Can Baseball Replace God? All Things Shining and the Search for Meaning in a Secular Age

What happens when a civilization loses faith in God but cannot shake its longing for transcendence? This is the provocative question at the heart of Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s All Things Shining. Rather than offering another philosophical treatise on religion or atheism, the authors embark on a sweeping journey through the history of Western thought, diagnosing what they call contemporary nihilism—the creeping sense that life is full of choices but empty of genuine meaning.

Their historical tour is necessarily selective, but it serves a clear purpose. It seeks to explain not only why so many people today feel spiritually adrift, but also whether there remains a path to meaningful existence after the decline of religious certainty.

The Two Temptations of Modern Life

Dreyfus and Kelly argue that contemporary Western culture is trapped between two equally unsatisfying extremes.

The first is what they call the temptation of monotheism. Even for those who no longer believe in God, Western consciousness remains deeply shaped by centuries of Christian thought. We continue to crave what monotheism once promised: an ultimate source of truth, purpose, and significance that anchors every aspect of existence. Although the authors never fully define what they mean by “ultimate meaning,” their discussion—especially through Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick—suggests that such a comprehensive source of meaning disappears once faith itself collapses.

The result is an uncomfortable inheritance. Secular individuals have abandoned belief, but not the longing that belief once satisfied.

This leads directly to the second temptation: attempting to manufacture meaning ourselves. Modernity celebrates individual autonomy and limitless choice, encouraging us to believe that purpose is something we can simply invent. Yet Dreyfus and Kelly contend that this project ultimately collapses under its own weight. Meaning that is entirely self-created rarely feels authoritative; it remains fragile, provisional, and haunted by the suspicion that it is merely arbitrary. Instead of escaping nihilism, we simply arrive there by another route.

It is difficult not to recognize something familiar in this diagnosis. We inhabit an age overflowing with possibilities—careers, identities, lifestyles, beliefs—yet often lacking any convincing basis for choosing among them. Freedom, paradoxically, becomes exhausting.

Looking Back to Homer

Rather than searching for solutions in modern philosophy, Dreyfus and Kelly take an unexpected detour: Homeric Greece.

Their admiration for ancient polytheism is frequently misunderstood. They are not arguing that contemporary society should literally resurrect Zeus or Athena. Instead, they see Greek polytheism as embodying a profound philosophical insight.

Unlike monotheism, which places ultimate authority in a single divine source, the Greek pantheon represented a plurality of values. Courage, wisdom, beauty, cunning, justice, love, and war each found expression in different gods. Human life therefore unfolded within a landscape of competing but equally legitimate ideals.

In contemporary philosophical language, this resembles value pluralism—the recognition that there are many genuine forms of human flourishing rather than one universal blueprint for the good life.

Yet Dreyfus and Kelly’s argument extends beyond pluralism. Their real emphasis is on passivity.

Modern individuals imagine themselves as sovereign choosers, constructing their identities through deliberate acts of will. The Greeks, by contrast, often understood themselves as being claimed by forces larger than themselves. Excellence was less something one invented than something one answered.

When the Sacred Appears at a Baseball Game

Perhaps the book’s most surprising move arrives in its final chapters.

To explain how meaning might still emerge in a secular world, Dreyfus and Kelly revive the Greek concept of physis—the spontaneous emergence of significance that overwhelms ordinary consciousness. Physis is not planned or manufactured. It erupts unexpectedly, suspending doubt, irony, and self-conscious calculation.

And where do they find contemporary examples?

Baseball.

At first glance, the choice feels almost comical. Yet the example captures something surprisingly profound. Picture a packed stadium in the instant a game-winning home run clears the fence. Thousands of strangers rise simultaneously in celebration. For one brief moment, individual anxieties disappear into a shared experience that feels larger than any one participant.

As Dreyfus and Kelly write, “there is no question of ironic distance from the event. That is the moment when the sacred shines.”

Their point is not that baseball is a religion. Rather, communal experiences—whether in sports, music, art, or ritual—can still generate moments of unquestionable significance. These experiences cannot be forced or possessed. They arrive unexpectedly, carrying with them a sense of meaning that feels discovered rather than invented.

Does This Really Solve Nihilism?

This is where All Things Shining becomes both fascinating and vulnerable.

The book succeeds admirably in demonstrating that meaningful experiences continue to exist even in secular societies. It challenges the assumption that the collapse of religious belief necessarily condemns us to permanent emptiness.

Yet whether these fleeting moments genuinely answer the problem of nihilism remains uncertain.

Can an ecstatic sporting event really substitute for the comprehensive vision of meaning once offered by religion? Can transient experiences of collective transcendence sustain us through suffering, loss, or moral conflict? The book gestures toward these questions but never fully confronts them.

Its historical narrative also invites criticism. The treatment of the Enlightenment, in particular, sometimes relies on broad generalizations that flatten complex intellectual developments. Readers familiar with the philosophers under discussion may find themselves questioning several historical claims. These weaknesses appear to arise from the authors’ determination to portray Western history as a succession of incompatible worldviews, each replacing rather than enriching the last.

Why the Book Still Matters

Despite these shortcomings, All Things Shining remains an intellectually exhilarating read.

Its interpretation of Moby-Dick alone is worth sustained reflection, revealing dimensions of Melville’s novel that extend far beyond conventional literary criticism. More importantly, the book asks questions that remain deeply relevant: What makes life meaningful? Must meaning come from outside ourselves? Can secular societies recover genuine experiences of the sacred without returning to religious belief?

Whether or not one accepts Dreyfus and Kelly’s admiration for Homeric Greece or their faith in baseball as a site of transcendence, their central insight lingers long after the final page.

Perhaps the real crisis of modernity is not simply that we no longer believe in God. It is that we have forgotten how to recognize those rare moments when the world, unexpectedly and without our permission, shines.

Chandra, S. 2026