No, I read it, start to finish. Twice now. <bolding mine>:
Hart hand waves science of the known universe away and give his version of God an external locus. His God permeates and at the same time is bigger than some puny universe barely understood by mere human mortals. Well, he’s right in one aspect. Humans have a very poor understanding of the universe in which we live. But all Hart has done is move the goal posts with respect to the explanation or understanding of god’s role in it.
God is not an ‘external locus’ of the universe (or of all possible universes) any more than the ocean is an external locus of all the waves. That analogy may be confusing, since it’s not really adequate to convey the concept. Perhaps currents within the ocean would be a slightly better analogy than waves on top of the ocean. The ocean is not an external locus of ocean currents.
Understanding of the universe has nothing to do with it. We could understand every minute detail of the universe completely, but that still would not have anything to do with the existence or being of those details of the universe and the laws which govern them.
Perhaps I’m one of those of whom Pascal spoke when he said, ‘For those who cannot believe…’. Perhaps I simply don’t understand how what Hart is saying is different from “god of the gaps”?
Defining God negatively (i.e. as, broadly, that which is not [insert criteria]) is convenient in a way, but also seems to me an unsatisfactory way of defining anything. The reason I don’t think it’s useful is that such gaps have no stable salient characteristics.
When (for example) the existence of an undiscovered particle or process is predicted, the reason for the prediction is always that current observations show a certain kind of anomaly - the kind of anomaly that would be completely explained by a new particle or process with an exact and limited set of characteristics.
The “God in the gaps” type of idea works this way, except for one thing - the “predicted” characteristics of this type of god are unlimited and undefined. It’s exactly as if a scientist wrote a paper saying “I predict the existence of a particle that neatly explains everything we don’t know. Its characteristics will constantly change to suit whatever we need to explain at the time we mention it, and conform to the state of our knowledge at that time.”
In other words, defining God as not(insert something here) is exactly the same as saying “Anything we don’t know must be magic, and let’s all agree to call magic ‘God’, OK?”
The latter. 
Another quote from Hart (my emphases):
Again, Hart’s argument is most definitely NOT ‘God in the gaps’. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what he is saying.
I do not pretend to understand quantum physics. But I would not presume to re-purpose my lack of understanding of quantum physics into a philosophical position or argument for the existence of (a) God.
Again, with all respect, that’s NOT what Hart is doing at all. :smack:
Okay. I can stand being corrected. Can you explain what he means when he talks about god and how such a concept relates to quantum physics, if at all?
Maybe I’m not picking good quotes from his book…
He’s saying that it doesn’t relate to quantum physics.
“The picture is radically incomplete [by radically he means that even filling up the gaps wouldn’t make it complete] … because neither level of reality explains the existence of the other, or of itself.”
So NO understanding of the details or laws of the universe would explain why or how those details and laws exist in the first place. And the explanation is NOT that some god decreed that they should exist like that, because a god would just be one more existing and unexplained object. What it means is that NO explanation of any god or gods, and NO explanation of mechanics and physical laws can ever give a complete picture. There is - and must be - something transcendental to all objects and all laws which is not itself an object or a law.
At least that’s my understanding of his argument…
I’m going to have to leave this discussion until tomorrow. I have some kind of a life. Really!
I’m just coming back from some errands, one of which included a stop at the liquor store. I’ll give the above some thought after a glass or two and see if starts making some kind of sense. Maybe I should drink until it does. 
Third glass and nothin’.
Why “must” there be something transcendental?
Because, the essence of existence that materialism relies on must come from somewhere and that’s Hart’s God. At least I think that’s the argument. It’s not God as presented by the vast majority of religious people so really the naming gets confusing. 
If the universe needs God to hold it together, then God needs God-of-God to hold him together, and God-of-God needs God-of-God-of-God, and so on. If God can exist on his own, then the universe can just as well exist without any gods at all.
You’re saying that as though it’s some kind of clever insight, but it’s been regarded as a childishly obvious thought by theologians and philosophers for thousands of years.
If you want to say something useful on the subject then perhaps you could try giving a meaningful refutation of David Bentley Hart’s argument, quoted above.
Do you even know about Thomas Aquinas’ thoughts on the matter (contingent and non-contingent being) in the 13th century?
Or Leibnitz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason?
Or Craig’s Kalām cosmological argument?
I really don’t want to sound snippy, but it’s sorta hard not to read this as saying ‘materialists only attack a straw man god’ and simultaneously claiming that the notion of ‘God’ I have is that of an ‘old man with a beard sitting on cloud’—which would of course be a straw man.
In fact, the notion of God I have in mind is basically Hart’s “eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things.”
Virtually none of this is necessary to provide a background to common ideas and perceptions; it’s all added-on baggage we have no reason to accept. And once we get rid off the superfluous, what’s left, though we might call it ‘God’ (or ‘Frank’, or ‘Mary’), will not differ appreciably from a materialist’s notion of the universe, external reality, or what have you. This is just a bait-and-switch, really—idealists realize they need some form of backdrop reality, and quickly substitute God, where atoms and the void would do as well, and with far less questionable attributes (far more parsimoniously, even though it’s strictly speaking somewhat questionable to appeal to parsimony here).
