#38: David Bentley Hart: What Atheism Has Never Actually Challenged

What if atheism’s most celebrated arguments — Dawkins on complexity, Hitchens on morality, Harris on science — were never aimed at God at all, but at a caricature so philosophically crude that no serious theologian in history would recognise it? That is the central provocation of one of the most intellectually formidable theologians alive today. In this episode of The Prometheans, Ali Zaka sits down with David Bentley Hart — Eastern Orthodox philosopher-theologian, author of over 1,000 essays and 24 books, winner of the Michael Ramsey Prize in Theology awarded by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the man whom The Guardian called the author of “the one theology book all atheists really should read” (The Experience of God, Yale University Press, 2013). Hart has spent decades making a single, devastating argument: the God that New Atheism attacks — a kind of invisible super-being lurking within the cosmos — is not the God of classical theism at all. The classical theistic conception of God is not some discrete super-being sitting on the same ontological level with contingent reality, but the infinite fullness of being, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, from whom all things come and upon whom all things depend for every moment of their existence. To argue against Richard Dawkins’s “Boeing 747” deity is not to argue against the God of Aquinas, Augustine, Ibn Sina, Maimonides, or Shankara. It is to argue against a straw man. In this conversation, we explore: • Why classical theism — shared across Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism — describes God as Being Itself, not a being among beings • Why Dawkins’s argument from complexity fundamentally misunderstands the doctrine of Divine Simplicity • How the concepts of Being, Consciousness, and Bliss reveal that materialism cannot account for the most fundamental features of reality • Why atheism, rather than being the rational default, may itself rest on a profound metaphysical confusion • What the contemplative traditions of East and West say about the experience of God — and why this matters philosophically • Whether a genuinely rigorous atheism is even possible without first grappling with the classical concept of God David Bentley Hart has made it his life’s work to insist that the conversation must be raised to a higher level — or it is not a conversation worth having. Whether you are a committed theist, a convinced atheist, or a sincere seeker, this is the episode that will change how you think about the oldest question of all. David Bentley Hart is the author of The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale, 2013), Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale, 2009) — winner of the Michael Ramsey Prize — The Beauty of the Infinite (Eerdmans, 2003), That All Shall Be Saved (Yale, 2019), and The New Testament: A Translation (Yale, 2017), among many others. He has taught at Duke Divinity School, the University of Virginia, and the University of Notre Dame.