Created meaning is a less rational way to live life than doing so with discovered meaning.

It is fair to say that if you are a Christian with those beliefs—about who you are to God and what is in store for you—but you are not experiencing peace and meaning, then it is because you are not thinking enough. There is a kind of shallow, temporary peace that modern people can get from not thinking too much about their situation, but

In his essay “Is That All There Is?” Wood discusses Charles Taylor’s description of “fullness.”37 Sometimes one experiences a fullness in which the world suddenly seems charged with meaning, coherence, and beauty that break in through our ordinary sense of being in the world.38 Some who experience this know unavoidably that there is infinitely more

He found it no longer unreasonable to believe in God. He came to a belief not only in God but also in “the central values of Christianity—sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness—because I found them so compelling.”24 Paul Kalanithi had also found that, in Habermas’s phrase, the completely secular point of view had too many things “missing” that he knew

When Kalanithi realized that there was no scientific proof for the reality of meaning and virtue, things he was sure existed, it made him rethink his whole view of life.

A popular book that makes similar points is the best-selling When Breath Becomes Air, the reflections of a young neurosurgeon, now deceased, who wrote about a journey back toward faith when he was dying of cancer.20 Paul Kalanithi had been an “ironclad atheist.” His primary charge against Christianity was “its failure on empirical grounds. Surely

If you think Christianity doesn’t hold much promise of making sense to a thinking person, then this book is written for you.

After that first section of the book, in the next chapters I will compare and contrast how Christianity and secularism (with occasional reference to other religions) seek to provide meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, a moral compass, and hope—all things so crucial that we cannot live life without them. I will be arguing that Christianity

This volume begins by addressing those objections. In the first two chapters I will strongly challenge both the assumption that the world is getting more secular and the belief that secular, nonreligious people are basing their view of life mainly on reason. The reality is that every person embraces his or her worldview for a variety of rational,