Book Review - The Experience of God

In an age of philosophical poverty, David Hart enriches us with 'The Experience of God'. In this book, Hart shows that God's existence can be found through our experience of Being, Consciousness, and Bliss. Our awareness of being leads us to being's inherent contingency and the need for the non-contingent God. Our experience of consciousness shows us the intelligibility of all things and the need for the all-encompassing intelligence of God. Our yearning for bliss inexorably takes us to the need for the God of truth, beauty, and goodness. Such is Hart's argument, in a tremendously compressed form.

But in this book Hart does so much more. He persuasively argues that our modern culture has become almost incapable of experiencing God. Due to the prolonged influence of materialism and naturalism, our culture has attempted to fit all experience into the boxes of the tangible and the scientifically provable. Hart devotes many pages to deconstructing materialistic arguments against the existence of God. But in so doing, he recognizes that the true problem is not bad philosophy, but rather a disenchanted culture that cannot conceive of the spiritual. This book can be tiring and very difficult, but is ultimately quite rewarding.