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

Advent

Christmas culture

Joy

Poetry

20 December 2024

6 min read

The Advent poets who can’t wait until the world is sane

Tennyson to Eliot, Rossetti to L’Engle, find despair doesn’t preclude joy.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

Beyond a misty and raindrop streaked window, a colourful triangle shape emerges.

Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash.

After his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, critics began to notice a change in T. S. Eliot’s poetry. Some thought this was for the worse, that Eliot’s newfound faith dimmed his literary powers, making his usually impenetrable style more conventional. But there is a less cynical view. I think, instead, that his conversion brought a sense of clarity and purpose to his poetry. I think what really happened is that, like many Christian converts before and after him, he found a sense of joy.

Nowhere better can we find that distinctly Christian sense of joy than in Eliot’s ‘The Journey of the Magi’, an Advent poem recounting Jesus’s birth from the point of view of the magi travelling to meet him. Like many of my favourite Advent poems, ‘Journey of the Magi’ is not straightforwardly cheerful, instead dwelling on the idea of alienation. The last stanza of the poem in particular is devoted to the magi’s confusion at returning to their old life after witnessing the miracle of Christ’s birth:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

It’s hard not to read these lines and imagine that Eliot himself might have experienced a feeling of alienation, as a new convert, when looking back on his old life. And yet, the magi’s sense of being ‘no longer at ease’ in their old home, of being among ‘an alien people’, is not something that only converts experience. All of us, whether we are converts or reverts, whether we were brought up in the Christian faith or are still contemplating it with uncertainty, have a moment when we realise that believing in Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection radically changes the way we look at the world.

And conversion isn’t something that just happens once. Every year, during Advent, we are asked to meet despair with joy. For those of us living in the northern hemisphere, we’re specifically asked to do this in the darkest and coldest time of the year, when nature looks so gloomy and unwelcoming. As Christina Rossetti puts it in one of our country’s most beloved Christmas hymns, Jesus comes not at a time of flourishing nature, but rather ‘in the bleak midwinter’, when the earth is ‘hard as iron’ and water frozen ‘like a stone’. Just as we persevere in our yearly hope that spring will come again, so too we are called to renew our conversion of heart each Advent, waiting in hope for Christ’s birth.

But hope doesn’t have to mean blind optimism. The older I’ve become, the more I’ve come to think that rejoicing during Advent doesn’t have to involve unadulterated cheerfulness. Grief has its place within joy, as counterintuitive as that may seem. In fact, Advent is an opportunity to cultivate the virtue of hope in spite of grief, and in spite of the evils that we see in the world. ‘Were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?’, ask the magi. The answer is both. Each year Christ’s birth reminds us that faith requires us to die to our old selves. For some, this means having uncomfortable conversations with family or friends who don’t understand their conversion to the faith. For others, it means facing illness or death of a loved one or other kinds of trauma without giving in to despair.

None of this is easy, of course. Clinging to hope in dark times can truly feel like ‘bitter agony’, as Eliot writes. And yet, as one of the magi says in the final line of Eliot’s poem, ‘I should be glad of another death’. When we die to our selves, we also experience a new birth in Christ. Even as we celebrate his birth, we are reminded of his death on the cross for us, of the fact that he so loved us that he was willing to bear unbearable pain for our sake.

That kind of love, although it doesn’t remove all the sources of suffering in our daily life, does call for rejoicing. Another wonderful Advent poem, Madeleine L’Engle’s ‘First Coming’, emphasises the necessity of joyfulness in the face of a corrupted world. L’Engle begins by reminding us, stanza after stanza, that Jesus didn’t wait for humanity to become perfect before coming to us: ‘He did not wait till the world was ready’, she begins, before adding, ‘He did not wait for the perfect time’, ‘He did not wait till hearts were pure’. Rather, Christ came ‘in joy’, to ‘a tarnished world of sin and doubt’, right ‘when the need was deep and great’.

L’Engle ends ‘First Coming’ by encouraging us to imitate Christ not just in his patience, but also in accepting joy now, not when we world finally stops being rife with sin and pain:

We cannot wait till the world is sane
to raise our songs with joyful voice,
for to share our grief, to touch our pain,
He came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!

We can’t wait until ‘the world is sane’ to be joyful. Joy is remembering that Christ really did come ‘to share our grief’, no matter how seemingly unbearable it may be. Lord Tennyson expresses a similar sentiment in his poem In Memoriam, an elegy written after the loss of his dear friend Arthur Hallam. He admits that the pain at his friend’s death is so intense that, as Christmas is drawing near, he almost wishes ‘no more to wake’, and for his ‘hold on life’ to ‘break’. Then, he hears the sounds of bells:

But they my troubled spirit rule,
For they controll'd me when a boy;
They bring me sorrow touch’d with joy,
The merry merry bells of Yule.

Happy memories of Christmas bells from childhood are mixed with pain for Tennyson, bringing him ‘sorrow touch’d with joy’. That’s what all the best Advent poems, from Tennyson to Eliot, From Rossetti to L’Engle, show us: that sorrow doesn’t preclude joy. In the weeks leading up to Christ’s birth, it’s normal to dwell on both birth and death; Advent can be a season for both somberness and merrymaking. Most of all, Advent is a time for prayer, that our hearts may be filled with the knowledge that Christ loves us even in our sorrow, and that the very knowledge of Christ’s love may in turn fill our hearts with joy.

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