“One of the things that held me back from Supernaturalism was a deep repugnance to the view of Nature which, as I thought, Supernaturalism entailed. I passionately desired that Nature should exist ‘on her own’… the thought that she had been manufactured or ‘put there’, and put there with a purpose, was suffocating…
To find that all the woods, and small streams in the middle of the woods, and odd corners of mountain valleys, and the wind and the grass were only a sort of scenery, only backcloths for some kind of play, and that play perhaps one with a moral – what flatness, what an anti-climax, what an unendurable bore!”
– C.S. Lewis, Miracles
There’s an early episode of House, MD in which the good doctor describes a personal near-death experience. Although he generally makes something of a hobby out of ridiculing religious belief, in this case House doesn’t immediately dismiss a colleague’s suggestion that he had made contact with eternity. There’s no way to know, he admits. Nonetheless, he chooses (his word) to believe that what he experienced was nothing more than the last chemical reactions of a brain closing shop, because “I find it more comforting to believe that this [life] isn’t simply a test.”
A couple of weeks ago, the Christian Post published a piece I wrote on the “deaths of despair” epidemic afflicting the white working class in the US. You can find it