itself? Why are people kind to strangers they will never meet again? Why have the overwhelming majority
of people through time believed in intelligent spiritual agents?" And it seems that the naturalist would be
forced to say that, while these phenomena may be socially useful in some ways, they are fundamentally
absurd because what they seem to suggest to people about reality is false or misleading.
GG: I can't overstate how inaccurate and unsatisfying an answer this would be. No thoughtful naturalist
would ever say such a thing. Here's one reason why, off the top of my head: love toward another person
(children excepted from this example) is a feel ing, an emotion, a drive toward something that is very
difficult to put into words. There is nothing but faith when one agrees to a loving relationship with another
person. When a love dissolves and the relationship ends, is it prudent to say, "Wow, that was meaningless,
pointless, and love therefore has no meaning?" No; in fact, in my experience, I have learned a lot from
past relationships, and I have gone on to love other people. There is a drive in my mind toward loving.
This is because I am a social organism and whatever physicochemical causes are present to create my
love drive have served my ancestors well in forming a social species. It is a part of being human to have
these drives and it unifies us as a social group.
PJ: Which brings us back to the fundamental problem with raw naturalism: It can't explain why people
long for ultimate meaning when they live in a world that comprises only proximate and relative meaning.
GG: I just explained how the drive for meaning can be a physicochemical process. The focus on ultimate
meaning is a story told to us as we develop that ultimate meaning is more important than proximate
meaning. I think you have a hard task ahead of you if you want to assert that ultimate meaning is what the
mind focuses on. You can ask a million people and they all might say, "Yes, I focus entirely on ultimate
meaning," but perhaps as many as 99 percent of them have been told a story as a developing child about
the ultimate story of God. The only meaningful study would be to find a group of people who were raised
in a culture of proximate meaning stories and see if they longed for an ulti mate explanation. My
hypothesis is that they would not. I feel fine not having any need for ultimate explanations. It might be the
key to my happiness, in fact!
PJ: A world made only of soft things couldn't produce a concept of hardness. A world made only of blue
things couldn't produce a concept of red. A world that is ultimately meaningless couldn't produce a
concept of ultimate meaning.
GG: With all due respect, my friend, this sounds like philosophical nonsense. Philosophers love to sit
around and talk about this stuff, which very few naturalists take seriously. It is not very hip with current
neurobiology.
PJ: It's true that theism can't explain why this is true in a way that would satisfy a person looking for leak-
proof answers. But the answers it can provide seem more plausible than those raw naturalists can
provide, partly because theists are in a position to add to naturalists' findings ...
GG: Not if they can't address metaphysics, which they haven't for over 1,900 years!
PJ:... while naturalists are left only with their findings, which are necessarily limited.
GG: Well, given their progress in the last 200 years alone, it might be prudent to assume that the
limitations aren't as great as you would like to paint them.