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

Care

Creed

Easter

Trauma

14 April 2025

1 min read

Understanding the power of blood

From hospitals to hymn books, it's significant for a reason.

Helen Cowan

Helen is a registered nurse and freelance writer, writing for audiences ranging from the general public to practitioners and scientists.

Give blood.

Aman Chaturvedi on Unsplash.

With one billion molecules of oxygen packed into each of your 30 trillion red blood cells, blood is sometimes known as the red river of life. Countless lives have been saved through blood transfusion, but why, throughout history, across continents and cultures, has there been a special interest in the blood of one man crucified 2,000 years ago, believing it alone to have “wonder-working power”?

Whether you are a newborn baby with half a pint of blood, or an adult with nearer nine pints, “what is certain is that you are suffused with the stuff”, writes author Bill Bryson in his book, The Body.

Once thought to ebb and flow in waves like the sea, from the liver to other organs, having been heated in the heart, blood in fact flows in a network of vessels measuring some 60,000 miles, with the heart acting as pump, not heater. Cleverly conserved through a complex system of blood-clotting in the case of injury, blood is a precious resource that needs replacing if lost in large amounts. Victims of road traffic accidents can require up to fifty units of blood; significant amounts are needed for organ transplantation, severe burns or heart surgery.

The first human blood transfusion in Britain, using blood from a lamb, was performed by Dr Richard Lower in 1667, given not to replace blood loss but to change character: could the old be made young, the shy be made sociable through blood transfusion? Apparently not.

Safe transfusion awaited the discovery of blood types by Dr Karl Landsteiner in the early 20th century. Today, NHS Blood and Transplant deliver 1.4 million units of red cells to 260 hospitals each year for transfusion; about 85 million units are transfused worldwide, given to replace blood loss after accident, surgery, ulcer, ectopic pregnancy or for anaemia in cancer. Also used to boost blood cell numbers in malaria, sepsis, HIV, leukaemia and sickle cell anaemia, blood transfusion is now amazingly safe. Fatal reactions are extremely rare, “occurring only in one out of nearly two million transfusions”, writes physician Dr Seth Lotterman. “For comparison, the lifetime odds of dying from a lightning strike are about 1 in 161,000,” he adds. The risk of HIV infection has dropped dramatically, to less than one in seven million.

History tells though of the danger of transmitting disease from the blood donor during transfusion. The World Health Organization recognises risk of infection with HIV, hepatitis, syphilis, malaria, and Chagas disease. The Contaminated Blood Scandal saw an estimated 30,000 people in the UK given blood transfusions and blood products infected with hepatitis C, hepatitis B and HIV. More than 3,000 people died as a result, and thousands more live with on-going health complications. For my final Christmas article for Readers Digest, I wrote on Stephen Christmas, a tireless campaigner for blood safety who lived with haemophilia and died in 1993, having contracted HIV through contaminated blood.

I was a blood donor. However, I am now unable to donate blood or organs for the rest of my life since there is a possibility that my blood is ‘stained’, possibly with prion disease, after adopting embryos. The Blood Transfusion Service will not accept donations from women who have had various fertility treatments.

And there’s another uncomfortable truth about blood donation – the NHS does not have enough blood, organs, tissues, platelets, plasma or stem cells to treat everyone who needs it. As a nurse, I remember caring for a man dying of liver cancer. Suffering from sudden, massive melaena (blood loss in black, tarry stools as a result of internal bleeding), he received emergency blood transfusion, with bag after bag of blood being infused, until the consultant called for the treatment to stop, because the bleed was too big – and blood supplies too scarce.

Struggling to accept the stark reality of stained blood and dangerous shortages, I kept coming back to an old Sunday School song about blood, where absolute abundance and ultimate cleansing are instead promised.

There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel’s veins;
And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains.

Gruesome and graphic in its imagery, but full of deeper meaning. And as a nurse, I’m accustomed to blood, sometimes lots of it. I’ve seen that man bleed out on the ward that night; I’ve attended a road accident, where a boy lost his leg – but not his life, because towels stemmed the massive flow of blood. I’ve raced a patient to the operating theatre after her aortic aneurysm burst within; I’ve stemmed arterial bleeding from the groin by applying prolonged pressure to the site punctured by a catheter during cardiac stenting. According to the World Health Organization, severe bleeding after childbirth is the leading cause of maternal mortality world-wide. Each year, about 14 million women experience postpartum haemorrhage resulting in about 70,000 maternal deaths globally.

In the Bible, and in hymns of praise like this one, there is also no getting away from blood. “Like it or not, the Bible is a bloody book,” writes Kyle Winkler. It runs through the book like a crimson thread. There’s a story of a woman bleeding for twelve years, until she touched the hem of Jesus’ garment and was healed.

Elsewhere the Bible keeps returning to the idea of blood, shed in sacrifice, used to cleanse, save, and heal in a spiritual sense. In the Old Testament, animal blood was painted on doorposts at Passover as a sign of protection from judgment, and sprinkled ritually on the altar as a sacrifice for human sin, restoring relationship with God.

On Good Friday, Jesus himself shed (and sweat) his blood, sacrificing his life on the cross to “wash our souls” once and for all. Millions of Christians across the world take a sip of communion wine each Sunday in commemoration of this act. It’s a beautiful gift, coming with a promise that the shed blood will “preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life”, through the forgiveness of sins. It’s no wonder then that churches love to sing about this blood. “Would you be free from the burden of sin? There's pow'r in the blood, pow'r in the blood,” goes one hymn, while another simply says, “Your blood has washed away my sin, Jesus, thank you”.

“God’s intention for blood isn’t gory—it’s beautiful! And I’m certainly not offended or scared by it,” writes Kyle. “Rather than question how little blood I can get by with, I’d rather stand under the cross to be covered in all that I can get!” Thank God for the fountain of forgiveness that flows from Good Friday.

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