Only religion and secularism can do that.
The educational magic of diversity was experienced by me long before the term “diversity” became a cliche for describing getting students from different points of view to intersect on a campus. I was early in my freshman year at college when I met up with another freshman and he had prepared for college at a Catholic high school. When I said that I didn’t believe in anything, he said with considerable anger that everyone has to believe in something and so the only question is what people agree to that is based on faith rather than scientific truth. And, yes, it was true that I believed that humankind was engaged in a road to progress and that knowledge would make us free, but what I meant was that I did not subscribe to any supernatural belief, one beyond the tests of factual or conceptual truths where one might make an educated inference. I could believe that ethical life was important without claiming that ethics were a sacrosanct or holy entity the equivalent of religious belief, such claims by definition to be beyond reason, such as the Virgin Birth or God parting the Red Sea. So, there.
A more incisive but somewhat parallel question was raised to me by a colleague when both of us were young professors and in answer to my doubts about the theory of evolution in that biologists could not trace out intermediary stages in the evolution of species nor deal with the metabolic changes in species, only their bones. My colleague asked what I did to fill my imagination if it were not filled with either the Bible or with the theory of evolution. There is a craving by all people, my friend was presuming, for people to have a worldview that provided the story and images that made life what it was and that preoccupied them, not very far from conscious thought, and that adequately met by either the story of Jesus and what His life meant, a single God intervening in history to save humankind from its evil ways, or else, like my friend, the world focussed around the clashes of dinosaurs or insects out to survive as best they can and without any greater end or purpose than to survive, just the opposite view of those who thought God to be a sentient creature who had a plan for how mankind’s history would unfold. It strikes me that the Fundamentalist theologians of the American early Twentieth Century were correct in thinking that Evolutionism was their direct antagonists in that there was no compromise between purpose and purposelessness however Catholic Christianity made its peace with evolutionary thinking by treating it as the mechanism through which biology operated rather than as the proof of the purposeless of life.
I have pondered the question that my friend, Steve Gottlieb, proposed for almost a half century now and it is troubling in part because I can not easily cite some other world encompassing story and attendant ideas that meet the requirement to fill up our imaginations that are as comprehensive as those offered by religion and evolution, the latter extended to include the mindless forces whereby stars are born and entropy will eventually envelope us so that the universe will be uniformly close to absolute zero temperature, even if a benevolent God seems quaint and narrow in comparison to the images and evolution of the mindless universe. What offers itself as a third alternative? Steve’s question is a standard to set for allowing a world view to be fully considered one or to measure why other putative worldviews are to be considered deficient.
Most proposed world views are just occupational or avocational preoccupations or even just pastimes. A medical doctor does not think that everything in life has to be modeled on medical care even though sometimes doctors overreach as when they treat gun wounds as a medical problem because they have to fix the victims but that is a social problem to be dealt with by history and politics and social structure. Most of the time, there are other realms of life than medicine. A colleague of mine who was a professor of marketing said that he discovered in graduate school that everything in life was marketing. Politicians have to package their products and advertise them. But that was a metaphor in that marketing was like politics because what was being packaged was a conviction or inclination rather than a product. Similarly, people can think the meaning of life springs from making widgets or pulling teeth or watching a baseball game but people will in the rest of their lives move onto other spheres of influence. Alongside religion as always salient is a claim that laissez faire economics is the universal process because that ideology has become just another adjunct of the evolutionary world that posits a dog eat dog relationship between companies as well as species but even then it is checked by the religious view that there are values that transcend competition. And religion has to hold its own as the premiere and necessary worldview by recognizing that it is superior to the natural order or even to the transitory political order, standing atop morality as the way to judge both politics and biology. You shouldn’t forget your religion even if you are engulfed by a war.
