“The thing about Christians, says the philosopher Alain, is that looking them in the eyes one senses that they don’t believe it. This is, in my experience and apart from the obviously insane, accurate. But so is the reverse: look deep in the eyes of the avid atheist and you sense a quiver in the iron cage of conviction, a tiny — but ineradicable — If.
“Most people believe that one of the reliefs (facile distortions, the atheist would say) that religion promises is just the kind of panoptic vision I’ve been talking about. Religion is the very thing that puts all of our experiences in context; it makes life mean [have meaning]. But in fact this is just what faith ought to free a person from: the need for this kind of seeing, the compulsion to believe that there is one truth. This is in fact the stale hell of modern scientific materialism, which is by no means confined to science.”
