Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World

Sociologists Peter Berger and Grace Davie report that “most sociologists of religion now agree” that the secularization thesis—that religion declines as a society becomes more modern—“has been empirically shown to be false.”63 Countries such as China are becoming more religious (and Christian) even as they modernize.

The ultimate disordered love, however—and the ultimate source of our discontent—is failure to love the first thing first, the failure to love God supremely.

The alternative to secular optimism in progress is hope. Real hope, as Lasch defines it, “does not demand a belief in progress” at all. “The disposition properly described as hope, trust, or wonder . . . three names for the same state of heart and mind—asserts the goodness of life in the face of its limits. It cannot be defeated by adversity.”19 Wh

In short, no one can purge him- or herself of all faith assumptions and assume an objective, belief-free, pure openness to objective evidence. There is no “view from nowhere.”

So, contrary to our cultural narrative, we must look outside ourselves and connect to something else first, before we can descend into ourselves and make any assessment.

We need “devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable. Without it, we have only our desires to guide us, and they are fleeting, capricious, and insatiable.”

Nietzsche’s point is this. If you say you don’t believe in God but you do believe in the rights of every person and the requirement to care for all the weak and the poor, then you are still holding on to Christian beliefs, whether you will admit it or not.59 Why, for example, should you look at love and aggression—both parts of life, both rooted in

At the end of his book What Does It All Mean? philosopher Thomas Nagel wonders if the “Meaning-capital-M” question comes from too great a sense of our own importance.1 He proposes that since “the grave is [life’s only] goal, perhaps it’s ridiculous to take ourselves so seriously.” It should be enough to simply take life as it comes and enjoy it as

It is quite possible to find great purpose in the ordinary tasks of life, apart from knowing answers to the Big Questions About Existence.