Near the end of his life, the atheist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre told Pierre Victor: “I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.”
His long term companion and fellow philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, responded to this contemptuously saying: ‘How should one explain the senile act of a turncoat?’
Despite their claims to have a monopoly on the ability to think freely, people like Sartre came to realise that their commitment to a purely materialistic view of life is, in itself, putting limits on their thinking; like a man who is tone deaf refusing to believe there is such a thing as music, simply because he hasn’t the ability to hear it.