianity is the valid and true religion, the fact remains that only a religion like Islam that claims to have the dictated literal word of God can be valid. Valid does not necessarily mean true. But a valid religion must have a source of revelation that overrides man. A religion based on popular theologians and votes and political influence like Christianity has man's handprints all over it.
Second he has the nerve to mention the outlandish hate between Catholic and Protestant and the religious driven Thirty Years War. It is unacceptable to argue that religion killing is fine as long as your type of religion is less vicious than the next person’s religion.
Third despite having read Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, he ignores how Harris took time to mention the horrid violence commanded by God in the Old Testament which had no effect on Jesus who dug his heels in to say the text was truly inspired and infallible. A true good man would find that to be a deal breaker. To say religion is all peace takes some nerve when the religion’s own books do not say that. Hart: "The pagan rhetorician Libanius justly bragged that the gods of the Roman Empire had directed the waging of innumerable wars". The fact that the monotheistic faiths of the time such as Judaism were as bad was no help, there was no good example. And how did the gods direct wars? Well there were soothsayers. Fortune-tellers. Signs in the sky. Jesus hailed David as his model despite him killing a giant instead of trying to incapacitate him. The underlying current is, "We are protected for we work for the greater good despite the risk to ourselves and the misery we cause or if you like it is because of the risk and the misery." (They act like they have received some revelation or higher or forbidden knowledge to that effect.) That is one overlap between Christianity and the worst of religions. The overlap means that regardless of how good it behaves, it has no right to look down its nose at savage religions or to call them invalid.
Fourth, Christianity argues that God is all in all so Christians fighting over land and money is about God even if not done in the express name of God. The God of the Torah says that material success is a sign of divine favour.
Fifth, big claims need big knowledge and you need to be able to put forward a good case for defending them. Errors harm and lead to lies. More lies and errors follow. There is no mention of how the early Christians were celebrated by the Church and its leaders for dying for the faith sometimes in an unimaginably cruel and twisted fashion. This was wrong for they had given no real religious assent. Uniformed choice is not choice. The blood of martyrs become the seed of Christendom and today cultural Christians selfishly and unfeelingly look for benefits in religion as if the blood it was watered with does not matter. The faith killed its own never mind heretics and other religions. Ultimately the blame lies with Jesus who himself promised massive rewards if you lift the cross and die for him and who encouraged devotion from his entourage even if it meant paying with their lives.
Hart objects to Dawkins writing that the ultimate reason we are here is natural selection and say you need something deeper than that for where did natural selection come from? He knows fine well Dawkins means chance led to us and chance just happens to be in the form of survival of the most adaptable. If the universe has a purpose and is a miracle that does not mean I do as well. A miraculously made clock can still be a normal clock and fall and smash by bad luck. There can be more than one ultimate reason. Chance is the ultimate reason we exist.
Hart says, "materialism is not a fact of experience or a deduction of logic; it is a metaphysical prejudice, nothing more, and one that it arguably more irrational than almost any other." Whatever. He wants to deny that all is purposeless blind stuff. That is why materialism is vilified. But bringing in the supernatural, the notion of spirits and powers such as love that are non-material but real does not solve anything. It makes it worse. Spirit can ultimately be stuff too. Blunt materialism with the notion of magic and spirits and so on being thrown out is better.
He agrees with Dennett that religion is a natural human thing but says that does not mean a God cannot inspire it. He could use people and the natural as instruments to bring us to him and teach us religious truth.
True. But this gives man too much power. It lowers the bar too much. All you would need is this divine prompting and would not need miracles or anything else as signs. In practice it means just saying God is behind you. If you write an ethics manual that is human. So what if you suggest that God could be the real author? God is making a God out of you.
And while faiths may seek miracles to show that their Christ or prophet is inspired by God, the truth is they would not be looking for the wonders and trying to verify them unless they had made up their minds that they were genuine in the first place. As dishonest as that is, Hart’s doctrine that natural religion can still be divine is worse. It is utterly shameless.
