Column

Atheism

Creed

1 September 2023

6 min read

Confessions of an atheist philosopher. Part 4: The empty promises of “be here now”

In the fourth of a series, philosopher Stefani Ruper tries the most popular advice given by atheist philosophers.

Stefani Ruper

Stefani Ruper is a philosopher specialising in the ethics of belief and Associate Member of Christ Church College, Oxford. She received her PhD from the Theology & Religion faculty at the University of Oxford in 2020.

A graffited wall shows a stick man face next to 'what now'

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash.

My name is Stefani. I was a committed atheist for almost my entire life. I studied religion to try to figure out how to have spiritual fulfillment without God. I tried writing books on spirituality for agnostics and atheists, but I gave up because the answers were terrible. Two years after completing my PhD, I finally realised that that’s because the answer is God.

Today, I explain how and why I decided to walk into Christian faith.

Here at Seen and Unseen I am publishing a six-article series highlighting key turning points or realisations I made on my walk into faith. It tells my story, and it tells our story too.

I spent the first thirty years of my life looking for ways to have spiritual fulfillment as an atheist. I even got a PhD studying theology trying to figure out how to get the same peace and joy my religious friends had without believing in God.

For a brief period after finishing my PhD I thought I might have found some solutions. I tried writing books about them titled things like How to Have an Existential Crisis and Agnosticism: The Real Spiritual Truth and Joy. But they were not good books. When I shared this opinion with my friends, they all thought I was being too hard on myself. But I knew the truth: the answers I was providing just weren’t good enough. They didn’t make me feel happy or peaceful. Why would they work for anyone else?

I had one last resort to try: giving up, which is the advice most atheist philosophers provide. According to them, happiness lies not in finding the meaning of life, but in accepting that there is none. Relax, they say. Stop searching for something that isn’t there! Be a good person. Enjoy the present moment. Be here now!

I decided to give it a try—and I really did try my best. I got a prestigious job. I rented an expensive apartment with a balcony overlooking Harvard Square. I bought a brand-new car and paid an extra $600 for a special-edition paint colour. I partied a few nights a week. I meditated every day. I cultivated friendships. I dated. I went hiking and sat on park benches and wondered at the beauty of nature.

Everyone who followed me on Instagram thought I was having the time of my life. But I have never been more miserable.

“Be here now” reduces meaning and possibilities for spiritual fulfillment

Of course, there are beautiful aspects to being present. It is true that being aware, mindful, and grateful in each moment enriches life.

But when that’s all there is, you run into three big problems.

1: Meaning is flimsy

All religions offer meaning that has what Donald Crosby calls a personal-cosmic link—that is, a way to explain our personal stories in terms of a bigger, ultimate story. These stories call us to be the best versions of ourselves for the sake of something beyond us. They give us reason to actualize. They provide solace when we falter or suffer. They offer meaning that is fulfilling, reliable, and concrete.

In contrast, when meaning exists only in the here and now, it’s not out a real thing out there to be discovered, but only something you can make up if you feel like it. Such meaning is flimsy, easily transgressed, and forgotten.

2: The universe is a cold, empty, meaningless void

Believing in God or some transcendent source turns existence into what William James calls a thou. Humans are naturally social beings and always in relationship. Being able to have a relationship with the source of all existence adds great potential for love, awe, adoration, belonging, and homecoming to life. In contrast, when the present moment is all there is, the universe is a cold, empty, meaningless void you just bumble along in until you die.

3: Life is unsatisfying, pain harder to bear, and effort more difficult

“Why bother?” is a common refrain in modern culture. There are many reasons, including unjust systems and corrupt institutions. But one major reason is that living only in the here and now traps what counts as “good” and “evil” in the here and now, too.

The highest good can only ever be pleasure (things like ‘flourishing' and 'well-being' are measurable only by how good they feel), and the worst evil can only ever be pain (suffering and injustice are similarly measurable only by how bad they feel).

Pleasure, however, never lasts. Dopamine, the neuromodulator that creates a feeling of satisfaction every time you obtain something you want (a meal, an achievement, a date with a crush), falls right back down after you get it, typically to levels lower than when you started. No matter how much you love, or how hard you party, or how much you sacrifice to help others feel good, you (and they) end up in the same state of longing you started in—or worse.

