At Church Life Journal, David Bentley Hart kindly reviews Five Proofs of the Existence of God. From the review:
Edward Feser has a definite gift for making fairly abstruse philosophical material accessible to readers from outside the academic world, without compromising the rigor of the arguments or omitting challenging details… Perhaps the best example of this gift in action hitherto was his 2006 volume Philosophy of Mind: A Beginner’s Guide (at least, speaking for myself, I have both recommended it to general readers and used it with undergraduates, in either case with very happy results). But this present volume is no less substantial an achievement…
It is also a virtue on Feser’s part that the only God he cares to argue foris the God of “classical theism.” He does not waste any attention on debates (of the kind all too depressingly common in Anglophone philosophy of religion) over the possible reality of a single “supreme being” who exists alongside other, lesser beings, on the same ontological plane (so to speak), and set off from them only by virtue of his “maximal greatness,” or some other property that makes him far larger and far older than all other things. Feser clearly grasps that, even if one could prove that such a being exists, this would bring us no nearer to an understanding of the true source of all reality (which for monotheists, presumably, is what the word “God” ideally refers to), but would merely provide us with one more entity whose existence must be accounted for…
The third argument Feser calls the “Augustinian” proof; it proceeds from the reality of universals, propositions, abstract truths, logical possibilities, and so forth, to that reality in which all these things must necessarily subsist: which (so the argument at last concludes) must be the divine intellect… Feser manages to bring out the logical force of this approach better than most of its other expositors…
In sum, Feser’s is an admirable achievement, and this book can be recommended for the classroom quite vigorously – but also, happily, not onlyfor the classroom. It accomplishes much in a fairly compact space, and does so with exemplary clarity. In fact, it is among the best such volumes currently available in English.
End quote. I thank Prof. Hart for his very kind words. Hart also raises a couple of minor but useful criticisms, which I may address in a future post. As they say, read the whole thing.