Modern ‘Technoculture’ Makes the World Feel Unnaturally Godless

In his 1996 novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies, John Updike has a fictional Reformed Presbyterian minister feel his faith abandon him like an exhale, leaving his “habitual mental contortions decisively relaxed.” For this minister, the experience was one of relief, “an immense strain of justification” lifted “at a blow.” Unbelief, in this sense, is not so much a choice of the will but the relaxation of the will, with the mind clicking into an atheist-materialis