Post Author: Bill Pratt

For some secular, non-religious people, their hope is that religious people will some day be the minority, that mankind will finally grow out of this unfortunate phase of history.  Religion may have helped our distant ancestors to explain where we came from, why we are here, why we have moral feelings, why we are unhappy, and where we are headed after we die.  The answers that religion provided gave aid and comfort in the face of a hostile world.

But, the secularist may argue, we don’t need religion any more.  The scientific method has served to successfully explain many aspects of the world that our ancestors did not understand.  Religion is on the way out.

Are the secularists right?  Will mankind move beyond religious answers?  Will the deepest desires of man be fulfilled without religion?

I do not see this happening any time soon, if ever.  The worship of God seems like a permanent need built in mankind, not something temporary that will disappear in the near future.  Pastor and author Timothy Keller has the following to say about man and religion in his book The Reason for God:

Religion is not just a temporary thing that helped us adapt to our environment.  Rather it is a permanent and central aspect of the human condition.  This is a bitter pill for secular, nonreligious people to swallow.  Everyone wants to think that they are in the mainstream, that they are not extremists.  But robust religious beliefs dominate the world.  There is no reason to expect that to change.

For the foreseeable future, those who deny the existence of the supernatural will remain in the small minority, as they always have.  It is always possible that they are right and the religious are wrong, but the entire history of man is the history of belief in the supernatural, not just by a few, but by the many.  Humans seek the supernatural – that’s who we are.