The superstitions of materialism

"Beauty can be a startling reminder for those us who have sunk occasionally into the superstitions of materialism, that to see reality in purely mechanistic terms is not to see the real world at all, but only its shadow."

- David Bentley Hart

Om ateismens metafysik

All of which is to say (to return to where I began) that it is absurd to think that one can profess atheism in any meaningful way without thereby assenting to an entire philosophy of being, however inchoate one’s sense of it may be. The philosophical naturalist’s view of reality is not one that merely fails to find some particular object within the world that the theist imagines can be descried there; it is a very particular representation of the nature of things, entailing a vast range of purely metaphysical commitments.

Principally, it requires that one believe that the physical order, which both experience and reason say is an ensemble of ontological contingencies, can exist entirely of itself, without any absolute source of actuality. It requires also that one resign oneself to an ultimate irrationalism: For the one reality that naturalism can never logically encompass is the very existence of nature (nature being, by definition, that which already exists); it is a philosophy, therefore, surrounded, permeated, and exceeded by a truth that is always already super naturam, and yet a philosophy that one cannot seriously entertain except by scrupulously refusing to recognize this.

It is the embrace of an infinite paradox: the universe understood as an “absolute contingency.” It may not amount to a metaphysics in the fullest sense, since strictly speaking it possesses no rational content—it is, after all, a belief that all things rest upon something like an original moment of magic—but it is certainly far more than the mere absence of faith.

David Bentley Hart - “God, Gods, and Fairies”

Bentley Hart on natural law

Without “specific religious or metaphysical traditions, there really is very little that natural law theory can meaningfully say about the relative worthiness of the employments of the will.” but we can talk about natural law only if there is general agreement about nature, such that there is a bond between “what is and what should be.”

Peter Leithard summarizes Bentley Harts latest article in First Things

The wall of separation

"We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess; our culturally most persuasive models of human freedom are unambiguously voluntarist and, in a rather debased and degraded way, Promethean; the will, we believe, is sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and this is the highest good. And a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end. Desire is free to propose, seize, accept or reject, want or not want — but not to obey. Society must thus be secured against the intrusions of the Good, or of God, so that its citizens may determine their own lives by the choices they make from a universe of morally indifferent but variably desirable ends, unencumbered by any prior grammar of obligation or value (in America, we call this the “wall of separation”)."

- Ur David Bentley Harts text Christ and Nothing

Hart om den övernaturliga naturen

Missa för allt i världen inte David B. Harts vackra text i First Things.

A person who believes in fairies or in Thor may or may not be mistaken about certain finite objects within the cosmos; a person who believes in God may or may not be mistaken about being, the nature of existence itself, the logical possibility of any world, the moral meaning of the universe, and so on. The former kind of belief concerns facts of experience, the latter truths of reason, and to suggest that they occupy the same conceptual or existential space is either to confess one’s own stupidity or willfully to engage in cheap rhetorical thuggery.

That though, as I say, is obvious. My reason for taking exception to such remarks is perhaps somewhat more precious, but still quite sincere. Simply enough, what if there are fairies at the bottom of one’s garden? Or, more precisely, what the hell is so irrational in believing there are or might be?

... som @joelsh uttryckte det:
Och nästa gång nån bara: "Att tro på Gud är ju ungefär som att tro på féer & troll", svara: "Ja. Och?"

Tro det eller ej

På tal om David Bentley Hart och kritik av den nya ateismen, så finner man i senaste nummret av First Things en lång men läsvärd artikel av just David B. Hart, om just den nya ateismen.

Se även detta videoklipp för mer av Harts kommentarer på samma tema.

Bentley Hart om frihet och det goda livet

David Bentley Hart är en framstående ortodox teolog, filosof och samhällsdebattör som bland annat uppmärksammats för sin bok Atheist Delusions. Den som är nyfiken på Bentley Hart bör kolla in dessa korta videointervjuer!

I ett av dessa klipp talar han belysande om två konkurrerande föreställningar om frihet och det goda livet:

Ethics and the good life from CPX on Vimeo.

"(Modern notions of freedom) defines freedom not in the classical sense as the power of a being to realize its nature by growing into greater conformity with the good as such. We don’t assume we have a nature, we don’t assume the good as such is anything other than a cultural construction. Rather freedom consists in the unrestrained spontaneous power of the self to construct for itself the ends it desires. And then to pursuit them with as little interference as possible to the greatest extent of its power. If that is true, if we are working with that model of freedom, the pretense that there is some obviously self-evident system of ethics out there that all rational people will agree on because it is good for us is absurd."

Medeltiden som renässansens Andre

I mars kommer utställningen :And There Was Light till Göteborg. Över 30 orginalverk av renässansmästare som Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo och Rafael kommer att visas. Det kommer säkert bli en fantastisk upplevelse!

Jag hängde dock upp mig på den ideologiska historieskrivningen i den snygga broschyren ...



"... livsvilja, glädje och ljus tog över efter medeltidens mörker och religiositet". Känns historien bekant? Den moderna tiden som med sin vetenskap stod för frihet och framsteg, avlöste medeltiden som med sin religion stod för fanatism och förtryck. Medeltiden som modernitetens Andre, typ.

Men förställningen om att perioden mellan rommarikets fall och renässansen kännetecknades av kulturellt och akademiskt mörker framstår alltmer som en ideologisk produkt av upplysningens historieskrivning. En som tagit sig an att avslöja denna myt är David Bentley Hart, i sin bok Atheist Delusions.

“My chief ambition in writing [this book] is to call attention to the peculiar and radical nature of the new faith in [the cultural] setting [of late antiquity]: how enormous a transformation of thought, sensibility, culture, morality, and spiritual imagination Christianity constituted in the age of pagan Rome; the liberation it offered from fatalism, cosmic despair, and the terror of occult agencies; the immense dignity it conferred upon the human person; its subversion of the cruelest aspects of pagan society; its (alas, only partial) demystification of political power; its ability to create moral community where none had existed before; its elevation of active charity above all other virtues” (pp. x-xi)."

Hart är inte ensam om att kritisera myten om den "mörka medeltiden" eller "the dark ages" som denna föreställda period brukar kallas på engelska. Från teologiskt håll har till exempel både Charles Taylor och Talal Asad på olika sätt bidragit till att sticka hål på den förenklade framgångsmyten. Visst var renässansen rik på konst och litteratur och vetenskapliga framsteg, men att ställa den ljusa renässansens i ett motsatsförhållande till den mörka medeltiden känns inte bara onyanserat, utan som ett uttryck för sekularistisk ideologi.

"If anything is agreed upon, it is that a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable." - Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular. s.1

...

För intressant läsning på samma tema, se Signum-artikeln Var jorden platt före Columbus?