Can an Atheist Have an Inner Life - Part 1
Q. Isn’t being an atheist a rather shallow way to live? You don’t believe in God and you have no spirituality. So what kind of an inner life can you have?
A. This is a complex question. Actually you have asked what I consider to be two interrelated questions. In order to answer this I would need some specifics. What do you mean by atheist and what do you mean by an inner life?
As we have pointed out before (and I am certainly not the first to do so) an atheist is simply someone who lives “without gods.” This does not necessarily mean without religion. There are plenty of non theistic religions many of which those of us in the west have never heard of. To be “without gods” is not necessarily to be without superstitions or supernatural enthusiasms.
Let me start by explaining what I mean by the term atheist. I need to stress that this is my explanation. Given that many non-believers are free thinkers, humanists or one of the many “atheistic” philosophies that exist you will find the answer to what is an atheist to vary from individual to individual and often greatly. This is why I asked for specifics.
For me an atheist is simply someone who makes a conscious choice to live without god(s) or a belief in supernatural influences. We rely on our senses and perception of the world to understand reality. We might be called materialists as we see no mystical underpinning or world to come. We use logic and empirical evidence gleaned from the scientific method before we reach any conclusions and we leave ourselves open to change our minds about things as new evidence presents itself. We are concerned with ethics. How do I live among my fellows and live a good productive life? An atheist creates their own meaning of life. It is not handed down to us by god(s) or his or her spokespeople. Justice and compassion are human endeavors and not divine ones.
My assumption is that when you say “you don’t believe in god,” what you are really declaring to me is that I don’t believe in the Christian god. If I believed in Odin or Zeus you might still consider me an atheist simply because I didn’t believe in a deity that you thought to be real. If you were an Islamic fanatic you might declare me infidel.
I am reminded of the demise of the bishop Polycarp, who shook his gnarled fist in defiance declaring that those who had gathered to witness the spectacle of his being burned at the stake[1] as the “real atheists” for not submitting to the one true god. This was an in-your-face sort of response because Christians were often persecuted for being atheists because they refused to acknowledge the god(s) of those in power. Polycarp had been arrested and tried because he refused to light incense to the Roman Emperor as god incarnate.
In the simple mindedness of the average person an atheist is often someone who believes in a different god than me. The arrogant assumption being that somehow I am in possession of the only true spiritual knowledge and that only I know the real god. Every other god is an idol at the very least.
As a young philosophy major in his early twenties I was “schooled” out of that particular form of arrogant shortcoming in a rather amusing way. At the time I was still a practicing Catholic and had begun making inquiries into the priesthood. I had specifically developed and interest in the Order of Friars Minor (aka Franciscans).
I was talking with an acquaintance over coffee one afternoon and had the very poor manners of laughing at him over his believe in UFOs and alien abduction. He was the credulous sort that believed just about anything and did so with only a marginal shred of evidence - if Erik Von Daniken could ever be accused of providing evidence.
He asked me why I was laughing at him and I launched into what I mistook as an elegant rebuttal of his beliefs and why they were simply preposterous.
“Really?” He asked me. “What makes you think your beliefs are any less preposterous than mine?
My jaw hit the ground. I was not prepared to defend what I believed. I knew I couldn’t because most of my beliefs were from a process of indoctrination called CCD or Catholic Christian Doctrine (Catechism) classes that I had taken from Kindergarten through 12th grade. When the subject came up in my classes I often avoided participating in the discussion.
“Should we review what you believe to be the truth?” he asked me
I was disturbed by the fact that the virgin birth, the resurrection and the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ seemed truly preposterous when looked at underneath the light of reason, or in this case the light shined on it by someone who believed differently than I did. For the first time I began to grasp a central truth about religion, and truth, in general - it is relative to the person believing in it.
So that being stated, what do I mean when I say I am an atheist? To reiterate from above slightly differently an atheist is more than not believing in god it is a conscious choice to live fully without god(s) and accept the consequences of that choice. God does not test me or punish me. God does not reward me. There is no devil or supernatural source of evil. We have no proof of an afterlife and therefore expectation is a waste of time. Man is the measure of all things.
I know that many religionists and “spiritual” people find Protogoras’ statement to be the epitome of arrogance. In my understanding of atheism we acknowledge that we are creatures of nature. We arise from nature and return to it upon death. Our bodies decay and break down so that its individual components at a molecular level can be recycled according with the laws of the physical universe. However, it doesn’t follow that there is a mystical survival of consciousness. The forces of nature or the laws of the universe (as we understand them at any given point) are powerful but not conscious or supernatural.
Man is the measure of all things or the French existentialist Sartre’s statement that we are condemned to be free is the direction that my atheism takes me. However, I am not necessarily an existentialist, at least not from a metaphysical standpoint. But, it is useful for you to know that the works of Sartre and Camus influenced me a great deal when I was a young man.
As an atheist I see that there is no metaphysical, spiritual or mystical purpose of life. The most we can say is that life is stubborn and tenacious and will find a way to survive. The purpose of life, if we must assign one to it, is to survive in perpetuity - if it can. That leads me scientifically to evolution and the process of so called natural selection. Those species that can adapt, survive. Those that cannot adapt become extinct and given that most of the species on this planet over its long geological life have become extinct we can see that survival is a thing of beauty.
Since human beings have the ability of reason we need to add another dimension to this purpose of life that we so often crave. There is no purpose; there is no meaning to life save the one you create for yourself. This weird angst that so many people seem to suffer from that leads them from one thing to another desperately looking for that one single purpose confounds me. It seems that we could quite possibly have many purposes in this single lifetime and that each of these purposes can be valid.
Why can’t we be parents, artists, business people, charitable workers, gardeners or software designers and still find purpose in other things as well? The reality is that we do, but we seldom seem to appreciate it. “Spiritual” people seem to torture themselves unnecessarily over this single purpose driven meaning to life.
The fact that I will die someday gives my life all the meaning it needs. It informs the way I live it and the things that I do. Not perfectly, of course, because like all human beings I have regrets. I have made mistakes that I wish I could undo. I have spoken words that I wish I could take back. But self awareness or what some Buddhist teachers refer to as mindfulness is a part of my purpose in life. It is one of the many things that make getting up each morning and facing the world meaningful. My life is spent cultivating a sense of awareness about myself and the world I contact through living - human and non-human.
Ethics - this is our supreme vocation as thinking, reasoning beings. Eventually I dropped all the mystical and metaphysical mumbo jumbo and specialized in ethics. By way of my academic training I am an ethicist. Anything that takes us from this world into an imaginary one is not useful.
This brings us to the second part of your question which we will answer next.
How Can an Atheist have an Inner life?
[1] The murder of Polycarp seems amusingly Rasputinesque to me. It is reported that the burning failed and he had to be stabbed several times in order to die. This certainly added to the mystique of this 1st century martyr.