We’ve talked about transcendence a lot, including especially here and here. It is a top-down understanding of phenomena we observe, or consider through rational thought, that can’t be explained purely as matter in motion. The utility of a chair; the beauty of a painting; the harmony of music, are all emergent properties of the movement of […]
Read more...Category: Transcendence
New York Public Library
We’ve talked a lot about “transcendence” on this site. “Transcendent” is from the Latin transcendere, “climb over, surpass.” We’ve used it often here in its usual sense of the supernatural “transcending” the natural, such as by experience of an interior contact with a numinous realm: the felt experience of God. This is being written in […]
Read more...The Intelligible Universe
In the atheist’s imagination, all of reality is reducible to matter and energy and time. Science, the study of that matter and energy and time, is thought to render it intelligible. This is a mistake of thinking, however. Intelligible order existed in the universe before the first scientist began to inquire into it. Science is […]
Read more...The Materialist Epoch
The Pagan and Christian Epochs The predominant worldview in the west before Christianity was paganism, which assumed the existence of something beyond the here-and-now of matter in space and time; gods who must be honored in their prescribed ways and seasons, for orderly human life. We discussed this in The Pagan Epoch. That “something beyond” […]
Read more...Review (Part Six): The Experience of God – Being Consciousness Bliss, by David Bentley Hart
Having explained how we approach the natural only over the interval of the supernatural, Hart turns to the incoherency of materialism. Absolute truth The human longing for truth involves a loyalty to an ultimate ideal, and that ultimate ideal beckons to us from beyond the totality of beings. We would not care at all about […]
Read more...Review (Part Five): The Experience of God — Being Consciousness Bliss, by David Bentley Hart
Bliss Mind over matter There is a mystery at the base of all of our ruminations about consciousness, and that sense of mystery resists reduction to material causes. Reality is one, embraced within the totality of being. “[P]erhaps we really should look elsewhere for the source and sustaining principle of that unity.” And Hart does: […]
Read more...Review (Part Four): The Experience of God—Being Consciousness Bliss, by David Bentley Hart
Consciousness The mechanistic vision of reality holds that material forces are inherently mindless; intrinsically devoid of purpose. Consciousness, on the other hand, is everything that matter is not: directed, purposive, essentially rational. Materialism and the fact of consciousness cannot be reconciled. The materialist point of view means making no accommodation for any spiritual reality. But […]
Read more...Review: True Paradox/How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World, by David Skeel
Let’s start with the quibbles, and move on to the good stuff. Skeel desires to avoid the concept of burdens of proof, in argument concerning the existence of God. Here’s the problem with that. Materialists routinely argue, for reasons they never adequately explain, that Christianity (or creationism or theism) bears the burden of proof. So […]
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