Does the world have a purpose? The new atheists regard the question as absurd. Purposes emerge in the course of evolution, they tell us; to suppose that they could exist before any organism can gain a reproductive advantage from possessing them is to unlearn the lesson of Darwin. With the theory of evolution firmly established, therefore, there is no room in the scientific worldview for an original purpose, and therefore no room for God.
Today’s evangelical atheists go further, and tell us that history has shown religion to be so toxic that we should do our best to extinguish it. Such writers describe the loss of religion as a moral gain — even though, for most ordinary believers, it looks like the loss of all that they most seriously value.
But maybe the atheists have misunderstood their target.
The ‘god of the philosophers’ — serene, omniscient, and outside space and time — has appeal to those who think in abstract terms. But ordinary people don’t think in abstract terms. They don’t see God as the answer to a cosmological question, since they don’t have cosmological questions. But they do have the question of how to live, and in the effort to live with others they often stumble upon moments, places, relationships and experiences that have a numinous character — as though removed from this world and in some way casting judgment upon it.
Hence there is another question, that seems to be much nearer to the heart of what we, in the western world, are now going through: what is the sacred, and why do people cling to it? Sacred things, Émile Durkheim once wrote, are ‘set aside and forbidden’. To touch them with profane hands is to wipe away their aura, so that they flutter to earth and die.
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