I sit up and pay attention when Roger Scruton speaks. He recently considered the significance of the worldview evinced in books by Uval Noah Harari, who is a biological determinist in the same vein as Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins. Harari acknowledges the philosophical consequences of the humanist rejection of transcendent truth. He goes a step […]
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Blinkered Reality
Sean Carroll is a physicist who sometimes dabbles uncomprehendingly in philosophy, as in his entrée into the New Atheist genre, The Big Picture. In it, Carroll repeatedly and exasperatingly assumes his conclusion (there is no supernatural reality, therefore there is no supernatural reality), adopts a materialism-of-the-gaps outlook (any gap in our understanding of physical things […]
Read more...Review (Part Three): The Experience of God — Being Consciousness Bliss, by David Bentley Hart
Being Wonder Hart has set the stage for his discussion of being, consciousness, and bliss, and now we start with being; by which he means the astonishing fact of existence of anything. All serious thought, Hart says, begins in a moment of “unsettling or delighted surprise.” Hart describes it as a “primordial agitation of the mind.” That […]
Read more...Review (Part One): The Experience of God–Being, Consciousness, Bliss, by David Bentley Hart
This book is a rare find. Hart eloquently puts forward what is fundamentally wrong with the materialist point of view that lures so many into a blinkered perception of reality. Part One: “God” The Straw Man Here we consider the first of the theses Hart pursues: that the new atheist argument against God is a […]
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