Our Search for Transcendence
Our perennial interest in transcendence appears to be a uniquely human trait. It’s the reason 20th-century Romanian religious historian Mircea Eliade, referred to human beings as homo religiosus.
In the pre-modern world Atheism didn’t exist as we know it. Back then, the term was used as an accusation against those who deviated from religious norms. For instance, the Greek philosopher Celsus accused Christians of being atheists, for refusing to worship the Roman gods.
Over time, with the success of the scientific method, the word "atheist" began to take on new meanings. By the early 18th people began to use the word to describe their belief in scientific materialism—a shift in worldview brought about by the Enlightenment.
Today, we live in what Charles Taylor calls a secular age. In A Secular Age, Taylor traces the transition from a pre-Enlightenment society where unbelief was almost unheard of to a Post-Enlightenment one, where faith is just one of many ways to live one's life. With the Enlightenment came the conviction that everything had a rational (i.e. scientific) explanation—even if we didn't know it yet.
It is also worth pointing out that this belief in materialism is primarily held in the West. A phenomenon that missiologist Paul Hiebert described in his essay "The Flaw of the Excluded Middle" (1982) Hiebert observed that in the West we divide reality into two realms, the natural and the supernatural. The natural world is the one we all experience every day, and the supernatural is a world which we may or may not believe in, but it is a world which has little or no direct effect on this one. This is why we rationalize inexplicable phenomenon like premonitions of the death of a loved one which turn out to be true.
Samuel Clemens, the American author known to most people as Mark Twain, reluctantly published an essay about a premonition he had of his brother Henry's death. Clemens writes about a dream in which he saw his brother lying dead in an metal coffin - which unusual for the time, wearing one of Twain's own suits, and having flowers on his chest - a bouquet of white roses with a single red rose in the center. About a week later Henry Clemens was involved in a tragic accident aboard the steamboat Pennsylvania, which exploded, leading to his death from burns and injuries. Clemens who worked as a riverboat captain at the time, felt extremely guilty for having encouraged his brother to get a job working on a riverboat, but he did not think anything strange had happened until he attended the funeral. When Twain saw his brother's body at the funeral, the scene was eerily similar to what he had dreamed. Henry would have been buried in a simple pine box but some women had raised sixty dollars to put him in a special metal one. The suit he was buried in one of Clemens suits because he had borrowed it without his knowledge during a trip he'd made to St. Louis. There was just one piece missing. The thing that was most striking to Clemens and the thing that brought the dream back to his mind was when an elderly woman entered and placed a large bouquet of white roses on Henry's chest. In the center was a single red rose. This experience left Twain deeply shaken and contributed to his lifelong fascination with fate, death, and the unexplained.
A person such as myself hearing this story is tempted to dismiss it as coincidence, or mis-remembering or perhaps a combination of both. We might even start to doubt the honesty of the storyteller. The fact remains that such stories did become less common in the modern scientific world, people from all walks of life have them.
Several authors have demonstrated that our initial confidence in human reason was overly optimistic. Belief in the transcendent persists from the children of non believing parents to the most highly educated. Jason Josephson Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment provides numerous examples, as does Jeffrey Kripal’s The Flip. Earlier thinkers like William James (Varieties of Religious Experience) and Robert Coles (The Spiritual Lives of Children) also offer accounts that challenge the Enlightenment’s view of a disenchanted world.
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