The "religious impulse"

William James once wrote: “Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and most general terms, one might say that it consists in the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”

This belief is what Tim Crane, in his recommendable book "The meaning of belief" calls the religious impulse.

The order physics talks about is order as contrasted with randomness or chaos; but the order that is the focus of the religious impulse is a normative order, the order of how things ought to be.

Normality is just a matter of regularity, whereas normativity is a matter of conforming to some kind of standard or ideal.

A widespread expression of the religious impulse is the familiar thought that this cannot be all there is; there must be something more to the world. Days follow one another, a generation comes and a generation goes. If this were all there is, then the world would be meaningless. The religious impulse involves the view that the world is not meaningless.

I am a pessimistic atheist. I think the religious impulse is intelligible, but I agree with Thomas Nagel when he says that “the universe revealed by chemistry and physics, however beautiful and awe-inspiring, is meaningless..."