Vapid Dogmatism

Spurious Claims of the Age of Reason

Materialism is not a fact of experience or a deduction of logic; it is a metaphysical prejudice, nothing more, and one that is arguably more irrational than almost any other.  In general, the unalterably convinced materialist is a kind of childishly complacent fundamentalist, so fervently, unreflectively, and rapturously committed to the materialist vision of reality that if he or she should encounter any problem--logical or experiential--that might call its premises into question, or even merely encounter a limit beyond which those premises lose their explanatory power, he or she is simply unable to recognize it.

Richard Dawkins is a perfect example: he does not hesitate, for instance, to claim that "natural selection is the ultimate explanation for our existence."  But this is a silly assertion and merely reveals that Dawkins does not understand the words he is using.
  The question of existence does not concern how it is that the present arrangement of the world came about, from causes already internal to the world, but how it is that anything (including any cause) can exist at all. . . .

Even the simplest of things, and even the most basic of principles, must first of all be, and nothing within the universe of contingent things . . . can be intelligibly conceived of as the source or explanation of its own being. . . .

In the terms of Thomas Aquinas, a finite thing's essence (what it is) entirely fails to account for its existence (that it is) . . . . (R)eason leads different minds to disparate and even contradictory conclusions. . . . One might even conclude, in fact, that one of the real differences  between what convention calls the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason is actually the difference between a cogent intellectual and moral culture, capable of considering the mystery of being with some degree of rigor, and a confined and vapid dogmatism without genuine logical foundation.  Reason is a fickle thing.  David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009),  p.103f.