In Denying and Disclosing God, the late Catholic theologian Michael Buckley argues that it wasn’t “the new science” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that led to denying God’s existence and thus to the emergence of what, in his earlier book At the Origins of Modern Atheism, he terms “modern atheism.” Instead, it was the conscious effort, in the face of the “new science,” to ground God’s existence in natural theology, or philosophy, that slowly, dialectically passed over into its antithesis.

By a slow, corrosive process, God first became the universal Architect of a highly ordered natural world, only to later become “otiose” as nineteenth century debunkers declared that the universe no longer required such a hypothesis in order to account for the emergence of organic life out of inorganic matter or the coalescing of ornate, immanent design.

I could go on, but I’ll stop this line of historical thought here. It’s enough to say that, by perhaps the latter half of the twentieth century and certainly into the twenty-first century, atheism has slowly taken root in the Western world. To say that “atheism has slowly taken root” is not to imply that it defeated all the arguments in support of God’s existence, for that never happened. Nor is it to suggest that it’s impossible to find the Presence of God in one’s heart. Instead, it is to point to the very real facts of modernity: the “sacred canopy” of our shared life just ain’t there; the turn of the mundane world–the shops opening and closing, the daily tasks completed in succession…–places no emphasis on, and seems to have no room for, the Divine Light to be felt; in essence, the basic affairs of ordinary life seem to go on, many believe with their feet, without the intimate Presence pervading these undertakings. It’s really as if God we’re here, as if God were nowhere to be found.

By my lights, then, we’re left with just two basic options. One is to embrace nihilism–but nihilism cannot be wholeheartedly embraced. Consequently, ersatz concepts of meaning will continue to get “pumped out” one after another: some on the side of entertainment; others pushing “experiences”; others clamoring loudly for everyone to have “callings.” I don’t think this development is tenable. The emperor certainly has no clothes.

The other, which I endorse, is a return to religio: the binding or rebinding of the human to the Divine. While I’m a proponent of the nondual teaching, I’m open to all kinds of “conversions” or “changes of heart”: some might feel called to return to traditional Catholicism, some to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, some to Theravada Buddhism, some to a bhakti-style Hinduism, and so on.

Rene Guenon might have argued that the farther we are from the Source, the closer we are to a “new cycle” in which a return is made possible. Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps at this very moment in time as atheism and nihilism gallop feverishly on, we’re close to a volta, a turn. The more home recedes, the more our hearts are bound to miss it. Hearing the call to come back, how can we not, as the sun approaches the horizon, turn our boots around and step steadily through the hard, crunching snow?