The Profundity of the Human Experience

“How are we able to experience such profound pain? How am I able to fall in love with a piece of music and so deeply appreciate its melodies and harmonies? Why am I so terrified—offended even—at the thought that the universe, and my life, have no meaning?”

I wrote words very similar to this in a journal once, during a time of enormous struggle with doubt. I wanted badly to believe in and affirm the Christian narrative, but I wasn’t completely sure I could. Later, my collection of anchors grew, but at the time, I didn’t feel like I had a lot to hold onto. However, there was a very small handful of things I couldn’t doubt. One of those was the profundity of my own experiences as a human being. Despair over personal failures, the longing to love and be loved, a craving for significance and adventure—all these things rent me and touched the very depths of my soul. Particular scenes or images left (and still do leave) deep impressions on me. Shafts of golden light breaking through the green ceiling and falling to the forest floor. A family at peace gathered around the fireplace, the love in each person’s heart as warm as the embers glowing in the hearth. Sorry, I don’t mean to go all poetic on you, but these kinds of things stir up feelings that I can’t always easily explain. And when I was really struggling with doubt, none of this seemed to make sense to me under the assumption that we live in a cold, mechanistic universe. 

I want to look quickly at some of these things that make human life so profound, and that, I think, point to God. Particularly, I want to talk about beauty, the need for significance, and morality. Let’s start with beauty.

I’ll repeat my question from the beginning: why does music move me so? How is it that sounds of string, wind, and percussion instruments played together at different pitches and levels of loudness can combine into textures that make my heart melt with tenderness or lurch in sorrow? Why does John Williams’s theme from Hook make me feel like I’m flying? Words on a page, hues and textures on a canvas, lighting and camera angles on film can all produce similar experiences. Why?

Sure, we could probably come up with some naturalistic explanation for how our capacity to appreciate beautiful things enhances our survivability or something, but the connection between that end and those means is far from straightforward. I feel like any such explanation will necessarily involve a degree of rational gymnastics and will prove, in the end, to be somewhat convoluted. I’m not saying a naturalistic explanation is impossible, but is it really the best answer?

Let’s shift gears and talk about our need for significance. Why do we all have such a desperate need for our lives to mean something? To make something of the world around us in a way that impacts others? Are our desires for significance just the highly evolved trappings of an underlying drive to pass on our genes? That doesn’t seem right. “Meaning” and “propagation of genes” don’t appear to me to be the same thing.

So where does this idea of “meaning” come from in the first place? Might I suggest that we have these desires because a God of meaning, who fashioned us after His image and likeness, put them there? I’m hardly the first person to feel this way:

“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning” (C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity). 

Finally, let’s talk about morality. It’s perhaps a bit more reasonable to think that morality might have arisen via naturalistic processes as a way to keep us from harming and killing each other, lest we bring ourselves to extinction through violence. After all, most moral decisions happen within interpersonal contexts. Not all of them do, at least in a straightforward manner. Take, for example, the idea we often find in ourselves that certain places or things are holy or sacred. Sure, such an idea might be a developmental quirk, or an amalgamation of smaller, more survival-oriented mental constructs, but that’s just a guess.

But do you want to know the thing that really gets me about morality? It’s this question—why “right” and “wrong,” as opposed to something that would make more sense in a mechanistic world, like “more conducive to survival” and “less conducive to survival”? Why specifically right and wrong? These words imply objectivity as regards moral standards, and that we will be held accountable for our misdeeds. They imply that there is some ultimate norming norm that we violate, some perfect moral Being whom we offend, when we do wrong. And most people in history have more or less felt this way. I think that means something. 

Here’s the bottom line: When I look inside myself, I see desires and profound experiences that just don’t seem to make sense in a meaningless, naturalistic universe. The things inside me are like puzzle pieces in an incomplete picture of who I am. Deep down, something inside me knows that other pieces are out there that perfectly match the grooves of my soul. The puzzle pieces from the naturalistic account of the universe sort of fit in some places, but they just really don’t in others. The pieces from the Christian account? Those fit much, much better.