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.

Explainer

Creed

Easter

Resurrection

26 March 2024

5 min read

Beyond immortality there’s restoration

The resurrection strikes at the heart of the cold reality of the human condition.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

A fine art painting depicts a risen Jesus hold a flag in one hand and raising his other hand above his head, against a dark background

Caravaggio's The Resurrection, detail.

Art Institute of Chicago, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

No one on the planet can pretend not to care about death or about a way to overcome it. The heart of the Christian message is that death has been overcome. This isn’t just about immortality. It’s about Resurrection: the triumph of life over death. If we want to see why that matters we need first to face the reality of death squarely and without flinching. The best person to help us do that is Martin Heidegger.

It is unfortunate that one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century is also among the hardest to understand. There are even philosophy professors who avoid Heidegger’s work and refuse to talk about it (his associations with Nazism and antisemitism don’t help either). Yet for all that, his fame and influence continue unabated. Why? Perhaps it is due to the bold way he points to realities at the heart of the human condition. Realities like death.

Nobody can avoid death. No matter how rich, healthy, successful, or famous you are, death comes to you as it came to everyone before you.

If you dare to open Heidegger’s most renowned work, Being and Time, you will find a description of human existence as being-towards-death. What on earth does that mean? It starts with Heidegger’s claim that time is part of our very essence. We are time-bound beings. And the way in which we are time-bound has a direction: the future. Anxiety about the future constitutes our existence. We never stop being anxious: about where our lives are going, whether we will achieve our goals and dreams, whether our loved ones will be safe and happy, even (for some) whether we will survive another day. Only the most downtrodden and dehumanised in society have lost this forward-looking drive. The rest of us live most of our lives in our own projected future. Earning money, getting engaged, buying a house, getting a secure job, raising children: almost everything we do is future-oriented.

Yet our ultimate future faces us all as a horrifying reality we can’t avoid, that we spend most of our lives trying to ignore. We are all going to die.

Nobody can avoid death. No matter how rich, healthy, successful, or famous you are, death comes to you as it came to everyone before you. The greatest emperors, the wealthiest entrepreneurs, and the most famous superstars in literature, music or art have no advantage over the lowliest peasant. Death is the great leveller. And what of all that achievement then? What does it mean?

Death puts an end not only to ‘worldly’ ambitions like the above, but also to more meaningful pursuits like love, family, and relationships. Whoever you love will die too. This was the terrible truth that the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy learnt. After decades of promoting family as the true meaning of life, he realised that he was simply passing the buck to the next generation. Unless each individual life had its own meaning, he had nothing to offer his children: like him they would end their lives six feet under the ground. He could neither stop them from dying nor give them a meaning to their lives that outlasted their death.

Heidegger said we should spend more time in graveyards. He believed that facing the inevitability of our death would make us live more authentic lives. No doubt he was right. But wouldn’t something else change how you lived your life? Namely, if you believed death was not the end?

There’s a point being made here that goes far beyond immortality: it is about the restoration of life by the author of life who defeated death.

The Christian tradition is founded on an event with a unique promise. Christians claim that Jesus defeated death by dying and rising again. This means that even though we still die we will one day rise with him and never die again. There is no greater hope on offer. Nothing could be more relevant, more urgent, more meaningful than this central Christian claim. It is equally relevant to someone gasping for breath on a sinking ship and to someone bursting with health in the prime of life.

If Heidegger is right, the Christian message strikes at the heart of the most horrifying and cold reality of the human condition. The event of the Resurrection has the power to transform every anxious future-oriented human being facing their inevitable death. The reality is cold and horrifying no more. Jesus’ death broke the curse of death and robbed it of its power. If we follow him in dying, we will also follow him in rising. Just as Jesus rose again (and because Jesus rose again), we will rise again one day and death will be no more.

But is the Christian claim really unique? Don’t other religions believe in life after death?

Not like this. Not bodily resurrection. We must not confuse the Christian claim with a general belief in immortality, though that is an essential part of it. Other religions hold that our souls continue after death. Some teach reincarnation, an endless cycle of birth and death. But there’s something more to the Christian claim. The Gospel accounts tell that Jesus died and was buried in a tomb. If all Jesus wanted to prove was that the spirit outlives the body, then his body could have remained in the tomb. No big deal: it’s just a dead body. His ghost could have still wandered around and appeared to people.

All four Gospel accounts begin their scandalous news with the inability to find Jesus’ dead body. Three days after he dies, the women go to his tomb, and the tomb is empty. When the risen Jesus appears to the disciples, he takes pains to prove he is not a ghost. He invites them to touch him. He eats breakfast with them. He walks among them as flesh-and-blood. There’s a point being made here that goes far beyond immortality: it is about the restoration of life by the author of life who defeated death.

That’s why the Christian teaching on immortality is unique: because immortality is just the beginning. It’s about far more than that. It’s about restoration to life in the world God made: the bodily world in which we live. God created it. He doesn’t want us to leave it after we die. He wants us still to live in it. Jesus’ death empowered us so that we can live in it forever.