Review of David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013).
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One thing, certainly, can be said about David Bentley Hart’s book and it is this: that its author takes atheism very seriouslyor rather, the “New Atheism,” as it is called, a recent ideologico-cultural “movement” whose proponents are mainly scientists who, through the publication over the past decade or so of a string of popular (and often best-selling) books, seek to debunk the “God theory” within the context of a strictly materialist / naturalist understanding of the world. But don’t get me wrong: when I say that Hart takes the New Atheism seriously, I do not suggest that he himself sits within its camp. Rather, the whole point of Hart’s book is, in a fairly lively and (admittedly often humorously) caustic polemical spirit, to, first of all, debunk the New Atheists’ own debunking by demonstrating that their definition of “God” (or rather, lack of coherent definition) is not only distressingly unsophisticated, but also, in their clear lack of interest in even trying to learn anything at all about what the major religious traditions of the world actually say about “God,” appallingly infantile; and secondly, to offer instead a more sophisticated definition of “God” deeply rooted in the traditions and (which is most to the point) adequate in its address of the three experientially intractable phenomena that a strictly naturalistic explanation of the universe is finally simply incapable of accounting for: namely, being, consciousness, and bliss. Indeed, says Hart, a truly adequate appreciation of these three phenomena as the basis for a more philosophically refined definition of God ultimately renders naturalism (and with that atheism) itself incoherent as a position: “Faith in God is not something that can ever be wholly and coherently rejected, even if one refuses all adherence to creeds and devotions” (p. 287).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.016 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".