Also, I’m severely skeptical of Hart’s claims that really, all the different spiritual traditions sorta kinda mean the same—it’s true that if you leave out enough, squint your eyes, cherry-pick some data and forget about the rest, everything kinda starts to blur together, but that’s not really telling us much. The devil, with some irony, is in the details; so while you certainly can find some philosophers nominally of one faith or another that have had similar opinions about the ‘uncreated’—it’s after all a sort of logical stop-gap to keep people from continuing to ask ‘why this?’—this doesn’t mean that the actual, lived religious traditions have much to do with one another. It just means that people got fed up at the same place with others asking ‘why?’ that they eventually hit on the strategy of claiming that it’s incomprehensible to the human mind, infinite, transcendental, or what have you.
After all, it’s easy to find prominent religious figures defending ideas that Hart so casually dismisses. Consider just as an example Pope Pius XII reaction to the development of the Big Bang theory:
This is exactly the view of God as ‘demiurge’ Hart dismisses, issued from the head of one of the largest religions in history. If you have to deviate that much from actual religion as lived and preached to find something defensible, or to find something ‘in common’ across religious traditions, it would seem you’ve missed your intended subject.
Furthermore, if one applies the criteria he issues for being ‘really’ an atheist to being ‘really’ a Christian—or ‘really’ religious—for surely if the atheist, to genuinely disbelieve, must understand God in Hart’s sense, so must the theist, to believe—then I’d wager there’d be preciously few ‘believers’ left. Pope Pius XII certainly would seem not to be counted among them!
Hart also seems to get the genesis of religion exactly backwards, writing as if mere ‘local’ gods are, in some sense, bastardizations of the ‘true’ idea of God, when actually, things such as animistic spirits historically predate the more transcendental notions, as with growing understanding of the world those spirits were forced to retreat into ever more esoteric realms, more and more removed from probing minds, until they could secure themselves behind the veil of the incomprehensible and infinite. All the various shamanistic and animistic traditions seem to be, in Hart’s eyes, ‘no true religions’, yet they stand at the origin of modern religion, which is distilled from those by a process of gradual refinement—gods moving from the bushes to the highest peaks to the heavens, fleeing from man’s prying eye, ultimately to some incomprehensible ‘beyond’, into transcendence and abstraction, becoming ‘God’. The only reason these more ‘refined’ beliefs persist is simply that they’re by design too ill-defined to be rationally acted upon. It’s a process of selection: only by becoming abstract could the belief in god, or God, survive; within the world, it has been hunted to near extinction by our progress of understanding.
There still remains one reason not to believe, however: God isn’t needed. Something that is “eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things” is simply total overkill. Hart misses this appeal in his argumentation: when the atheist talks about ‘invisible pink unicorns’, they’re talking about something that there is no reason to believe in; they’re not confusing God with the finite being of unicorns. The distinction between gods and God is a lame one, as in the one respect that matters—them being needlessly complicating and unmotivated additions to the world—they’re identical.
What I find interesting, and what your the names you dropped above clearly show, is that people who need god are imminently flexible and adaptable in redefining the existence of such a god. Kalam’s cosmological arguments demonstrates this quite nicely, by talking about creating “something out of nothing” and using basic cosmological principles to justify their argument for God’s Omnificence. My questions are these:
This is exactly where you are not ‘getting’ what Hart is saying. In fact, Hart himself says something very similar to what you’ve said above. His own argument is quite different.
I’m not even a Christian, never mind a Catholic, so Pope Pius’ pronouncements on anything honestly don’t mean much to me.
In all religions and cultures, there has always been a large gap between the beliefs of ordinary believers and the abstract and scholarly discussions of the elite. This so in the Greek and Roman religions and philosophy, Chinese and Indian religions and philosophy, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.
And because there is this inevitable gap, there is also a gap between the popular pronouncements of religious leaders to the public and their internal abstract and theoretical discussions. The public doesn’t want hair-splitting logic, they want something simple, clear, and practical to believe.
It’s similar to the major gap between pop-science and hard science. There’s pop-religion and there’s ‘hard’ religion and philosophy.
Hart on why the materialist view is not sufficient:
I’m quoting David Bentley Hart because his book is the best I’ve come across in answer to the ‘new atheists’ such as Dawkins, etc.
I’d say that if there is one book that every honest atheist should read, this is it. After reading it, you may not accept what he says, but you at least owe it to yourself to be familiar with the best that can be said on the other side of the argument.
They don’t. But they need to answer the scientific principles of the new atheists, and respond to their arguments.
Science didn’t and hasn’t described them. They have been around for thousands of years.
Nothing. See 1.
I don’t know how you can deny this as anything but a “God of the gaps” argument: ‘We understand science has a QM theorem. But God transcends it!’
Deists didn’t start talking about QM until QM theory was developed. Now, sophist spiritualists and deists can’t talk about anything else.
Then he needs to do a better job in explaining why there “must” be something transcendent, and use a much less loaded term than “God”. Some mathematics/physics to back his understanding of transcendence would be helpful as well.