David Bentley Hart: preference

Transcript context

…Given that perspective, does it ever make sense to think about the deity in probabilistic or Bayesian terms? Because it’s sounding almost Bayesian to me. “Well, the chance that God exists is 73 percent.” Well, faith isn’t — the question of existence of God, that’s not what I was talking about. When I talked about faith, I meant a path towards the sacred. There, first of all, to define what the word existence means, because God would not exist in the way that an individual entity, a finite entity exists. So, any rational arguments you have about God are based on, usually, a modal metaphysics of the absolute and the contingent, or so on and so forth. There, I think reason should be fully engaged. The question is, within a tradition — that’s when things become a bit more stochastic. If I don’t start from the premise that when I speak of God, that there’s an absolute source and end to all things, then I’m not really interested in the question of religion at all. But if I believe that may be true, if I have a sense of it, or if reason tells me it’s so — that it doesn’t make sense to believe in a pure physicalism or materialism — then where faith is engaged is in trying to make rational judgments about who can point you towards a deeper understanding and relationship. I don’t think that’s Bayesian so much as it’s not a leap of faith in the vulgar sense. But it is a venture of faith in the sense that you can’t start with perfect wisdom and knowledge. You are making rational judgments. Again, rationality is not a single, univocal thing. It can also have to do with intuitions, like moral intuitions. If you come up against a doctrine or a teaching or something that is repugnant to your moral reasoning, then that is significant. It would be deplorable of you to choose to believe it, despite the counsels of your moral reasoning, unless you had really good reasons to think you’d been mistaken. Does the concept of reincarnation make theological sense to you?…

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