DGE Review 3: Atheist Delusions, by David Bentley Hart

I started this series to see how smart people deal with tough questions, and Hart's series of essays in "Atheist Delusions, the Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies" decides to take on "the list" and the associated charges that Christianity has held back the West and the progress of culture and reason.

What can I say? Hart is a brilliant essayist and philosopher. This isn't Jerry Falwell giving us some 30-minute sermon. in fact, Hart doesn't get into religion per se much at all, except to explain how religious discussions fit into historical events. So this isn't a book meant to explain Christianity or convert people. This is a serious book by a scholar about Christianity's effect on the world and historical revisionism.

It's a "thick" book, which means if you're from the MTV generation like me you're sometimes going to find it tough going. I bogged down a couple of times, but made it through the entire book and am glad I read it. David sometimes makes a point so fine that I'm not sure where the point is by the time he gets to it. So I'm sure that whatever I say in my review is only going to butcher up his work. But hey, this is the internet: you pays your money and you takes your chances.

Hart takes us through all of the items on the list, exhaustively, and shows how they are commonly misunderstood (in his eyes). Inquisition? Awful thing and terrible tragedy, but most folks were spared by the church, not killed by it (the Spanish Inquisition, after all, was primarily a state proceeding). Crusades? Terrible tragedy and awful disaster, but also a colossal disaster for everyone concerned. On only a few occasions in the entire book did I think David was glossing over history. In each of these, he catches himself and explains to the reader: the goal isn't to say that all Christians are wonderful people or that Christianity in its entirety has always been a boon to civilization. The goal is to put things into context -- so that people don't understand these things on the list as cartoon images but deeply realize why and how they occurred.

Hart feels that a deep understanding of these events allow them to be read another way: that Christianity was a revolution in the moral understanding of the human. I've read his book, and he makes a very persuasive case. The idea that the common man: slave, laborer, craftsman, was actually a man could only happen because of Christianity. Strange as it may seem to our ears, the idea that people are people, that all humans have worth, wasn't around in the classical age.

He makes a broader case: to rail against "religion" is to have such a poorly defined enemy as not to have one at all. When authors speak of religion as a general thing to attack the definition is so mushy they can stretch it to meet just about anything. It's the ultimate straw man argument. I've had this problem with atheists for some time -- how do you know what not to believe in? Seems like the only rational position without evidence is agnostic, yet we have some "fire and brimstone" atheists out there, who are as sure there isn't a God as some believers are that there is one.

Hart views the modern bunch of atheists -- Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennis, et al -- as fairly crude poseurs for much greater thinkers throughout the ages. Or, in laymen's terms, what we got now for atheists is third string stuff. There have been much better commentators on religion and atheism in the past. Nietzsche, for instance, comes up many times in David's book. What to do about morals without a larger framework of religion to hold them up? Hart feels that the most reasonable answer is with Nietzsche, nihilism, and exercise of the will.

I think David is on to something here, although I wouldn't give all the credit to Nietzsche. And I think there's a long way to go from fervent dogmatist in some religious order and nihilist -- I'm not so sure the choice is so black-and-white. I am suspicious that there exists a blend between existentialism and belief in some higher power. Such could lead to a a "framework free" system of values that, without a structured church or orthodoxy, acknowledges various religious traditions as important creative placeholders for a deeper understanding of the infinite. But I digress. (And I'm just talking out of my butt, which is always a danger with these types of discussions.)

Indeed, Hart seems to feel that Christianity's greatest defeat was when Constantine decided to make it part of the state. The reasoning seemed to be if you can't beat them, join them. He sees much of what we call the historical evils of Christianity as part of a struggle between the inward understanding of God that Christianity brings and the state's desire to totally dominate the person. Christianity, as did Judaism, calls the individual to a higher purpose than simply serving the state. It is this tension between secular and religious, between inward and outward authorities, and the resolution to it, that has caused so much turmoil (and progress) in society.

I'm going to take it farther and state it clearly for my atheist friends: Christianity represents the highest evolved form of creative understanding of the unknown that anything yet has brought. Not organized or formal Christianity, but the belief that the infinite became a human and sacrificed himself for the rest of us brings forth a system of behavior based around valuing the individual as infinitely precious and promoting sacrifice for others as a virtue. From an external viewpoint the observation that the species does best as a whole when individual members have some greater standard than self-preservation seems obvious, yet it's proven impossible to reliably externally instill into individuals. You can dilly dally and nibble around the edges all you want, but at the end of the day the very value systems you use to attack Christianity are intricately based on its existence. The rock of modernity that you stand on to look back through the past is the very thing you find so lacking. Very ironic, that.

In addition, the intellectual and philosophical struggles as Christianity took this religion of self-sacrifice and higher morals and integrated it with the classical world is what has led to a great part of what we call the modern world. Thirty Year's War? Led to our idea of freedom of religion. Crusades? Led to the idea of public hospitals where the poor and sick could go for help. Did anybody forget the thousands of hospitals built in the Middle Ages? Protestant Reformation? Led to the idea that what you believe can be sourced authentically back to one book or provable source. To me this belief is the basis of modern science. In fact, looking at a lot of the great thinkers of the last two thousand years, most of them were Christians who used their faith as a sounding board to move into uncharted territories.

We are so surrounded by the after effects of Christianity's struggle with classicism that it's become invisible to us. Hart does a great job of letting us start to see these things once again. (without overstating the case, which I've probably done)

But all of this really doesn't get to the question: does God exist? instead it basically is a response to the current, feeble brand of populist atheism. (I reserve my prerogative to remain a Hitchens fan when it comes to his style of writing)

So this is a good book. Makes you think. If you're a die-hard atheist, I'd recommend going out and slogging through it, especially if you've spent time with some of the modern atheism books. But be prepared to take your time and spend some time looking up his points, especially if you're not a philosophy and history junkie like me. If you're a fervent believer, maybe not so much: you've already for whatever reasons picked a side and Hart isn't going to add much for you except a deeper understanding of history.

Which in itself is a good thing. Even if Hart is mostly wrong here, which I don't think he is, it's good to read opposing views about history. It gives a deeper understanding of the things that happened. You want your history to read like a comic book? Or a epic novel? I'll take the grown-up version, please.

In the end Hart didn't make much of a dent in the way I view the universe: I still think that some kind of Great Unknown is a necessary part of the human experience. I did, however, find comfort in his evening the score with some of the modern writers, which I think do a great disservice to atheism in general. This is worth the read. The ideas in it are going to be part of me for a long time to come.