NATURALISM vs TRANSCENDANTALISM [Part 1]

Is it 'normal' to be an atheist? 

Many contemporary people argue that since one cannot PROVE God exists, therefore He does not.

Interesting, but is this logical?

Worldviews, i.e. the instincts/motivations/beliefs/unconscious biases from which we operate in this world seem to place greater emphasise on NOT believing than they do too believing. Is this just normal, common sense?

From about AD 1500 until today, a major shift has been occurring in Western society. This shift has increasingly made naturalism the default functioning worldview. Philosopher Charles Taylor insightfully probes the depth of this shift and what it means for us today in his landmark book A Secular Age. [Crain, Natasha. Faithfully Different: Regaining Biblical Clarity in a Secular Culture (p. 70). Harvest House Publishers. Kindle Edition.] 

Up until the late 13th Century people lived in what Taylor termed "the enchanted world", that is; a world so saturated with a belief in the transcendental that most people found it incredibly difficult to NOT believe in the 'other-world'. 

I was born in Africa and the belief in an existence that embraces both a natural and a supernatural world seems quite acceptable, even 'normal', evidence that Western conditioning in secular materialism has not yet had its desired affect on Africa. Interestingly, given how completely captured all of the 'organs of meaning'(i.e. institutions that govern the minds and motivations of the masses) in the West are, we still see that a majority percentage of the population continue to believe in a transcendant 'something', even though there is much confusion about what that 'something' is. This 'transcendental confusion' is playing havoc on the psyche of  the Western population, hence the mass usage of illegal drugs, alcohol, anti-depressants, anti-social behaviours, suicides, and general dysfunctionality so evident in Western societies even with all of the material advances made in the West since the Industrial revolution: 

Fast-forward to today. Taylor calls our present age “haunted.” Everyone longs for meaning, but we encounter so many options that we often lack confidence in our own beliefs. We’re haunted by the realization that any belief is contestable today, and it leaves us with a sense of unease. That sense of unease grows when we perceive that more and more people are finding our own beliefs to be implausible—and that’s exactly what’s happening today for Christians. As more and more people abandon Christianity and theism in general, naturalism increasingly becomes the default worldview we encounter in society. And it’s not just atheists who have a naturalistic worldview.3 In a functional sense, the many people who believe in a nonspecific God often live their day-to-day lives as though this world is all there is. The fact that we’re increasingly surrounded by even a functional naturalism creates a certain sense of cognitive pressure: Why are so many other people convinced that God doesn’t exist or that He’s not in any way active if He does? Am I really so sure He’s there? And when those who hold to a strict naturalism are vocal in proactively challenging our beliefs, the pressure can become even greater. Any unease we might already have felt in this “haunted” age is magnified to a level that’s hard to ignore. [Ibid p. 71]