The only solution is to keep pursuing more pleasure. Many fall prey to all sorts of unhealthy attachments such as to substances, sex, and entertainment. Personally, I was most attached to professional success, food, and romantic love. I kept chasing ultimate satisfaction—while realising more every day that it was never going to come.

Pain, the greatest evil, is unavoidable. It can never be overcome. This makes us its victims, “helpless cogs in a cruel machine,” as Tim Keller puts it. This can create a victim mentality as well as a sense of futility, as there is nothing you can do to escape it or give it meaning. Many consider it their purpose in life to fight pain, but as none of us can ever put a significant dent in it, such efforts can feel pointless. Personally, I felt hammered by successive loss and the absurdity of injustice. I had no way to cope other than to escape with pleasure or to numb myself.

Back to the drawing board

Living in my sky rise apartment overlooking Harvard, I would often make a cup of tea and go stand on the balcony. I’d stare off into the horizon, my heart thudding dull and sluggish in my chest, and wonder: is this all there is?

It had been more than twenty years since the first time I read a book on philosophy and started my lifelong quest for spiritual fulfillment without God. I had remained hopeful that I would find an answer. And if there wasn’t an answer to be found, I would create one.

But as I sipped my tea and watched the sun slip below the horizon, night after night, I began to suspect that I was going to fail. I had just tried the most popular advice given by the most esteemed atheist philosophers and came up empty handed.

After just nine months, I pulled the plug on the experiment. A professor in France had recently published a paper on atheism I found intriguing. I terminated my lease, quit my job, and hopped on a plane. Two days later I dropped my books on a desk in the university bibliothèque and settled in to keep learning.

Little did I know, the program of research I’d given myself wasn’t about to deepen my understanding of atheism.

It was about to lead me to the one place I never thought I’d end up: in the loving arms of God.

Column

Atheism

Creed

14 July 2023

7 min read

Confessions of an atheist philosopher. Part 1: born to be atheist, born to be anxious

In the first of a series, Stefani Ruper tells of the first steps on her journey from secular philosopher to a person of faith.

Stefani Ruper

Today, I explain how and why I decided to walk into Christian faith.

Here at Seen & Unseen I am publishing a six-article series highlighting key turning points or realisations I made on my walk into faith. It tells my story, and it tells our story too.

I began having panic attacks about dying and the meaning of life when I was four years old. I would lay in bed at night and beat my head against the mattress while imagining what it would be like to stop existing. What would it be like to cease to be? I had no idea, but it seemed too horrible to fathom. I literally tore my hair out with the dread of it.

Like many people in my generation, my parents had been raised in the church but left it as soon as they were able. They raised my brothers and me completely without God or other spiritual things. I had no idea of anything beyond what we could see or touch. My first exposure to God was through the TV, as He makes a few guest appearances on The Simpsons.

As a child raised in today’s world, God was what Charles Taylor calls “unthinkable” to me. By “unthinkable” he means literally unthinkable. It was impossible for me to think God; it remains difficult for me to think God. But here’s the thing: this unthinkability of God—the sheer impossibility, the ridiculousness, the strangeness, the preposterousness of God, to me—was a bias I inherited from being born into this specific place and time.

I was pre-wired to disbelieve in God.

The thing is, every society is founded on tacit assumptions about the nature of reality. Ours, the modern West, assumes that nothing is real except for physical stuff. Philosopher Charles Taylor calls this the immanent frame. Inside the immanent frame, you can, if you like, believe in more than just what we can see and touch. But that’s a choice, and it’s one you make while others consider the things you hold most sacred as like cartoon characters lounging on clouds in the sky. Such beliefs are difficult to maintain with grace, and people often hold them with either too much timidity or too much obstinacy; many, like my parents, eschew belief altogether. This is a recipe for a tumultuous, confusing, and often unfriendly spiritual landscape.

The great existential trade-off

We are the first society in the history of societies to be founded on nothingness. A child born 500 years ago would not have been able to imagine a world without God. Back then, God was not just real but number one on the list of possibly real things. Atheism was unthinkable. God was the singular, unchanging reality upon which all material things—constantly changing and subject to decay and death—depended. You can read a little about what it was like in this review of Pentiment, an adventure game set in medieval Bavaria.

