Hi Dickey,
Your point is entirely valid. The desire to make sense of life, to see that some ultimate meaning might exist in humanity's darkest hours might well be common enough. Though there are those who are happy to accept that there is no ultimate meaning, no matter what happens to them. Jacques Monod, the French biochemist seemed to think such sentiments were universal, whilst acknowledging that that there was no meaningful reality, concomitant with the desire that there might be.
Well yes, though a common criticism of that from the religious is that those of us who think that way must be shallow, ungrounded – after all, we have no meaning in our lives!
It fails I think for several reasons. Fundamentally it’s an argument from consequences – “I think that there has to be a universal planner for there to be meaning in my life, therefore there’s a universal planner!”
It also fails to grasp that many people are perfectly capable of feelings every bit as deep and profound and important as they are within the paradigm of the uncaring and largely parochial universe we appear to occupy. Why wouldn’t we be? I’d even go further sometimes – how much
more grand,
more transcendent is the understanding science gives us of the universe than tawdry and un-ambitious tales of porcine slaughter, tribal genocide etc?
As for Vlad's "desiring a relationship with God" - this is very revealing of his second-hand approach to all these matters. The "relationship with God" idea never existed in Christianity before the advent of the German Pietist movement in the early 17th century, I think. Before that, no believer would ever have thought of belief in God in terms of 'relationship' in the personal sense which is implied here. And if I remember rightly, Vlad also spoke of his conversion in the second-hand words of C.S. Lewis.
Yup, though it’s worse than that – he takes his “desire for a relationship” as some kind of evidence that “points to” there being a god with which to have that relationship. Possibly an inadvertent channelling of a mutated cosmological argument (“cosmological lite”?), but I have no idea what he thinks the connecting logic to be.
The point I'm making in the above comments is in tune with something that you've often said - the conversion experience very often happens to be couched in terms of the religious culture in which a person has been brought up- which I'd broaden to say, couched in the terms of the literature one has been reading, or other social influences which one may have unconsciously absorbed. I certainly speak from experience. Though when the chips are down, I can only say that at the lowest moments of my life "Seek and ye shall find" has been so profoundly untrue that I find it difficult not to despise those who still try to perpetrate these tired old clichés.
I wonder how that works. Perhaps they do “find” in the sense that in their desperation their critical faculties are so compromised and their confirmation bias so heightened that they’ll grab onto a narrative that’s comforting regardless. It’s funny, when you’re desperate that’s generally reckoned to be the
worst time to make life-changing discoveries and decisions, yet in respect of “God” it’s often a prerequisite. I’m struck by how often we hear stories of the, “I was a drunken wretch and then I was saved” type, rather than “after a long period of calm reflection and deep contemplation weighing up all the arguments and the supporting evidence I found god”. Some have no doubt – C.S.Lewis (as you brought him up) was one such, but many don’t.
Odd.
