'The reason I'm not an atheist is that I think the philosophical arguments against it are unanswerable.'

David Bentley Hart says something that is immediately disconcerting: “The reason I’m not an atheist is that I think the philosophical arguments against atheism are insurmountable.” This is not the statement of a religious leader, but of someone who describes himself as a “thoroughly secular man,” that is, profoundly secular, with no natural predisposition toward religion. Yet he cannot shake the question of what lies beyond matter: as a boy, he was an Episcopalian; today, he is an Eastern Orthodox Christian, but for him, true faith has never had much to do with ritual or institution. According to Hart, the problem with atheism is not just “I don’t believe in God,” but “I can’t explain conscience, beauty, or the fact that there is a moral obligation to others” without something that transcends matter. He argues that beauty itself is a central category of Christian thought, and that the Bible should also be interpreted through moral reason, not just literally. Hart does not hide behind the Church's contradictions: Christian history, he says, has been as evil as it has been good. And his faith is never blind. In fact, today he claims to be almost indifferent to dogmatic or institutional authority: he continues to defend the character of God, even against those believers who claim to speak in His name. He feels a “burning sense of obligation” toward the least, those whom Jesus placed at the center: the poor, the marginalized, and foreigners. And here comes the reversal: for Hart, the true challenge to materialism is not a struggle between science and miracles, but the question of whether everything that matters in life—consciousness, beauty, moral obligation—can really be explained solely by atoms and the laws of physics. And when he tackles the problem of evil—namely, the fact that Christian history has also seen the most monstrous images of God, not just the most enlightened ones—he does not back down: faith must be continually defended, reexamined, and even called into question. At dinner, you can drop at least three bombs: Hart says that the category of beauty is central to understanding Christianity, that, in his view, conscience remains inexplicable for those who confine themselves to materialism, and that the history of the Church has been as evil as it has been good—it is not the institution that saves it, but the “mystery beyond nature.” In his view, those who stop at religious formulas have missed the point. In all of this, the perspective that is missing and that few address is the following: What happens if even those who consider themselves rational and skeptical, at a certain point, realize that their deepest questions cannot be answered by the natural order alone? Hart is not an enthusiastic convert, but someone who feels compelled to stay because the opposite—radical atheism—seems too simplistic to him. In a nutshell: for Hart, the true alternative to atheism is not to believe out of tradition, but to be unable to ignore the fact that certain questions remain unanswered if we exclude all mystery. If this tension between mystery and rationality resonates with you, on Lara Notes you can press I'm In: it's not a 'like'; it's a way of saying that this question now belongs to you. And if tomorrow you tell someone that there is a theologian who considers himself a layperson but cannot be an atheist, on Lara Notes you can tag those who were present with “Shared Offline”: it’s a way of saying that the conversation really mattered. This is from an interview with David Bentley Hart in the online edition of The New York Times: you’ve saved yourself over ten minutes of reading.