There’s no evidence for this encounter at all.

“Also, to consider the imagination paltry is to have little understanding of how YOUR imagined “relationship”, unproven as it is, is different from a perceived real. This difference, if not fully considered, may well be so imperceptible to the believer , that a psychologist may consider this experience a form of psychosis.

To say that my one who does not believe as you do has a heart filled with emptiness and futility merely offers the reader your experience of what it is like for you to live a life without these. You should have written “my human heart”, not “the human heart.” I think you have little understanding of individuals who are curious, who love, who contribute, without the need for the great lost and found department.

Your understanding of transcendent apart from your “spiritual and supernatural” is an uneducated one apart from your own experience as indicated in your declaration that this is a “futile feeling” and I think you need to spend time with real scientists who gaze at wondrous things every day.

Black bottomless hole of narcissism…” –
Narcissism is very evident in today’s modern church. We evaluate churches, ministers and truth-claims based upon how they make us feel about ourselves. If the proffered truth supports my self-esteem, it is, thereby, verified.

“There is abundant reason to experience sadness… of random existence without [my] meaning.”

You must be very sad as there are many of us who’ve you imagined.

Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat. ~John Morley

I have no “need to use religious stories to explain the unexplainable,” Mark — I have instead been transformed by a personal encounter and relationship with a Being far vaster than our paltry imagination and feeble intellects can begin to grasp — One Who has the infinite power and knowledge to create all the vastness and complexity of our universe, but in an even more astoundingly, can transform and ennoble the human heart, replacing emptiness and futility with peace and purpose.

To “feel the transcendence” without recognizing the spiritual and supernatural is to manifest the very futility of intellect detached from transcendence.

And as for being “addicted to certainty”: I know something of addiction. Addiction is that which leads you away from absolute truth to the futility of self-absorption and the black bottomless hole of narcissism. Faith — trust in the Being Who is both truth and goodness — leads us back toward the wholeness and purpose which can only be found in transcendent truth.

So, yes, there is abundant reason to experience sadness for those who manifest knowledge without wisdom, culminating in the empty purposelessness of random existence without meaning.

How very sad?

No need to feel saddened for the astronomer, physicist, mathematician who feels the transcendent yet has no need for the supernatural.

If you feel a need to use religious stories to explain the unexplainable, fine. Not everyone has that need. Some of us have been freed from this need.

As someone once said:
“In essence we have become addicted to the certainty, sureness or sense of security that our faith provides.”