Illusion can bind us together?

A friend of mine recently attended my sister's wedding. He doesn't sing hymns because he takes a moral argument that God's existence could not be in a world containing horrible events. I respect him and his sincerity but disagree. Such an argument is referred to through his characters by David Hume in his Dialogue Concerning Natural Religion. It may well be the case that it is unsatisfactory to say that we cannot know God's nature; it may be equally unsatisfactory to say that God's existence can be proved by arguments from analogy in human experience; but equally there is an instinct in us to believe that an existent God has a moral nature despite any evidence being adduced for it. That instinct may be consolatory in a 'vale of tears' (the Dialogues, see introduction); and of course many may argue from nature to suggest that God has no moral nature inherent. But as to my friend's atheism, he has sinply replaced the religion of God with the religion of Man.

Jacob Bronowski referred to man as finding the 'like in the unlike and the unlike in the like'. God is not dead, as we were told by Nietzche, because he is a by-product of the thought process of abstraction which humans possess as part of their metaphysical nature. But we do reach a summit in that an idea of God is held despite their being no experience in which the reality we see around us can be linked to that idea in a principle of cause and effect. It becomes an article of faith that belief in God is possible and that morevover God's nature is benevolent.

My friend may one day realise that all reality is illusion. Then ask the questions about which illusions we should and shouldn't cling to. To that extent, the richness of reality can be seen an an exercise in contemplating the beauty that the human mind can extend in its strivings. It can take from life the sense that we are good for each other only when we are of use to each other; rather we are self-standing 'essences' of value, supporting each other in our own metaphysic rather than seeking to destroy another's metaphysic in search of a truth.

We survive to the extent that we allow each other to thrive in our innocences. Those who are said to be streetwise have merely learnt rules for behaviour in life. The naive person sees what really goes on but in the absence of rule-based behaviour seems inadequate. The streetwise are naive survivors, the naive all-knowing but at risk of condemnation.

Surely as humans we should be more than a conditioned bundle of responses. Or maybe not.