Hart states that Augustine wrote that the best and highest state of human freedom is not “being able to not to sin”. It is rather “being unable to sin” posse non peccare. That is mystical woo. Becoming unable to sin and keeping free will and freedom is impossible. The person who is faced with loads of opportunities to do harm and won't take them is actually being diminished and called less than human! To argue that you should be so good that you end up stuck doing good like you are self-programmed is frankly bizarre.
Interestingly he says that the apparitions Emperor Julian the Apostate had of deities and miracles such as Hecate’s statue coming alive were probably tricks. Fair enough but there is no evidence of that or testimony. He should suggest that the corpse of Jesus not being in the tomb was down to a hoax as well. Fair is fair.
Hart wrote, “Some kill because their faiths explicitly command them to do so, and some kill because they have no faith and hence believe all things are permitted to them…men kill for their gods, or for their God, or because there is no God.”
If is an equal playing field then religion is nothing special and should not have its privilege place in society. Its feasts such as Christmas should not be marked by the state. The notion that people kill for they have no faith is nonsense. Faith even if in your army or your leader or yourself is needed. And the one who kills for they think all is permitted may not be obeying a God but is still acting as if this permission is divine. I mean they think something has permitted them even if they don’t call it God. It is tempting to think that all faith, including that which atheists have ie that they will not be hit by a bus today, is a product of magical thinking. That is for another conversation.
Hart curiously talks about religion as if it is real then he writes, "Religion in the abstract does not actually exist, and almost no one (apart from politicians) would profess any allegiance to it." "Christians, for instance, are not, properly speaking, believers in religion; rather, they believe that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate, rose from the dead and is now, by the power of the Holy Spirit, present to his church as its Lord." (That amounts to irresponsibly saying that there is no religion and so we cannot talk of keeping religion out of state affairs. If that is what Jesus wants then he should be excised from our minds. And how could the pagans have religions for they also said that they were about believing in gods?
"If Dennett really wishes to undertake a 'scientific' investigation of faith, he should promptly abandon his attempts to describe religion (which, again, does not really exist), and attempt to enter the actual world of belief in order to weigh its phenomena from within. As a first step, he should certainly - purely in the interest of sound scientific method and empirical rigour - begin praying, then continue to do so with some perseverance."
Well Dennett and many of the new atheists could have been doing that just as they wrote. They don't have to disclose that. Who is Hart to judge? And all did pray one time. Hart wants only those who get involved in religion or faith to comment on it. Ultimately prayer is private and personal. No matter how much you do it with others you are not them. Hart is advocating for a form of divisive arrogant standpoint epistemology: "Only I know what is right for me and nobody else's opinion matters." There is that but there is also a level of collective standpoint epistemology, "Only my religious community knows what it needs and is so nobody else's suggestions should count." One goal of that type of thinking is that critics will be put off thinking there is no point in them saying anything. Standpoint attitudes are hard to maintain - telling yourself that you are a good builder will get you nowhere if you are not. They are easy to maintain when it comes to religious faith which is immune to problems in the real world. For example, nobody sees if God is really working in your soul so it is easy for you to think he is.
The fact remains that those faiths have contradictions and do harms and make terrible errors that persist regardless of what research finds and you don't need to be in or out to see them. Hart is simply trying to get people to ignore them so what is he trying to hide?
It is true that religion says that prayer helps with faith problems but all religions even the silliest ones say that. And is that kind of help good for you? Let that be a warning that prayer is a trick for keeping you in a religion that lacks honesty and credibility. It must have some kind of conditioning effect. And the Bible warns that praying without changing your heart is harmful for it is calling God a fool. Yet those who pray manipulatively to God think it works. And not all prayers go to God seemingly. And if you say your prayer is true and real nobody else can see that so it comes across as self-righteous boasting. Conditioning yourself is self-abuse and harms others for you are no island.
All Hart has done is show that whatever the New Atheism got wrong in details, it did not get wrong in anything else. Its anti-religious mood is justified.