It’s not an All-Explaining Theory of Everything when it comes to atheism. But it does have an awful lot of explanatory power, I suspect. Especially in the weird disconnect I so often experience with people who are manifestly socially clueless gits, yet whose own estimation of their intellectual awesomeness and superiority to the Common Herd is astronomically out of touch with reality. It is not, as Lewis points out, that their heads are larger than ours. It is that their shrunken chests make them appear so.
And, in an odd way, they remind me of nothing so much as Calvinists who have made the final break with the Catholic tradition by rejecting the God bit along with all the rest. But the same cold preference for diagram over reality remains; the same absolute conviction that they’ve Figured It Out; the same hostility to mystery; the same love of cleverness over wisdom; the same tendency to treat human existence as a sort of math puzzle or logic problem. There will always be something alien and inhuman about it. And yet something pitiable. It feels like armor-plating defending something very small and frightened.
I know: worthless intuitions from a touchy feely mystical type who can’t “defend his position”.
Whatever. I can’t describe jazz either. Doesn’t mean it’s not real.