Lots of Roger Scruton’s friends passionately disagree as to whether he believed in God or retained his atheism.

But whatever they think, he put forward what I think is the best explanation for modern unbelief. It is in our practiced posture to the world. From The Face of God:

We should not be surprised, therefore, if God is so rarely encountered now. The consumer culture is one without sacrifices; easy entertainment distracts us from our metaphysical loneliness.

The rearranging of the world as an object of appetite obscures its meaning as a gift. The defacing of eros and the loss of rites of passage eliminate the old conception of human life as an adventure within the community and an offering to others. It is inevitable, therefore, that moments of sacred awe should be rare among us.

And it is surely this, rather than the arguments of the atheists, that has led to the decline of religion. Our world contained many openings onto the transcendental; but they have been blocked by waste. You may think that this does not matter that mankind has had enough of sacred mysteries and their well-known dangers. But I think we are none of us at ease with the result. Our disenchanted life is, to use the Socratic idiom, ‘not a life for a human being’. By remaking human beings and their habitat as objects to consume rather than subjects to revere we invite the degradation of both.

I spent last night pondering that.