Introduction

In the book, What is a Person?, Christian Smith argues that human beings express specific capacities, powers, limits, and tendencies that form human nature.[1] These features reveal that man is ontologically religious. There are visible and tangible aspects of human nature that demonstrate the raw religiousness of human beings. This class of observable universal behavior speaks eternally to the whole of humanity.

Why are there so many sacred books in the history of the world?

Why do people believe in a Divine Being?

Why do people possess the sentiment of trust and reverence?

Why do people love, hope, and dread?

Why do people feel dependent?

Why did ancient cultures have creation myths to explain their origins?

Why do people worship?

Why do people pray?

Why do people ask why?

Why do people make sacrifices to the gods?

Why are people capable of beauty, symphonies, wonder, and gratitude?

Why has modern science not eradicated sacred narratives?

Why do people wrestle with existential questions?

Why does moral disorder signal a disturbance between God and man?

Why do people seek propitiation?

Why do people’s beliefs contain more than they can see?

Why do religious beliefs renew when metanarratives and empires fall?

Why are there plentiful manifestations of religion around the world?

These questions can’t be explained away, or forgotten, or avoided just because they don’t fit the neo-Darwinian narrative. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that God put eternity into man’s heart. This means that eternal things are essential and universal for human beings. People imagine themselves during and after their earthly existence. Longing for transcendence is irrepressibly natural for God’s image bearers.[2] There are needs within people to which only an Absolute Person has the resources to satisfy.

What Explains the Religious Sense?

The Italian priest, Luigi Giussani, describes man’s “religious sense,” in which “awe” is “the stature of his identity.” Awe begins when someone recognizes they didn’t make themselves. The stature of human beings is to wrestle with God, like Jacob wrestled with God (Gen. 32:22-32), and receive the blessing. This is the whole of life’s meaning and it is impossible to receive the divine blessing without an intuition of the mysterious presence.[3]

There are indeed people and entire civilizations that appear unreligious. Their religious tendencies haven’t been activated, perhaps because of their social environment. But the capacity for eternal things remains. Spiritual and sacred needs still exist. People still wonder if eternity is a real prospect. Liturgical impulses elbow their way to the front and a haunting sense of transcendence occupies secular space. Cultural religion of this kind creates an identity without demanding personal sacrifice. Just because some religious instincts are misdirected to politics, environmentalism, globalism, drug use, promiscuity, or revolution, doesn’t mean the rank secularist is unreligious.[4]

Yet many today write off the manifold phenomena of man’s religious history by saying that religion, like man, evolved from nothing. The late Daniel Dennett, a professor at Tufts University, was just such a man. Dennett was perhaps the most devoted materialistic atheist in the world. He said that human consciousness was the interaction of cell clumps that evolved. The human mind was nothing more than a collection of biotic hardware that complexified over millions of years. The soul doesn’t exist. Rather neurons collide according to biological operations.[5] And religion is merely the evidence that sometimes evolution goes astray.[6]

Now that’s a fascinating admission. Evolution sometimes goes astray. In other words, evolution sometimes produces false traits in creatures. The religious trait has been passed down through millennia. People are meaning-making and purpose-pursuing creatures. Yet, if this trait is a mere relic of the survival instinct, enduring epochs with tenacious resilience, then natural selection has sowed falsehood deep in the cluster of neurons that Daniel Dennett calls the soul.

The neurophysiologist Ivan Sechenov (1829 – 1905) denied that human beings are free agents. He concluded that people are not moral agents because their actions are motivated and carried out by neurons which are just “reflexes of the brain.” Sechenov concluded that the soul is just a product of the brain's functioning.[7] The implications of erasing the soul are explored in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s (1828 – 1889) utopian novel What is to Be Done? This was the most influential literary work in Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution. It held sacred status for the intelligentsia. Lenin credited the novel with radicalizing him. Chernyshevsky argued that human choice is an illusion. People’s decisions are dictated by the influence of their environment—the interaction of natural and social laws. People, therefore, can’t be blamed for any behavior.

Darwin's theory of natural selection, outlined in his book On the Origin of Species, speculates that within a population, creatures with traits better suited to survive and reproduce, pass on those traits to their offspring. Over time, this process leads to the gradual adaptation of species to their environment, ultimately resulting in survival and evolution. In Darwin’s own words, “As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected.”[8]

And so it is that Darwin’s theory of natural selection featuring the survival instinct produces irrationality. Consider the inescapable reasoning from the naturalistic perspective: Natural selection produced religion. Religion is false. Therefore natural selection produces falsehood.

The Apostle John clarifies the standard of truthfulness when he says, “no lie is of the truth” (1 Jn. 3:21), which means that if something is true it can’t produce lies. If Darwinism is true it would not produce the lie (from the naturalistic perspective) of the religious instinct.

