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.

Article

Belief

Creed

Spiritual formation

3 April 2025

6 min read

The young are sold jumbled nonsense in exchange for their spiritual birthright

Is our religious Compare the Market selling us short?

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A perplexed looking woman hold her cheeks up with her fingers.

Sherise Van Dyk on Unsplash.

There is an old joke that goes around the Church of England. It concerns a parish that was having problems with bats who had nested in the roof of the local parish church. The vicar calls up the Archdeacon to ask for advice on how to get rid of them. The Archdeacon replies drily: “Just get the bishop to confirm them. They’ll leave the church pretty soon after that.”

This joke came to mind when reading of a recent report by the Pew Research Centre which suggested that 36 per cent of those raised as Christians in the UK now no longer self-identify as Christian.

As a bishop, I regularly go round parishes leading confirmations, a service where people make a public commitment to living as a Christian. With adults or older teenagers, I'm usually fairly confident they are serious about their faith because it takes some swimming against the tide to make such a counter-cultural move. When I confirm younger children - 10- or 12-year-olds, perhaps - I confess to a little niggle of doubt in the back of my mind. I’m sure some have a sincere faith. Yet in many parishes or even schools it can be a bit of a rite of passage, the kind of thing everybody does, which ironically takes more courage to resist than to go with the flow. The joke stings when I meet adults who were confirmed as kids, yet who left the church as adolescence kicked in, never to darken its doors again.

The detail of the Pew report reveals a more complex picture. In a list of countries where adults have changed religious categories from the one they grew up in, the UK comes sixth, behind such countries as South Korea (where the number is 50 per cent), Spain and the Netherlands. It’s about the same in the UK as in Australia, France Germany and Japan, which all come in at 34 per cent.

In other words, what we have here is a global trend of people, mainly in western, or western-influenced countries, exploring different religious options from the one in which they were brought up. Two factors lie behind this trend. The first is that in countries like the UK, where religion is in decline, you’re unlikely to face ostracism if you change faith, as you might if you stopped being Christian or Muslim in certain parts of the Philippines, Sudan, Pakistan or Indonesia. In the west, the pressure to remain is just not there. In places like India, Nigeria, Israel and Thailand, places where either religion is core to national identity, or where there is severe religious tension, 95 per cent of adults say they still belong to the religious group that they were raised in.

The second factor is that in western cultures, individual autonomy, the right to choose, is paramount. We are used to shopping as one of our primary activities. The right to shop around for spiritual alternatives, in a kind of religious version of Compare the Market, is hardly surprising.

Put this survey next to another recently published by OnePoll, suggesting that Gen Z people (in their teens and twenties) are much less likely than their parents to be atheists, and more likely to describe themselves as ‘spiritual’, and a more interesting picture emerges.

It is like thinking that it would be a good idea to learn another language and deciding to mix German verbs, Spanish tenses, French grammar, Portuguese nouns and Arabic verbs.

Most of the switching, says the Pew report, involves people moving to the ‘unaffiliated’ category. Rather than changing from Christian to Muslim, they're changing from Christian to, well, nothing. Or perhaps everything.

People are moving away from fixed forms of religion to a more general and diffuse sense of spirituality. The 20-something, brought up nominally Christian, now feeds her own inner life by enjoying nature, reading Tarot cards, shopping for crystals or buying a mindfulness app on her phone rather than going to church. It’s do-it-yourself religion, perfectly fashioned by an acquisitive age that wants us to be restless and dissatisfied so we buy more things that we think will make us happy. As Dan Kim has persuasively argued elsewhere on Seen & Unseen, there is a whole industry out there waiting to exploit our openness to the spiritual and mystical to sell us their stuff.

It‘s common to find forms of ‘spirituality’ these days that choose the bits it likes from a number of spiritual traditions of the past, while leaving saside the less attractive parts. It’s like a fruit smoothie mixed in a blender – a statue of the Buddha, a little Native American wisdom, a touch of feng shui, a whiff of incense, all mixed together to make you feel peaceful and more in tune with the world. The goal of all this is usually some sense of personal serenity or calmness. Yet this is typically far from what the spiritual traditions of the past had in mind.

It is like thinking that it would be a good idea to learn another language and deciding to mix German verbs, Spanish tenses, French grammar, Portuguese nouns and Arabic verbs. You might prefer French nouns to Latin ones, but the result will be highly idiosyncratic and not make a great deal of sense. As Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out, religions operate like a language in having a set of practices that make sense in relation to one another and to the underlying beliefs that hold the thing together. Each spiritual path has an integrity within itself which doesn’t work if you try to blend them all together.

To think we know better than the ancients who over centuries developed the spiritual traditions of prayer found in the different methods of religious practice is, not to put too fine a point on it, a trifle arrogant. Whatever we come up with might bring us a sense of momentary peace, but it is unlikely to have the long-term effect that the deeper traditions of spirituality were meant for.

Prayer was never meant to be a technique to de-stress, to find personal tranquillity. It was not a way to find yourself, but to find God, and then you might find yourself – and the tranquillity - as a by-product. It was not a way to reassure you about your familiar ways, but to disturb you into new ones.

If spirituality is about finding personal peace, confirming us in our own individuality, endlessly stimulating new desires and longings, then swapping a Christian upbringing, with its insistence on attending church, and sitting next to awkward people who aren’t like you, confessing sins and learning to pray, for this kind of jumbled, personal spirituality seems very attractive. But what if spirituality is about learning practices that focus your mind and heart not on the trivialities of TikTok videos or Candy Crush, but on the true source of all goodness, beauty and truth? What if it is about learning the counter-intuitive skill of loving your neighbour as much as you love yourself? If so, then the kind of communal practices lying right under our noses, learned in a place like Church with all its flaws - a tried and tested spiritual path laid out for us by those experienced in the spiritual life in generations gone before, might just offer the most benefit in the long term.

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