If you’ve not already heard the buzz about David Bentley Hart’s “The Experience of God”, be sure to have a look. It is a book worth reading: both for the thoughtful theist who wants to draw clear lines of distinction as to what she means by asserting that God exists, and for the thoughtful atheist who wishes to know exactly what it is that she’s rejecting.
Hart takes the New Atheists to task for their deep misunderstandings of what theists actually claim–and points out that their arguments all hang on making these errors.
I don’t, of course, agree with everything that Hart writes (I suspect it would worry him if I did), but he’s definitely right about this much: the current, often shrill, popular debates over theism are only very rarely ever talking about God at all.
God, as educated theists have always understood him, has simply been ignored–and thoughtful people will seek to rectify this in their own thinking.
Fide Dubitandum 
February 15th, 2014 at 8:21 am
OK, which “god” are you talking about here?
How have you heard of this god?
February 16th, 2014 at 12:20 am
If you want to know which God Hart is talking about, read his book. But read it with intent to understand, not to quote-mine for mocking.
But, if you want to know which God I’ve been discussing, I dedicated an entire section of the blog to that. Have a look.
If you still don’t understand, that’s fine, but ask a specific question. Simply saying “explain it again” doesn’t help.
As to specific questions, could you clarify what “How have you heard of this god[sic]?” means?
Like many of the opening questions, it reads less like an attempt to understand and more like an attempt to get me to make some declarative statement that can be met with demands for “tangible evidence”.
But I’m not interested in watching people point out that there is no tangible example of a non-tangible thing–as if I’d ever claimed otherwise.
You’ve often said that you don’t understand my answers. But, rather than simply demanding that I reword them, could you meet me half way and tell me what it is that you don’t understand? I honestly have no idea.
So, quote a sentence from this blog and tell me what you think it means. That will get us a lot farther than simply repeating the same vague questions from previous discussions.