Defending Pantheism

[Acrobat]

I experience the sense of the numinous on a daily basis, lol.  I think it's a sideline benefit of something else that was selected for.  Human beings (despite the cynics constant claims to the contrary, lol) have an expansive intellect and determined pattern seeking compulsion.  Pleasure isn't the biological purpose of sex, but it's a pretty sweet sideline deal.  The same is true of experiences like these.

Except of course, it's pretty easy to see why sexual pleasure was selected for, because without it, we wouldn't be all that inclined to have sex. If sex didn't feel good, we probably would have died off very early on. SO we can easily see why evolution would have selected for elements that made sex pleasurable for creatures as ourselves. To hear why you hypothesize an element like a sense of numinous was selected for, would be interesting, as to what sort of survival and reproductive benefit it afforded creatures like ourselves.

I have a bunch of awesome kids, a badass wife, and I work in ag.  It's hard -not- to feel as though I'm in the constant presence and favor of what other people refer to as the divine.  I'm headed out in a few hours to surf fish hatteras, I'm going to be floored, like I always am, by staring out over the ocean and smelling the salt air.  That's home for me.  I'll even get to see a sunset over water, optical illusion....but a rarity for we east coasters.  I'll shit talk the rays, and I'll whisper sweet nothings onto my braid,  past the breakers, like I'm casting a magic spell on a shark.  I get to drive through the Danny Boone to get there.  Then, when I get back, I'm going fishing for muskie and trout in Cave Run, then Wolf Creek.  When all of that is done, the tomatoes I started on a heat mat under lights will probably put their first flowers on.  My beagle will be pregnant, my entire family is ten minutes away from me (we've been living 14 hours away for the last decade).....and I have to mill white ash and black walnut for woodwork on their house.  I'm connected at every conceivable level to the people around me, nature around me, the all.

It seems to me that you're conflating a sort of gratitude for the fortunate life you have with the numinous. I can completely relate to such gratitude, I have a great wife, a good marriage, two wonderful daughters that brighten up any room, great friends, a good relationship with my family and community, have a good job, live a very comfortable life, all of which I'm tremendously grateful for, and composes a pretty a happy and healthy life. It seems that this is the same feeling you're describing here.

But this is not what's meant by the numinous, nor what I mean by my experience of it, that aligns with these basic descriptions. That experience isn't contingent on any aspect of my life, whether I'm married, or unmarried, have kids, or not, whether I'm sick, or in good health, poor, or rich. In fact sometimes in the midst of sorrow, it felt even more.

To describe to someone who might not have had a similar experience, is to borrow for the CS Lewis description, it's more akin to terror, than gratitude, expect it's not really terror at all, but a sort of awe, a monstrous sort of beauty, a recognition of our inadequacy, how little we are in comparison to it, like a living body approaching the lip of an event horizon, but welcoming it. As Otto would suggest, the original source of all the god-stuff.

Or as Hitchens would put it "there is something beyond the material, or not entirely consistent with it, what you could call the Numinous, the Transcendent, or at its best the Ecstatic. […] It’s in certain music, landscape, certain creative work, without this we really would merely be primates. "

And not the sort of experience of gratitude you described above.