But there is further irrationality if human beings are the result of a cosmic accident. Consider how the religious sense wantonly reverses and destroys the reasoning of the god of Big Bang boom: The survival instinct has produced in humans a deep sense of Transcendent purpose. Transcendent purpose is false. Therefore, the survival instinct produces falsehood

And there is something more. Go back to Darwin’s quote and notice the assumption. Darwin’s theory of natural selection assumes survival is good and death is bad. But why? Why, according to the unguided mechanism of natural selection, is survival better than death?[9] Is “survival” defined in physics? How, scientifically speaking, can “survival” be a physics goal? Especially since it’s death rather than survival to which all things yield.

In sum, from the perspective of naturalism, the survival instinct has gone wrong. It has taught wrong. Instructed wrong. Educated wrong. Naturally selected wrong. It has perverted homo sapiens in a way that is not consonant with the Darwinian truth claim. A theory meant to disregard God has taught human nature to regard God. There is an eternal struggle in the half-hearted idolatry of Darwinism. Natural selection isn’t a rational basis for the existence of the religious instinct. It is profoundly odd that man is by nature religious if there is no God. What is left to explain man’s spiritual proclivity? If human nature inherently longs for God, then it follows that there is a God.

Why it Matters?

Does God exist or not exist? There comes a moment of choosing in every person’s life. Do you want to submit to the cold, dry, lifeless, secular lie, or do you resolve to cherish Someone higher than yourself? The balderdash of secularism is that meaninglessness is meaningful; that evil is good; and that there is nothing higher than self. Every modern person faces a fork in the road. If you go the wrong way, you lose your life. But if you seek Transcendent purpose, you learn that life does have a meaning, but it’s not through hedonism. There is a meaning to your existence that requires the full activity of your soul. Will you drink the living water? Will you believe?

The church must attest to human nature’s religiosity not merely to save people from secular error but to save them from the consequent dissatisfaction that results from denying the nature of reality. What happens when “science” whitewashes the transcendent possibilities of human nature? What is lost when the religious imagination is displaced by sexual preference and gender choice? What is the backwash of ignoring the God-given structure of the human person? How can people live in happiness if that which is crucial to adequate functioning—the eternal dimension—is waved aside?

People are defined by something they can’t fully comprehend. The solution isn’t to believe in religion or mere eternality. The point is to behold the God of the Universe who pours living water on withering souls.[10] God does not accept the decline of man. Doom stands at the door and rings the doorbell. But it’s not the final sound.

There is potential doom for those who have rebelled against heaven. But salvation is to tune your ears to the trumpet sound of God’s grace. Based on the death and resurrection of Christ, there is an offer of free forgiveness. By faith in Christ, forgiveness is yours and so is righteousness (Rom. 4:1-8). Turning to Christ requires turning from sin. This is called repentance. You must repent of scientism’s “below the sun” code and conception of life that imagines no heaven above. Christians of every age are vulnerable to a wide range of cultural sins, which means Christians must repent of the all-consuming secularism that surrounds and shapes them: empty relativism, self-serving multi-culturalism, and godless psychotherapy. You must no longer be a threat to Christ and the church but to Baal and his institutions. To repent of functional atheism requires turning from the secular life. Repent of the de-sacralized and disenchanted lie. Since the secular rot has a corporate effect, you must explicitly turn from it all: Roe and Obergefell. Pronouns and Darwinism. Marcuse’s “tolerance” and Marx’s class oppression. Carnal Christianity and bowdlerized feminism. Deathworks and Jewish Scapegoatism. Expressive individualism and the DEI hooey. “Self-love” and radical subjectivism.

The God of the Bible is the source of and purpose of the religious longing. God is the one who gives meaning to the human spirit. Christ is the reason you shouldn’t be content with meager living or lackluster ambition. What should you do with your religious sense? Turn from unreality and embrace Jesus Christ. Through Christ’s death and resurrection, God reassembles a true person with a new nature and a new face, one that can behold God. This requires faith. Evangelical faith is believing in the resurrected Christ you’ve not seen so that you can behold the face of Christ and see what you believe.[11]

[1] Christian Smith, What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 10, 14-18, 58-70.

[2] Thomas Aquinas said, “Every intellect naturally desires the vision of divine substance.” Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk. 3, c. 57.

[3] Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997), 105, 134

[4] Steven Smith, Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac (Emory University, 2018).

[5] Dennett, Daniel C. Consciousness Explained (Little, Brown and Company, 1991).

[6] Dennett, Daniel C. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. (Penguin Books, 2007), 184.

[7] Ivan Sechenov, Reflexes of the Brain (Mit Pr, 1965).

[8] Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. John Murray: 1859, Chapter 3.

[9] N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World (Thomas Nelson, 2009), 132.

[10] J.W. Nevin said, “Humanity itself is never complete, till it reaches his [Christ’s] person. . . . Our nature reaches after a true and real union with the nature of God, as the necessary complement and consummation of its own life. . . . The incarnation then is the proper completion of humanity.” The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist. 1846. Reprint, edited by Augustine Thompson. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2000.

[11] Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel according to St. John, and His First Epistle, Sermon 40:9.