Today, faith is, even for Christians, typically cordoned off in a little corner of life, maybe squeezed into 15 minutes on a Bible app on the way to work. But back then faith was what scholar Timothy Fitzgerald appropriately labels encompassing. God was not a hypothesis to be posed, a belief into which you could opt. God suffused the world. The transcendent encompassed all.

Here’s how it flipped.

In 1451 Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, which made printing books faster and cheaper than ever before. New ideas about God began to spread faster than the then dominant Church could stomp them out. Within a lightning-quick five hundred years, the number of versions of the faith in Europe multiplied from one to literal thousands.

No one was prepared for the shock of it all. People began to differentiate themselves according to their beliefs, and authorities exploited burgeoning fault lines for the sake of conflict. Between 1517 and 1648, ten million people died in the Wars of Religion.

The things that seem the most real to us are those we share and discuss. The whole realm of the transcendent began to lose its status as unshakably real.

What was to be done? Philosophers like John Locke offered a solution: separate the church and the state. That seemed simple enough. And in some ways, it was. But this meant our European ancestors stopped sharing and talking about their beliefs in public. The problem is that humans are social animals. The things that seem the most real to us are those we share and discuss. The whole realm of the transcendent began to lose its status as unshakably real.

Over time, people discussed their fundamental beliefs less and less. Society even developed the notion that sharing beliefs at social gatherings like dinner parties is impolite. So religious beliefs became deeply private things, and it started to seem like people were choosing to believe them due to personal feelings or needs. This eventually made it seem to many that beliefs were mere wishful thinking—flights of fancy, silly, and weak.

On the opposing side, people who abstained from religious belief started to see their nonbelief as noble resistance to the temptations of wishful thinking. The idea was that being willing to view the universe as cold and uncaring was the difficult but right and brave thing to do. Nobody wants to seem weak, and everybody wants to seem noble. The transcendent faded out of our collective consciousness.

Or, to use Nietzsche’s terms, God died.

Thus, God and material things swapped places in our understanding of reality. God, once the most real thing in existence, became something you could believe in if you felt like it. Material things, once viewed as constantly decaying and thus only real through God, became the unquestionably real.

This isn’t normal, we weren’t made for this. We weren’t made to live without hope or homecoming or a bigger story of which we are a part.

Today, the immanent frame reigns. But it’s not inert. It has its own compulsive, even hypnotic, powers, arguably with as strong a grip on our souls as God once had. It locks our attention on the here-and-now (as that’s all there is), and in doing so elevates the status of things like food, fashion, and entertainment in our quests for fulfillment. We throw ourselves into pleasure, hoping for relief. But immanence leads nowhere except back into itself, like an Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail.

Immanence is so pervasive we take for granted that this is just the way things are. And yet young children do things like tear their hair out trying to make sense of what seems like an absurd existence. This isn’t normal. We weren’t made for this. We weren’t made to live without hope or homecoming or a bigger story of which we are a part. Characters in today’s novels are always buying sportscars and asking Is this all there is? Maybe it’s not.

What if all of us are grasping at the same ultimate truth, getting little bits of it right and wrong?

Betting on transcendence

My panic attacks made me obsessed with finding answers. The horror I felt at living in a cold and dark universe was relentless. But I also couldn’t lie to myself. A solution wouldn’t be real if it were imaginary. So as much as I wished I could believe in God, I couldn’t.

When I learned this history of immanence however, I realised that my automatic inclination to disbelief was a bias—an inheritance of our culture, and nothing more.

I then asked myself:

What if, as our culture sloughed off the transcendent, it didn’t move into greater nobility, truth, and progress like it tells itself, but pre-emptively gave up on the most important thing in existence? What if all of us are grasping at the same ultimate truth, getting little bits of it right and wrong? What if some of us are on the right path, exploring relationship with a Creative power beyond our imagining that loves us, helps us, saves us?

The fact is, when it comes to transcendence, we don’t know what’s true. No one knows with certainty.

But we do know that immanence is a bias. And we know the first step to finding the truth is to free ourselves from bias. We must identify and untangle presumptions, then rebuild our mental frameworks as carefully as we are able.

As for me, I’ve spent more than a decade in the academy doing this work. And in the end? Spoiler alert: I’ve thrown my hat in with transcendence.