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

Belief

Creed

Education

6 November 2025

4 min read

Theology isn’t just for believers – and that’s the problem

As spiritual curiosity among the young rises, let’s change how they explore it

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Quizzical-looking students look across a tutorial to others.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

The Cambridge don told us calmly but firmly in answer to a question, probably mine, that: “You don’t need to have a commitment to study theology here, but it helps.” It was 1972 and I looked around me. I was surrounded by young blokes, dare I say it, of a certain type – tall, pale-though-uninteresting, spotty and a bit chinless. Very much like me in fact in those respects but unlike me, I thought, in one key respect: Blimey, they’re all going to be vicars!

I ran a mile – well, about 100 – to study something more fun at a redbrick, something that was also being studied by young women, which was important for me at that moment.

Little did I know that I’d take a theology degree some 30 years later, when I trained for priesthood. And, as it happens, very much alongside women, though this column really isn’t about that.

What it is about is the lingering academic assumption that theology is for the committed, the faithful; that it’s vocational and for people who are called to make a career of it. I wanted to study it as an adolescent only because I was academically interested (yes, how we laugh now).

I’m with C.S. Lewis when he says faith is either a fraudulent trick or an absolute truth but can’t be anything in between (“He has not left that open to us”). Either way, I thought, that’s a great story, a curiosity for stories that led me to journalism, since the latter choice – absolute truth – seemed to be the matriculation requirement for theology at university. And the idea that theology is for committed Christians still prevails.

It’s been on the news agenda again lately that religious studies at A-level and theology in further education have been collapsing as course choices, even as Gen Z (18-28) has shown an increasing propensity for a return to faith and church-going – the “quiet revival”.

That apparent paradox may be explained in a number of ways. The current college generation may not equate religious interest with academic study (as I didn’t, in a way). It may be that young men, in particular, are drawn to church by a resurgent conservative Christian nationalism. Or it may simply be that a spiritual consciousness is seen as a self-improvement technique that gets dropped by their thirties.

But there’s another possibility. Maybe we’re just not teaching theology very well. Maybe, perish the thought, we’re making it boring. Perhaps it’s like wanting to make music as a child and being sat down in front of a blackboard to be taught theory, bars and crotchets and whatnot.

Maybe the young are interested in the subject but not in the Church Fathers, scriptural hermeneutics and ancient Greek. They may be intensely interested in whence our western ethics, morality and culture derive, but then they have history and philosophy for that. Theology is dying on its feet even as the young are wishing to make it live again.

I have a proposed solution and it’s this: Contextual Theology. This is a school that examines the meaning of religious faith in its contemporary cultural and social contexts. It values human experience – otherwise revelation – as a valid theological source and recognises that scripture emerges from its own cultural circumstances and must be viewed with reference to our own.

What Contextual Theology emphatically isn’t is an attempt to make theology “fit” post-modern mores and fads. The fount of divinity is unchangeable – impassable, as theologians say – but we’re invited to interpret it through the prism of the world in which we live. It’s not so much about how theology works in the world as how theology makes the world work.

Contextual Theology is as demanding as it is illuminating. It’s the degree I took, as it happens, when I trained for priesthood in the early Noughties and it never did me any harm (Discuss).

This isn’t a replacement theory for classical theology. We need to understand it in its ancient context to re-interpret it in our technocratic political climate. The curiosity of our young generation seems to suggest that’s an appealing prospect.

Yet search for a Contextual Theology degree course and you search in vain. They’re only available on courses for ministerial training (like mine), validated by a university rather than taught by it. That means you can only really study Contextual Theology if you’re training for ministry. Which takes me back to that summer of 1972.

As Graham Tomlin, of this parish, asserts, we need theologians as well as ministers if the quiet revival among the young is to be properly supported. But we need theologians of all sorts, classical and contextual.

I like to think of the theologian who, struck by lightning, arrives at the Pearly Gates. “But I taught that God sends famine and floods on all those who sin,” complains the theologian. “Ah,” replies St Peter, “but I think you took him out of context.”

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