existence itself appears throughout the historical record very much as a given. That, at any rate, is one explanation for needing and seeking the soteriological aspects of religion. Hick makes this point when he says that "different world religions have each served as God's means of revelation to and point of contact with a different stream of human life. Such a conclusion makes sense of the history of religions" (Hick, "Names" 113). This in turn makes sense of the proverb that if God did not exist, Man would have had to invent him. A wish for a transcendence of earthly existence points in the direction of a wish for redemption, as it were, from such existence at the moment of death. That impulse toward transcendence translates easily into an impulse toward faith, and by extension given the persistence of earthly difficulties a longing for their resolution in the transcendent realm.
Is this impulse, this longing truly universal? The existence of those who do not believe in a divine being and by choice are not members of a religion argues that it is not. One explanation is that such people either have given up on finding meaning or have uncovered the possibility of meaning despite the most absurd frustrations of existence. Such people may find meaning without an appeal to the transcendent, to take life rationally as it comes, not to make a bargain with the universe in strictly spiritual terms, and certainly not to expect a divine reward of some kind in exchange for bearing life in this vale of tears. Yet even such people believe and hope in (say) art, politics, emotion, ethics, and the resolution of such hopes, dreams, and fears cannot always be accommodated by rationality. One is brought back to a wish for transcendence, irrespective of its religious manifestations.
2a. Hick likens dogmatic Christian theology to the Ptolemaic cosmology, which put the earth at the center of the universe and to which the Church itself lent its ...