An Atheist Finds “God” Yet Not God

Alan Soffin

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by. —Robert Frost, “The Road Less Traveled”

I. Away from “God”

The road that led me into philosophical theology had an utterly conventional first leg. Born in Queens, New York—the only son of a middle class Jewish family—I received the usual unearned maternal adoration, tempered, however, by my father’s firm belief in sarcastic child development. It was another century. The Great Depression was still waiting for the Second World War to relieve it.

I recall tossing nickels wrapped in paper to itinerant violinists and sellers of old clothes in the alley two floors below. My world was sidewalks, empty lots, and boisterous play. Girls were alien. It was a world of simple rules, some counseling honesty, others prejudice. It was a world in which prayer was the means by which reality might be overruled.

Religion meant respectability and was (sotto voce) the only way to understand what we were doing on earth. “God” was the coin of exclamation on the street and of hope in every home. Yet God was nowhere to be seen on the boulevard.

Plainly not near the Blessed Sacrament school. There students formed the gauntlet a Jewish child would run on the way to P.S. 148—having failed to disown his ancestors for “killing Christ.” Still, I accepted God the way I accepted Franklin Delano Roosevelt—as a distant father one could call upon in desperate situations. (Though I confess to testing God, to making youthful bargains with God, to being angry when he didn’t hold up his end.)

By my teen years, the idea of “God” had been buried under facts. People who were rotten prospered. Good people suffered. Pets were run over by cars. People implored God to furnish help, from ending polio to killing Hitler. But God wasn’t listening or else didn’t care. God’s ancient visitations clashed with his contemporary absence. The child who remarked on such things “had a lot to learn.” The synagogue was filled with men who had, apparently, learned what was needed.

Facts continued to accumulate. The Bible had been as often thumped to justify as to condemn the use of slaves. Religion’s fabric of compassion had been regularly stained by presumption, persecution, and violence. No party to a war ever lacked God’s support. The Sermon on the Mount seemed confined to the Mount.

II. Away from all religion

At 17, freighted equally with baggage, hope, and ignorance, I left for Illinois. Behind me lay a realm of tradition and identity; before me the startling blackness of Midwestern soil, the openness of college—the promise and mystery of things I did not know. The first year was (of course) self-concerned—a mélange of grades, credits, tests, friends, and girls—save for a running dispute over God with a fellow dishwasher and his Newman Club priest.

But, providentially, a great university prevailed. The astonishing reach of human thought and the power of human art came in upon me like a tide. A course was set that, decades later, would return me to theology—though of that far off rendezvous I then had no idea.

My several interests came to rest in education and philosophy. I had not lost the seed of “ultimate concern.” By reflecting on human reflection, philosophy offered a way to understand what human beings are. And, if its insights could inform education, the ends and means of social life might be profoundly bettered.

A path seemed open to the Good (a prospect made more real by hearing, for the first time, Bach’s B Minor Mass and—over a tinny car radio—Beethoven’s Fifth). Timeless things might be realized. What I had yet to learn was that the culture of philosophy, like that of Queens, could be blinkered by tradition despite its thirst for truth.

III. The God that failed: “Seeing is believing”

If the God of my neighborhood was tradition, the God of my graduate school was experience. “Experience” had (in philosophy’s dominant, “empirical” tradition), a special definition. It meant “sense experience” or “sense-observation”—the bedrock of scientific testing. Science had changed the world. This was not lost on philosophers. For empiricists, the world as science sees it was the real world. Science was the standpoint from which human life must be described and understood. Yet, in time I had my doubts.

They first arose upon reading David Hume, the seminal empiricist. Hume could find no beauty in the circle. The eye perceives a line, but nothing else. Not being sense-perceptible, beauty was imagined. It was not real—it was not in the world.

But had I not seen beauty in paintings? Did it make sense that on Monday the Louvre’s collection is beautiful but on Tuesday, maybe not—depending on the mood of its visitors? And what of a painting’s warmth or a poem’s depth? Neither quality was sense-observable. Still, the minds I admired favored Hume. I thought I must be wrong.

Art was not alone beneath empiricism’s ax. The moral quality of acts was not observable. The senses could not detect “cruelty” or “goodness”; hence, they were only “in our heads.” But, if moral terms referred to nothing in the world, moral truths could not be learned from experience! Yet, all around me, people cited features of actions as good or bad in themselves, (as though experience did provide moral evidence).

I found myself, uncomfortably, closer to religion than philosophy. Religion held that values and norms were real. Their existence was not up to us. However, that was because they were up to God—they were expressions of His will. I demurred. Surely torture would be immoral even if God did not exist. But, without God, what basis was there for norms or values?

A stint in the army offered a break. When I returned, philosophy had turned to “ordinary language analysis.” I hoped this might challenge empiricism. Instead, the analysts, by and large, took ordinary language to the woodshed. What people thought they meant by terms like good was wrong. What they really meant was revealed when their statements were tested against (yes) the empiricist view of “experience.”

Analysts said language misleads us into thinking, say, beauty is real. The sentence, “this is beautiful” has the same form as the sentence, “this is aluminum.” We then suppose that both sentences state things about the world. But beauty (and all other evaluative terms) has no reference in the world. So, why do we use words like beautiful or good?

The explanation was that we use words like “beautiful” or “good” not to describe something but to do something. We use them to perform an action. So, when we say, “slavery is evil” we are not describing slavery; we are just expressing a negative attitude to affect others’ behavior.

