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.

Essay

Church and state

Creed

Royalty

9 May 2023

6 min read

After the coronation: what next for church and state?

As the coronation recedes, what's the future for an established church or a religiously impartial state, asks Jonathan Chaplin.

Jonathan Chaplin

Jonathan Chaplin is a lifelong Anglican, a Fellow of Wesley House, Cambridge and author of Beyond Establishment: Resetting Church-State Relations in England (SCM 2022)

A team of street sweepers clear up the road after the coronation procession, outside the Houses of Parliament.

Sweeping the street after the coronation.

Westminster City Council.

The magnificent and mysterious pageantry of the coronation, climaxing in the thrill of ‘Zadok the Priest’ bursting out over the royal anointing and the tremulous descent of St Edward’s crown onto the head of the king, are now receding into memory. The performative power of the event may linger for a while, but the time for critical reflection on what just happened has already begun.

The event will have evoked a wide variety of responses in different sections of the nation. Polls suggest that the majority remained largely indifferent, probably including many who had the TV on in the background while enjoying a long weekend spent on other things. A minority, not only vocal supporters of ‘Republic’, will have found the whole thing objectionable in principle. That will likely include many among the majority of young people who now report sharply declining support for the monarchy itself.

To have tampered overmuch with its religious character would have been to undermine their sense of cultural identity, whatever they made of it theologically (if anything).

Some, also a minority, will have looked to it to reconnect with longstanding British traditions that allow us to rise, even momentarily, above the grasping character of party politics and to offer to a fractured and anxious people a renewed prospect of national harmony.

For some among that minority, the religious character of the event will have been important. To many from non-Christian faiths, the coronation consolidates an Anglican Establishment which, they think, serves to protect the public standing of all faiths. The (welcome) participation of representatives of Britain’s minority faiths in the event will have confirmed that perception.

To others in the same minority, Christianity – represented here by the Church of England – is an essential thread in the weave of a national culture in need of shoring up. To have tampered overmuch with its religious character would have been to undermine their sense of cultural identity, whatever they made of it theologically (if anything).

To still others – we are now talking about a small minority-within-a-minority – the Christian character of the event is decisive to its intrinsic meaning and public significance. Mostly but not exclusively English Anglicans (the category includes many Catholics, for example), such voices claim that the coronation expresses a distinctively Christian theology of accountability and service that has been vital in the formation of Britain and should be retained if such goals are to be kept alive.

Political authority, they argue, is a trust from God, laying on its holders a solemn, ‘covenantal’, duty to govern according to God’s justice and to serve the common good. This theology was lucidly expressed in the Church of England’s commentary on the Coronation liturgy and appeared in many other Christian statements ahead of the event (for example, here, here and here). Bishop Graham Tomlin expressed doubt that there could be a better way to uphold a vision of accountable government.

This Christian theology of accountability, while truly at the core of the coronation liturgy, was almost entirely ignored by the media before and during the day.

The few in the secular media that did recognise its specifically Christian character mostly reacted indifferently or adversely to it (the Daily Telegraph’s Tim Stanley, a Catholic, was one exception). Some drew attention to the incongruity of one small and declining English Christian denomination continuing to preside over the investiture of the head of state of a pervasively secularised, religiously plural, and multinational, United Kingdom. The Guardian’s Martin Kettle even claimed that the event amounts to ‘a lie at the heart of the British state’. ‘The lie is that Britain is a practising Christian nation, and that it is defined and held together by the established Protestant religion, of which the monarch is the embodiment’.

Whether or not we accept that harsh verdict, it is surely necessary for the Church of England to confront the bleak sociological facts behind it. With fewer than three per cent of the population actively committed to the Church of England, what remains of its entitlement to enjoy the privileges and bear the responsibilities of being the ‘national Church’? Is there not a glaring presumption in wishing to remain the custodian of ‘the faith of the nation’ when the nation has overwhelmingly abandoned that faith – however much some still feel an affection for it as an embellishment of English culture?

But the Church of England should not be driven primarily by sociological considerations, telling though they are. It should be guided by theological imperatives. And that requires it to revisit the theology of accountability outlined above. The problem is not with the claim that rulers are accountable to God and people. That has long been the central assertion of Christian political theology; I affirm it. The problem is with granting that claim a constitutional status – which is exactly what investing a head of state in the context of a Christian service amounts to.

Defenders of the coronation typically refer back to the polity of biblical Israel to justify its sacral character. But they tend not to acknowledge that, in the Hebrew scriptures, biblical Israel was, uniquely, established by God as a covenanted confessional polity in which only the religion of Yahweh was permitted (and in which the priestly anointing of kings was prescribed).

But this arrangement has now been rendered obsolete by the ‘New Covenant’ inaugurated in Jesus Christ. The people of God have been transformed into a transnational voluntary fellowship of Christ-followers, no longer bound to any one territorial national political community, still less to one legitimated by one religion and protecting only that religion. In the era of the New Covenant, states no longer possess the right to express an official view of the truth of religious claims. By implication, that also means they may not decide that any religion should be endorsed or preferred. This suggests they should maintain a posture of impartiality towards religions, and indeed towards other ultimate truth-claims (such as secular humanism). That is one way of treating their citizens equally, which is another basic political principle originating in Christian theology.

A religiously impartial state is not a morally empty state, but a limited state – a humble state.

Some will reply by claiming that this is a ‘secular liberal’ stance that abandons the political community to agnosticism, leaving a moral and spiritual vacuum at its heart. Rather, this view of the religious incompetence of the state is itself an outcome of Christian claims. These claims originated with the theologically orthodox seventeenth-century Dissenters but were eventually taken up by thinkers such as Locke and others in the broader liberal movement.

A religiously impartial state is not a morally empty state, but a limited state – a humble state. It certainly needs the resources and challenges of faith communities, among many others, to fulfil its vocation to serve the common good. But it need not, and theologically may not, confer constitutional privilege on any religion or religious organisation.

If the UK were to become such a state, its head of state could still be installed in a rich, morally freighted civil ceremony, perhaps in Westminster Hall, in which the monarch, and the governments acting in their name, could be solemnly charged to uphold ‘law, and justice, with mercy’ (as the Coronation oath puts it). Other European constitutional monarchies without coronations perform as well as ours on that score, mostly without any elements of an established church at all.

The task of the Church of England and other churches, alongside other citizens, would be to project into political debate their particular visions of what these commitments mean, and employ all democratic means to hold governments to account for fulfilling them. They are already doing this; they could do so more effectively.

The Church of England could then do so unburdened by the jarringly mixed messages sent by its retention of constitutional privilege and by its very visible association with the royal pomp and opulence of a traditional coronation. It may have only a decade or so to prepare itself for such an eventuality.