So, we’ve all heard the famous maxim about there being a God-shaped hole in all of us that can, of course, only be filled by God. This is similar to the idea that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God. And, there are many other pithy, witty, and true aphorism and adages like these which truly do express the reality of the human condition: we were mad for communion with God and a lack of divine communion is causally connected to a suboptimal life experience.
Or to put it another way – when you are far from God your life will be far worse than it could be…than it should be. And this is true existentially, as well as intellectually. You see, I used to be a person who made a hard distinction between “wisdom” and “intelligence”. I used to think that you could be really smart and be a fool at the same time. I, like so many others, thought and taught that you can be a person who hates God and also be very smart.
I’m not so sure. Oh, I’ll grant that you can have a high general intelligence. There are a lot of people who are 2 or 3 standard deviations above average intelligence who actively hate God. But, as the old saying goes, “the truth will out”. Or, in Freudian terms, the things we suppress refuse to stay repressed. The problem with God is that he just doesn’t stay dead! Tell yourself “Gott ist tot” all you want, but he just keeps on coming out of the tomb, bright and fairer and more glorious and resplendent than the noonday sun. And, the funny thing is, Freud made a good observation which is that the things you suppress normally find sneaky ways of making their upset known. People who suppress childhood memories of abuse don’t normally just have outbursts of violence against an abusive parent – that would be predictable. But the funny thing about pathology is that it has its own madness to its method.
And, to be sure, to reject God is a pathology. You have to be stupid, insane, or in denial (which I would argue is a form of insanity…and probably stupidity) to believe that everything came from nothing, that life came from non-life, that order comes from chaos, that intelligence comes from unintelligence, that meaning comes from non-meaning, that morality comes from amorality, et cetera. These are fundamentally stupid beliefs and many of them are demonstrably false. For instance, abiogenesis was demonstrated to be false by Louis Pasteur. Fact Check: Pasteur has been dead for a long time. Fact Check: no one has ever shown how life can come from non-life and it ain’t for a lack of trying.
As I said, rejection of God is pathological. And that pathology has some funny ways of working itself out. And by funny I mean “haha” and “well, that’s strange”. And that’s because, as I’ve pointed out before, ideas don’t come as discrete notions that are separable. Ideas come in clusters. The come intertwined and interconnected, as worldviews. Indeed, the biggest ideas, like Theism or Atheism, the come was metanarratives.
Metanarratives, to the uninitiated, are stories that explain all the other stories. They are kinda the glue that holds an entire worldview together. For Christianity, for instance, the metanarrative is that Christ is the image of God in whose image mankind was made and to which image mankind is to aspire and ultimately attain – all things were made to be like Him. However, some desire to reject that image and for all of eternity they will become less and less like Christ while those who desire to receive the image will for all of eternity become more and more like Christ. Of course, there are a lot of ways we could explain what the story behind the stories is. That’s largely a matter of prioritization and perspective. And that’s OK. Because Christians who truly believe in Christ and long for Him coming and their own glorification would probably never say the same thing but they and their statements would all agree – they would all focus on different facets.
But what happens when you reject God – when you reject Theism? Well, you reject the Metanarrative that Christianity offers. And for a while that’s what the young and restless atheists did – they utterly rejected a Metanarrative because they were all enthralled by the French Existentialists and they didn’t want to try to affix meaning and purpose on an absurd reality. Oh how brave and deep!
But the problem is that there’s a Metanarrative-shaped hole inside each of us. And since nature abhors a vacuum, that Metanarrative-shaped hole desires to be filled up. And so, we tried not having metanarratives for a while and that proved…unpleasant. So now, Secularism has joined up with Paganism to give us Wokeism! Secularism couldn’t have a Metanarrative, but Paganism can. Because Paganism is openly religious (Secularism is only surreptitiously so). But in the oddest twist of fate Secularism became a religion, but the metanarrative is a remnant of Marxism which states that everything is about power-dynamics…which also sounds a bit Nietzschean, but hey, who’s counting!
People see young persons shouting about how the least racist country in the world (not not racist, but least racist) is the worst place ever, they see the richest and more pampered populace in world history crying about how they’re poor, they see people who live in a nation which has given more political power to more people for longer than any other place in history and they whine about disenfranchisement! People see this and they think – these people are disconnected with reality.
Well, yes and no. They ARE living in a fantasy world divorced from truth. But it’s not for nothing. It’s a pathology, but not a causeless pathology. Because they’re interpreting the data they see through their Metanarrative. You see, living without a Metanarrative is 1) existentially anguishing 2) intellectually draining 3) morally confounding. When you don’t have a way of interpreting, ordering, and prioritizing facts and data and reality as it is, you’re essentially a human ship lost at sea. Metanarratives are continents upon which to moor and anchor and stop being tossed to and fro by every datum or experience that crosses your path.
Unfortunately, in the globe of worldviews, not all continents are the same. Some are volcanic. Some are peopled with cannibals. Some are mirages. Some are Islands of Darkness and Dreams. Only a few of them are even passably livable – the archipelago called Theism. And only one of them actually is pleasant – Christianity.
The point is this – the suppression of God and its concomitant rejection of Metanarrative cannot happen without pathological consequences. Since people fundamentally as selfish, they’ll seek to alleviate pain and suffering in the least unpleasant way possible. Unfortunately, because people are sinners, and stupid, and essentially self-destructive (another of the ironic mysteries of godlessness that we’re self-pleasing and self-destructive, simultaneously) many are finding acceptance of the racist, classist, narcissistic, white-savior-dominant, epistemologically incoherent metanarrative provided by Wokeism to be preferable to faith in the Living and True God.
The Metanarrative-shaped hole wants filling – nature abhors a vacuum.