The ever-interesting Bruce Charlton explains why people are “naturally atheists.”
The fact that all modern public discourse excludes the divine.
As a modern child grows up, he becomes socialised, he becomes trained in modern public discourse of many kinds: school work, everything to do with the mass media, sports, pastimes, hobbies… and all of these exclude the divine.
It Just Isn’t There. The lexicon of objects that function in the system exclude the divine; the causality of the system excludes the divine.
As the child reaches adolescence – these modes of thought become more dominant, and they become habitual to the extent of being simply taken for granted; and eventually they become so habitual as to be extremely difficult to break out from.
This process is exacerbated in the world of work, where nearly all jobs exclude the divine (in whatever social system, the law, medicine, science, government, politics, police, the military, engineering – as well as the mass media and academia) – becoming competent means internalising these ‘materialist’ ways of thinking; thus, excluding the divine.
Dallas Willard once remarked, though I forget where, that Christians will never become convincing until they reacquire the ability to speak of Christianity as something known to be true.
Leave a Reply