It seems to me that many people today live their lives in a fog, with no real sense of direction at all. It’s like they have gotten lost somewhere along the way and can’t figure out which way to go. I think it’s because we have lost our sense of the divine. No society in history has attempted to live without a belief in God or a Creator, not until the modern one we now live in (Starting with the Enlightenment or Age of Reason in the 18th century). Such a leap has consequences that we are only beginning to recognize.
We now live in a state of confusion about the big questions that have always engaged the human race, questions of meaning, purpose, and morality. A skeptical friend of mine used to ask himself the question, “What would an atheist do?” in deliberate mockery of the What Would Jesus Do (WWJD) slogan. He finally stopped asking because he found that there were no reliable answers down that path. Eliminating the sacred changes the story of our lives in monumental ways.
In times of greater faith, people saw themselves as individual creations of a loving God who, regardless of how it may look at any given moment, has final control over a world destined for restoration. Now, people with no faith find themselves lost and alone, with no overarching story, or narrative, to give promise to the future and meaning to the present.
To regard nature as beautiful, humans as uniquely valuable, morality as necessary — these are mere “constructs,” we are told, invented to soften the harsh reality that humans play an insignificant role in a universe governed by mere chance. Most people in history have experienced this world with its pleasures and pains, its births and deaths and loves and disappointments, as linked to the sacred, invisible world. This is no longer the case.
Now we are born, play, work, accumulate possessions, relate to one another, and die with no consolation that what we do matters ultimately, or has any meaning beyond what we assign to it. Jacques Monod bluntly states the modern plight: “Man must learn to live in an alien world that is deaf to his music and is as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his sufferings or his crimes. . . . Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.”
Einstein remarked that the modern age has perfect means but confused ends. Physicists have reduced matter to subatomic particles and software engineers have reduced most of what we know about the world to bits of information. We know how things work, but not why. We seem bewildered, actually, about why anyone makes any given choice — whether to love their kids or beat them, whether to study for a test or binge-drink. Why do we act the way we do and make the choices we do?
Without God life makes very little sense, and that is why so many people feel so lost.
