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A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays QUOTES

A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays QUOTES

1 " Materialists believe that absolutely everything, even the formal structures of culture and the intentional structures of consciousness, can be reduced without remainder to an ensemble of mechanistic interactions among intrinsically mindless physical elements; and I suppose anyone capable of believing that is capable of believing practically anything. "

― David Bentley Hart , A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays

2 " These divisions are illusory. What we call “nature” is merely one mode of the disclosure of the “supernatural,” and natural reason merely one mode of revelation, and philosophy merely one (feeble) mode of reason’s ascent into the light of God. "

― David Bentley Hart , A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays

3 " Nowhere, not even in the sciences, does there exist a “purely natural” realm of knowledge. To encounter the world is to encounter its being, which is gratuitously imparted to it from beyond the sphere of natural causes, known within the medium of an intentional consciousness, irreducible to immanent processes, that grasps finite reality only by being oriented toward a horizon of transcendental ends (or, better, “divine names”). "

― David Bentley Hart , A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays

4 " It is pleasant to believe one’s society is more “enlightened” or “rational” than all others, "

― David Bentley Hart , A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays

5 " Materialism, being a fairly coarse superstition, tends to render its adherents susceptible to a great many utterly fantastic notions. All that is needed to make even the most outlandish theory seem plausible to the truly doctrinaire materialist is that it come wrapped in the appurtenances of empirical science. "

― David Bentley Hart , A Splendid Wickedness and Other Essays