An Unplanned Conversation

"As the explanations get more desperately minute, the apologies get ever vaster.  David Bentley Hart's recent "The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss" (Yale) doesn't even attempt to make God the unmoved mover, the Big Banger who got the party started; instead it roots the proof of his existence in the existence of the universe itself.  Since you can explain the universe only by means of some other bit of the universe, why is there a universe (or many of them)?  The answer to this unanswerable question is God.  He stands outside everything, "the infinite to which noting can add and from which nothing can subtract", the ultimate ground of being. This notion, maximalist in conception, is minmalist in effect. Something that much bigger than Phil is so remote from Phil's problems that he might as well not be there for Phil at all.  This God is obviously not the God who makes rules about frying bacon or puts harps in the hands of angels.  A God who communicates with no one and causes nothing seems a surprisingly trivial acquisition for cosmology -- the dinner guest legendary for his wit who spends the meal mumbling with his mouth full."

Bigger than Phil, by Adam Gopnik
The New Yorker
February 17 & 24, 2014

"My confidence that there is a loving God who cares at all for your health or your longevity, based on what I see in the physical universe, is so low that it is not something that I would spend any time investing in, to try to explore any further about whether or not it's true.  I'll let other people do that exploring.  And, if they bring the evidence to me, that's fine."

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Starman, by Rebecca Head
The New Yorker
February 17 & 24, 2014