So there’s this guy Steve Cornell who has written an “article” telling people what it’s like to be an atheist.  Thing is, Steve is a Christian.  So what Steve is ACTUALLY talking about is what he IMAGINES it to be like to be an atheist.  He speaks from an assumption (his own personal assumption, not shared by all Christians) that one is completely dependant upon God, and has no independent ability to know right from wrong, to find meaning and joy in existence, and has no capacity for understanding outside of scripture.  He goes on to project his deficiencies onto those who do not share his theology and his lack of natural human ability to find meaning and fulfillment outside of his theology.

Let’s take a look at his first assertion shall we?

1)      An atheist assigns himself to life without ultimate purpose. Yes, atheists enjoy many smaller meanings of life-- like friendship and love, pleasure and sorrow, Mozart and Plato. But to be consistent with his atheism, he cannot allow for ultimate meaning. Yet, if the atheist is honest, he will admit to feeling that there is something more to existence -something bigger. Someone said, "The blazing evidence for immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution." According to Scripture, God has, "set eternity in the hearts of men" (Ecclesiastes 3:11). To maintain his position, the atheist must suppress the feeling that there is more to life than temporal pleasures. But the atheist encounters many other difficulties.

Many people who have rejected Christian theology (not just Atheists) believe that this existence has great meaning.  In fact, it has its own meaning that is independent of any other existence.  Perhaps there are other existences beyond this one, and perhaps not, but the nature of those is pure speculation, and need not be essential to the meaning of this existence.

I would argue that many Christians view this existence as meaningless.  They talk only of death and heaven.  Love only has meaning for them in terms of the great beyond (“I love her, but I could never marry someone that won’t go to heaven with me when I die.”).  Obedience and morality only have meaning in so far as they will get them to heaven.

I recently heard an MPR program where they were discussing how the human brain constructs order and meaning from the “random” stimuli of the environment.  They were talking about the tension between avante-guard art and the mind.  In particular, they discussed how Stravinski’s “Rite of Spring” caused riots the first time it was performed in public, reportedly due to the effect of its cacophony of rule-breaking jarring rhythm and tonal dissonance. Yet in a very short span of time (27 years?), it was featured in Disney’s “Fantasia”, and is now regarded as a triumphant masterpiece.  Because our minds find order in what at first appears to be chaos.

We come to hear music in “The Rite of Spring”, we hear voices in the wind, we see The Virgin Mary in a cloud formation or the wood grain of a cross-section of a tree…and we explore the world and make sense out of it.  We at first might think that God put the picture of Mary in the tree to impress us, but then we learn more about how the tree rings develop, and we realize that it is the effects of the “random” forces of weather and climate, combined with the workings of our mind that makes the Holy Virgin appear to us in the tree, and we make rules that keep us from being fooled the same way again.

If walking can be described as a series of controlled falls, then progress of the mind might be poetically referred to as a series of controlled descents into chaos.  There is order, there is new information, there is disorder, and then a new order is established.  It’s how our minds work.  Many humans, and most atheists in particular, find this cycle rewarding, fulfilling, and meaningful.  Much the same way that most humans enjoy the process and benefits of walking forward, and would be horrified at the thought of having to stand in one place for lack of the ability to move.

Even if you believe our minds were made to work the way they do, it stands to reason that we were NOT meant to have all the answers, and the “meaning” of existence was not meant to be a static constant dictated from beyond.

In the human condition, meaning is a process.  More than simple, fleeting pleasures and accomplishments, but also more than pat and easy answers that deride and devalue the existence we have in favor of some other future existence.

For some people it is enough to say that the purpose of being a human being is to be a human being.  They can be satisfied and find adequate reward and meaning in the existence they have rather than reaching for and demanding more.  In fact, they have enough trust in the forces that brought them into being to believe that whatever happens will happen as it should, according to the workings of the universe.

In particular, there is no reason to believe that the nature of future existence is at all dependant upon, or proved by, the need some people have to believe it.  Our mind craves order and meaning, and God and creation stories have been a significant part of that process, but just because the mind wants something to be, that is no proof to establish it as a fact. 

That is a logical fallacy that even a first-year theology student would dismiss.   Further, that quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and I find it hysterical that a “Christian” is quoting one of the most influential minds in Unitarian Universalism…to support doctrinal Christianity.  That’s probably why he chose to not attribute the quote.  Or maybe he heard it somewhere and couldn’t be bothered to find out who said it.  Either way, the irony is delicious.

Yes, truly, intellectual rigor and basic scholarship are the pit-falls of an arrogant atheism, and Steve does a very good job of avoiding both of those things.