The final blow came when (empirically-based) “postmodern” philosophies declared that knowledge was illusory. I suppose I should not have been surprised. Science can’t distinguish knowing from believing. But it was absurd. We all knew we’d had a Civil War, knew atoms exist, knew the sun lights the Earth—knew more than we can ever say—and (for that matter) knew it is wrong to jail the innocent. If I reach for my key, you have (physical) evidence that I believe the door is locked. But no behavior of mine can tell you that I know  the door is locked. Knowing transcends the physical.

Later I would find, in knowing, my first glimpse of a genuine mystery. The empirical “God” was dead. Now, two explanations of reality had failed. One had said that only what the senses could test was real—the other that, in reality, the world was the manifestation of a will. But why ever mount such explanations? Was the world (as we find it in experience) too astounding to accept? In that question lay the clue to rethinking religion.

IV. Dorothy: “There’s no place like home.”

Religion and empirical philosophy had sought to establish what we were by explanation. What confounded them was the presence of standards, values, and moral and aesthetic qualities that together prompt the uniquely human  question, “What ought I do?”

Animals calculate how to get what they want. We inquire into things for guidance . We contemplate home decorations. We discuss our treatment of each other. We draw up statements of rights and obligations. We develop mathematical proofs, scientific tests, critical reviews, ethical systems, critical thinking, ideals of love and commitment.

But where do the standards and values that guide us come from? Either they are independent aspects of the universe, no less possessed of their own character than mass or energy, or they only appear as such to us. “They simply can’t be aspects of an (otherwise) physical universe,” said the traditional theorists. But what did they think true, instead?

Theism believed that an unembodied agent, unconstrained by any pre-existing rules or laws, created what exists by willing it out of nothing—empiricism believed that the standards and qualities we live by and for are psychological illusions projected onto the world by processes within the brain. To me these notions were more incredible than the problem they purported to solve.

It struck me, then, that what these theorists could not believe about life when they observed it was what in fact they never doubted when they lived it.

The denizens of my old neighborhood may have explained moral rules as, simply, messages from a God who was “beyond human understanding.” But so little did they think moral standards were opaque orders from beyond (or merely attitudes), they had no qualms about explaining what God did. If a tragedy occurred, God was helping us to grow. If an avalanche killed innocents, then God allowed it for a greater good. In short, an unfathomable God whose “word” was law, was subject to moral considerations.

But contradictoriness was not confined to Queens. Empirical philosophers, too, lived in neighborhoods. In academe, it was heinous to take credit for another’s ideas, cowardly to obscure the flaws in one’s argument, reprehensible to fail a student out of pique, and flat out wrong to falsify data, or advocate a theory for money. Yet—in empirical theory—none of these actions were intrinsically bad; they were just disapproved.

“Back in Kansas,” no one honestly believed standards were “psychological,” “useful”—or simply “up to God.” Whether they were working in a lab or advising those they loved, right and wrong, true and false were encountered. The standards and the qualities that governed us were real. Not sense-observation, not messages from another world, but responsible living—consequentiality—was the locus of what makes us human. I had been wrong. God was very much on the boulevard. I just hadn’t recognized “his face.”

V. Finding “God” not God

God and ordinary life came together. The one idea common to all “religion” is that the meaning of life comes from something outside us. It is precisely this that empirical philosophies deny. For them, the meaning of our lives comes entirely from within us, not to us (from our physiology, our genetics, our glands—the lot!)

These opposed “logics” of meaning were, I thought, the real source of the “warfare between science and religion” and between “religious” and “modern” societies. And the fight would continue, if I was right, because neither tradition could believe that we were in the presence of the ultimate mystery, and that, in an important sense, we were already in heaven and had met our maker.

I do not speak “poetically.” Poetic statements can be literally false. Religious statements must be literally true (God must exist, so to speak). If the idea of “God” is the idea of a creator and the guarantor of whatever meaning our existence may have, then the moral and aesthetic qualities that guide us, and the standards of rationality, morality, and decency that command us, do for us what “God” is supposed to do. They create and guarantee the meaning of our thoughts and actions.

As “God” is, for theists, the lawgiver, they are the “givers” of law. In the end, I concluded that the idea of “God” is the idea of the necessity that characterizes whatever is real (morally, aesthetically, logically, physically). “God” is this great, multi-faceted “presence.”

“How,” you may ask, “can you speak of objective (independently authoritative) standards and values in the same breath as “God?’”

“Because,” I answer, “the existence in a silent universe of invisible bearers of authority is a mystery—a mystery no less deep than the mystery of physical existence itself.”

I take a cue from Native American religion. Judeo-Christian-Muslims tend to think themselves apart from the (physical) world around us; we suppose ourselves a special creation. But the fact is that we are molecular, and in every way but our thinking, we are “governed” by the same laws as the stars from which we come. Is it then a “speculation” to say, “We are the universe thinking”?

I do not explain. I endeavor only to make us “look homeward” and to echo the philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce, when he said “do not doubt in your philosophy what you do not doubt in your heart.”

Oh yes, “God” gives us purpose. What is it we can do that “nature’s” creatures and objects cannot do—save glimpse and realize that which is good or right? And if the good and right is in the universe, it is we who—while we exist—can realize what “calls” out to be realized. This is what it is to love the world, for to love is to give oneself to the “other,” to help what is other than oneself realize what it can be. That is, perhaps, theism’s idea of self-fulfillment in the service of God. And, at bottom, it is right.

—Alan Soffin, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, numbers among his interests philosophy, religion, filmmaking, writing, and music. Although an atheist, Soffin seeks nevertheless to value religion and is awaiting publication of Rethinking Religion (Cascadia, 2010).