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

Creed

Monsters

23 June 2025

5 min read

The short road from normality to evil

The Liverpool’s parade ramming reveals society’s watermark

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

Aerial view of a yellow-jacketed police forming a cordon within a crowd.

Aftermath of the Liverpool parade incident.

ITN.

Sometimes football is interrupted by real life, and you remember how trivial it ultimately is.

On 26 May, the city of Liverpool was gearing up to do what it does best: celebrating. Specifically, celebrating the parade for Liverpool’s lifting of the Premier League trophy the day before. I’ve written before about the day it was confirmed that Liverpool would win the league. The joy, the relief, the tears; the community of it all. Cody Gakpo with his top off.

Here the whole city would be involved, and many more besides who had travelled just to be there. Not even torrential rain can dampen scouse joie de vivre. The city alive in red, joined in adulation of its team as the Premier League Champions’ bus paraded across the city. What a day.

And then, an interruption. Reports begin to emerge that someone had driven a car into people on the parade route. You fear the worst. And then it’s confirmed, and you fear even more.

Suddenly the parade feels trivial; football feels trivial. You’re just waiting for news that everyone is okay. 109 people are injured and it’s a miracle that no-one is killed, although you imagine many more will live with the trauma of the day for years to come.

The immediate and (quite literally) uninformed commentary and misinformation spread by many on the far right was as predictable as it was racist. The same people seemed genuinely disappointed when the perpetrator turned out to be, not an immigrant or an asylum seeker driven by ‘non-British’ values, but a 53-year-old white British man from the city. As ever, the far right demonstrating once again that the first reaction is very rarely the right reaction.

We still don’t know the full details of what happened and why, but the man’s neighbours described him as “normal” and expressed their surprise at him being caught up in something like this.

I was surprised by how surprised everyone was at this.

The Christian Bible is full – full – of ‘normal’ people committing abnormally evil acts. David, Israel’s most beloved and highly praised king, rapes a woman called Bathsheba resulting in her getting pregnant. He then tries to convince the woman’s husband to sleep with her so people will think the baby is his. He doesn’t, so David has him killed. Israel’s most beloved and highly praised king.

David may be one of the starkest examples from the Christian Bible, but he’s certainly not the only instance of a normal, or even seemingly ‘good’ person performing unspeakable acts of violence and evil. Time would fail me if I tried to recount them all here.

People are fundamentally good. I will die on this hill. People are fundamentally good. But the road from normality to evil is shorter than we often care to admit.

The Slovenian philosopher and professional eccentric Slavoj Žižek tells a joke in his helpful little book Violence. Workers are suspected of stealing from a factory and so have their wheelbarrows checked every day at their shift’s end. Only when it’s too late do the factory owners realise they’re stealing wheelbarrows.

We have so many frameworks and watermarks for identifying what constitutes ‘violence’ in society. And yet Žižek’s point is that these frameworks and watermarks are themselves upheld by violence. There’s violence inherent in the system.

This is one of the central points in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, too. In one memorable scene, the Joker is talking to Harvey Dent while strapped to a hospital bed. He says:

“Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan’, even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that a gangbanger will get shot or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, no one panics, because it’s all ‘part of the plan.’ But when I say that one little old Mayor will die? Well then everyone loses their minds!”

But the Joker’s point is that none of this is normal. Not really.

This is the true crime of the world we live in today, that it has convinced us of the normality of evil while undermining the normality of loving one another.

But they are all symptoms of the same sickness. The repulsion we feel towards the ‘normalcy’ of the driver at the Liverpool parade is the repulsion we ought to feel towards any act of violence, be it the violent persecution of immigrants and asylum seekers, the enforced annexation of sovereign territories, or the attempted genocide of unwanted people groups (to conjure up some obviously hypothetical situations …).

To be surprised at the violence seen in Liverpool on 26 May at the hands of a ‘normal’ man is to miss the fact that society’s very norms and standards are, themselves, deeply violent. Fashion business built on modern slavery and child labour; banking corporations paying their bosses obscene bonus wrung from the pockets of people barely able to make ends meet; at least 354,000 people homeless in England alone by the end of 2024.

All these things are acts of violence. All these things are normal. They are the norms and standards against which we look for violence in our world today. But they themselves are deeply violent evils. They are the violence inherent in the system. They are the workers’ wheelbarrows. They are the Joker’s truckload of soldiers.

We live in a society that functions precisely because of deeply unjust and violent systems and structures. The violence is necessary for the functioning of the system.

But while Liverpool’s Champions League parade demonstrates this, it also shows us the correct response to the normality of evil: love.

In the aftermath of the incident, people took to social media to offer beds for the night, lifts home, food, drink. Anything and everything that anyone might need. And do you know what the most remarkable thing about this was? It was all so … normal.

Of course this is what you do in situations like this. You love, and you care, and then you love, and then you care. What else is there to do? It’s the most normal things in the world. People are fundamentally good. I will die on this hill.

And this is the true crime of the world we live in today, that it has convinced us of the normality of evil while undermining the normality of loving one another. In such a world, to love one another, to care deeply and meaningfully for those around, is nothing short of an act of resistance to the violent established order.

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