Theologian and Philosopher Dr. David Bentley Hart has little patience for sloppy thinking atheists. Looks to consciousness and spirituality.

photo by: André Batista

The wooden pews in the Greek Orthodox church I grew up in were hard and uncomfortable. I think it was by design. The spiritual path of my ancestors was one of sacrifice, suffering, and of course, fear. The pews fit the path, but the path didn’t fit me. Fear kept me there for a while, but even that wore off over time. As the years passed my forced indoctrination transformed into a genuine curiosity about human consciousness, science and soul. But all along I always wondered what had kept everyone in those pews. How did they find Gnosis/truth/bliss/God through the ridiculous ritual and ceremony that dominates Orthodox Christianity?

Today’s guest, author, philosopher and theologian, Dr. David Bentley Hart may have found a way through. From his scathing and intellectually rigorous dismantling of the physcialism/materialism that mesmerizes secular culture, to his thorough understanding of Eastern and Western religious traditions, Hart’s deep thinking is almost enough to get me back in those pews… well, almost:

David Bentley Hart: If you examine the act of consciousness in which you are engaged when you’re choosing a tie, you already find dynamisms that exceed the possibilities of the naturalist picture of reality.

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Alex Tsakiris: We spend a lot of time on this show looking at the science of near-death experiences and other science of extended consciousness. I think it both falsifies this materialism that we’re talking about, and gets us to the entry point of being able to really seriously consider [what lies beyond our physical body]. Do you delve into this science?

David Bentley Hart: It depends on what you mean by the science.

Alex Tsakiris: For example, the science of near-death experience.

David Bentley Hart: No. In fact it may disappoint you but I go out of my way to avoid that because it was never an issue with me since I don’t believe in the mechanistic picture of the soul. So near-death experiences are not surprising to me although, the accounts you read can be disappointing at times. I’ve hand encounters with Bruce Greyson and I was at the University of Virginia. So I did my doctorate and I taught there for a while. And I corresponded with him briefly. But again, what fascinates me is not the way in which extraordinary experiences which may be contentious and contended… you’re not going to be able to hammer that home with great success to a convinced materialist no matter how much evidence you think you’ve amassed. He’s going to dismiss a great deal of it as anecdotal or [because of] the limits of our ability to measure deep electrical processes in the cerebral cortex. All the while that’s going on he’s going to be missing such fundamental issues that would be available to him or her–[such as] Patricia Churchland. I mustn’t leave her out of this. Just from an ordinary phenomenology of consciousness in every moment of life however ordinary the acts of consciousness seem … that remains fascinating. If you can get someone to see there’s a fundamental irreducibility of the structure of co...