From Timothy Keller, his book ‘Making Sense of God’ and invitation to the skeptical
Now, as we have said, many people in the postmodern culture believe we should train ourselves to not ask this “metaquestion” about the point of life. We should discipline ourselves not to think about the ultimate outcome of all we do, which in the secular view is sheer nothingness. We should put that out of our mind and concentrate on today. But this establishes my first point. When secular people seek to lead a meaningful life, they must have discipline to not think so much about the big picture. They must disconnect what their reason tells them about the world from what they are experiencing emotionally. That is getting a feeling of meaningfulness through lack of rationality, by suppression of thinking and reflection.
The great Supreme Court justice Olive Wendell Holmes Jr. once wrote to a friend and said that if one “thinks coldly,” a modern person has to admit that there is “no reason for attributing man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand.” By this he meant that if the modern secularist thinks out the implications of his view of a strictly materialistic world in which all life developed randomly and accidentally, human beings have no importance at all. But then he added that when he begins thinking like this it is time to “go downstairs and play solitaire.” No one with this set of beliefs can get peace and meaning for daily life unless he stops thinking about the implications of his beliefs. 32
The problem is that it is hard to stop thinking, and the big picture may keep breaking in on you.
In A Confession Leo Tolstoy tells how he was leading a very successful life until around the age of fifty he began to realize that every loved one would be taken away from him and all he had written would eventually be forgotten. In light of that, “the question was: ‘Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything? . . . Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?'” He also asked: “How can we fail to see this? . . . That is what is surprising! One can only live when one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud!”33 He has sobered up and was now thinking rationally (or “coldly” as Holmes named it). He could not go back to writing his novels and loving his family, because the lack of any objective, lasting meaning had dawned on him. He could not go back to his prereflective state.~Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God (Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, 2016) p.67-68
