Are we all searching for something?  In my monthly atheist discussion group last week, almost everyone agreed that we are.  Almost everyone agreed that we all face some deeply fundamental questions, questions about ourselves and our world that our best science cannot answer.  These questions, almost everyone averred, have to do with, gasp, the metaphysical, some level of mystery that seems, gasp again, to exceed the boundaries of our humanness.  As one person remarked, "That I long so much to know the answers to these questions must mean that there is something out there to know."

     So the larger question becomes this:  what is "out there?"  One, who identified herself not as merely an atheist, but rather an anti-theist, insisted that everything about our quest can be explained by the nature of our brain.  Be it quest or answer, it is nothing more than a shift in our brain state.  There is nothing metaphysical about it.

     While I do not dispute that brain states explain a great deal about the source and direction of our longings, I find it disingenuous to attribute everything--everything--about them to a twist or nuance of the chemicals that run through our brains.  Synapse exchanges tells us a great deal, yes, but they do not tell us why--in the most absolute sense--we long.  They do not tell us why we are moral creatures.  They do not tell us why we long for value, and why we long for meaning.  They do not explain why the desire for meaning seems to afflict, in the most profound and challenging sense, every human being.

     In other words, social adaptation and evolutionary processes notwithstanding, why do we think there must be something else?