While the search for the divine has been somewhat crowded out in modern times by our busy and overstimulated lives, it is still one of the most universal of human strivings. C.S. Lewis describes this phenomenon in his own life in his wonderful book SURPRISED BY JOY, and it is this sense of intense longing, triggered in his life by something as simple as a few lines of poetry, that he identifies as "joy." He describes the experience as "an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction." I can recall clearly some of those moments in my own life, where this poignant sense of longing, falling somewhere between pleasure and grief, caught me by surprise and caused me to wonder from whence came such strong emotion, and how might such an experience be recovered.As a boy of ten, I recall being transported by the experience of looking through a telescope that an amateur astronomer had placed on a high field at our farm, when I sensed the vastness of the universe and saw the craters on the moon and the magical diaphanous light of the Pleiades. At fifteen, I recall a Christmas Eve Where the descant on a particularly beautiful Christmas carol, rising sweet and true above the more familiar tune, left me with a sense of unexpected awe and a longing for something I could not name. Much later, as an atheist graduate student, I surprised myself by experiencing this same sense of grief, at the playing of the second movement of Beethoven's Third Symphony (the Eroica). As the world grieved the death of Israeli athletes killed by terrorists at the Olympics in 1972, the Berlin Philharmonic played the powerful strains of this C-minor lament in the Olympic Stadium, mixing together nobility and tragedy, life and death. For a few moments I was lifted out of my materialist worldview into an indescribable spiritual dimension, an experience I found quite astonishing.
More recently, for a scientist who occasionally is given the remarkable privilege of discovering something not previously known by man, there is a special kind of joy associated with such flashes of insight. Having perceived a glimmer of scientific truth, I find at once both a sense of satisfaction and a longing to understand some even greater Truth. In such a moment, science becomes more than a process of discovery. It transports the scientist into an experience that defies a completely naturalistic explanation.
So what are we to make of these experiences? And what is this sensation of longing for something greater than ourselves? Is this only, and no more than, some combination of neurotransmitters landing on precisely the right receptors, setting off an electrical discharge deep in some part of the brain? Or is this an inkling of what lies beyond, a signpost placed deep within the human spirit pointing toward something much grander than ourselves?
The atheist view is that such longings are not to be trusted as indications of the supernatural, and that our translation of those sensations of awe into a belief in God represent nothing more than wishful thinking, inventing an answer because we want it to be true. This particular view reached its widest audience in the writings of Sigmund Freud, who argued that wishes for God stemmed from early childhood experiences. Writing in TOTEM AND TABOO, Freud said, "Psychoanalysis of individual human beings teaches us with quite special insistence that the God of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relationship of God depends on the relation to his father in the flesh, and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father."
