The Experience of God

the new atheism is often just the confessional rote of materialist fundamentalism (which, like all fundamentalisms, imagines that in fact it represents the side of reason and truth);

Late modernity is thus a condition of willful spiritual deafness. Enframed, racked, reduced to machinery, nature cannot speak unless spoken to, and then her answers must be only yes, no, or obedient silence. She cannot address us in her own voice. And we certainly cannot hear whatever voice might attempt to speak to us through her.

one is contingent through and through, partaking of being rather than generating it out of some source within oneself; and the same is true of the whole intricate web of interdependencies that constitutes nature.

while the act of creation is timeless, the world had unfolded progressively in time, out of its own intrinsic potencies and principles, with nature itself acting as the craftsman.

highest power to act—and hence the most unconditioned and unconstrained reality of being—is rational mind. Absolute being, therefore, must be absolute mind. Or, in simpler terms, the greater the degree of something’s actuality, the greater the degree of its consciousness, and so infinite actuality is necessarily infinite consciousness.

if one is going to go to all the trouble of writing a book about the deficiencies of religious ideas, one should probably also go to the trouble of first learning what those ideas are.

the structure of rational consciousness is ecstatic: our minds are capable of reflecting the world because there is a kind of elation in our thinking, a joy, or at least anticipation of joy, which seeks its fulfillment in an embrace of truth in its essence. Every movement of the intellect and will toward truth is already an act of devotion, or (aga

The Christian philosopher Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984), in fact, proposed an argument that was intended, in a very complicated and ingenious way, to transform this venerable philosophical intuition into something like a comprehensive philosophical proof, one that moved from the “unrestricted intelligibility” of reality to the reality of God as the

Paths to Transcendence: According to Shankara, Ibn Arabi, and Meister Eckhart