Here are two existential conditions that might lead people to think their imaginations filled, and those are other than religion or secularism. The first of these is sex, an experience which, I daresay, is even more dominating a force than religion, so overwhelming a force that experts say a person thinks a hundred times a day about sex which, I also daresay, is more than happens to most religious believers with the exception of people who have trained themselves to do so and also happens perhaps by children who have become preoccupied with dinosaurs. People are flooded with sex for biological reasons and that lasts most every person for a lifetime. So powerful is sex to color whatever else happens in life that Freud had to find a counterforce so that people are able to think of something else, like dinosaurs or poetry. Freud came up in his earlier work within a weak counterforce by invoking custom and moral controls as devices that will lead to tube suppression of sexual preoccupations, sex raising itself to the surface as much as it can.
But that is not quite right either. Freud decided in his later work that the ego had its own needs and its own development and so replaced id as its primary objective. A broader way of saying that is that sex is just one of the thoughts and impulses that contest with one another for immediate salience. So it is possible to think of thinking about something other than sex as normal rather than abnormal and so not exceptional except that it has its own modalities to which all cultures accommodate as just part of human nature, other interests, as in history or paleontology, also circumscribed by social life as well as some idiosyncratic impulse.
Another existential situation alongside sex as a candidate for filling a person’s imagination is literature, which is as old as stick figures on caves displayed as interacting with animals. Story is that old because it shows that things change over time as well as, simultaneously, presenting an ending which says life has been restored, in that people die or are reborn, in their imaginations, as their offspring or as a comment, often called justice, of what has preceded within the story or originated the story, as happened when Adam ate the apple or Hamlet found that his father’s death was suspicious. Stories are everywhere around us and we create new ones every time people imagine meeting a date of someone they met on a bus or thinking how nice it would be to have the corner office or what one might order in a restaurant.
Story is so ubiquitous that Matthew Arnold thought that literature, rightly speaking to include poems and novels and plays, can flood the imagination so well that religion could be replaced by literature, all the emotions and thoughts of religion replicated by literature while adding as well the mundane and unsanctified aspects of religion. That would be a monumental change in consciousness but it was an accurate prophecy in that the current day imagination is filled with sports, where you can spin a story of what happens in a nine inning game, or in the ever unfolding and never ending of politics and how, through, thick and thin, you manage to pay off your mortgage, and all those facsimile or overheard stories told in paperbacks and movies where the story is vicarious and so enriches your own life by confronting the stories of others, both real and imagined. We cannot do without literature and being illiterate is considered a privation of human nature.
But it is also the case that not all people engage in literature even if they cannot avoid using story, which is itself universal to the human condition. Many people, including literate ones, are not consumers of literature, do little more than look at headlines, or treat literature as a pastime, reading thrillers in the same way they play cards or scrabble, so as to attend to the more important thing of experiencing themselves as being alive, rather than engaging literature as providing alternative lives, and so ways lof expanding the imagination, of having more lives than their own. And people of these sorts do not think of themselves as so impoverished that they have smaller souls, just people who have not had the additional advantage of education which, by the way, is less and less a matter of engaging in literature but in technology, having learned computers or physical therapy rather than the classic texts of history or economics or English literature. Arnold may have thought that literature would flood consciousness rather than it being a particular kind of skill. You can manage information technology without considering Shakespeare as some plays you had to read in high school.
So the conclusion from my ruminations is that there are only two overarching ways to appreciate and engage in the universe: that of religion and that of the secular, the two diametrically opposed in that the first thinks that the universe is purposeful and the latter is purposeless unless people create purposes of their own despite the indifference or lack of any consciousness within the universe in itself. That means that religion is not to be understood as essentially what it was in its origins, what with its tree spirits or funerary rituals, but what it has evolved into being, which is an experience beyond dogma or liturgy or even a sense of what god is like, or even the supposedly elementary emotions of awe and obligation or, in the Christian case, sin and atonement, but reduced and purified into being a trust in hope, the evil in Pandora’s box, a sense that it is for a purpose however obscure it might be and however antiquated are the myths to which hope is associated, and that people are appeased by that and can continue along with their lives, while the others have to brave on in the emptiness of it all. I wish I could think of a better alternative.