I find it ironic that, here in America, we have only two socially acceptable ways to identify ourselves with regard to religion: you’re either a believer, or an atheist.
Yeah, this is crazy. For all kinds of reasons.
We all know that the first category—believer—really describes a vast spectrum of religious faith, from rigid practitioners of an orthodox religion (which, in the U.S., probably means some brand of Christianity or Judaism), to non-practicing believers (i.e. lapsed Catholics, lapsed Jews, etc.), to people who believe in God but don’t correspond to any formal religion (we had a whole class of such people in the middle of the 19th Century—the Transcendentalists.)
But what most people fail to realize is that the category of atheism also includes a spectrum, one that is almost as broad and diverse as the believer category.
On one end, you have what I call the Brutalists. Brutalists believe that life, whether human or otherwise, is a lucky accident, the result of random natural forces in the universe (which is itself a kind of accident). And while some Brutalists believe that there might be some underlying mathematical principal which explains the existence of the universe as it is—some Grand Unification Theory of the sort physicists have been seeking since Einstein, which would, at least, give some mathematical justification for our existence—but not all do. Rather, some believe that our existence on earth in our tiny corner of the Milky Way galaxy is just a fluke, a quantum fluctuation in an otherwise empty void. Life, if it has any meaning at all, is what we make of it, and it is our responsibility to do the best we can.
(Please note that I do not believe that this kind of atheism is synonymous with nihilism. Far from it. But it’s hard to deny that this brand of atheism is a bleak vision of reality. Himself a noted atheist, Vladimir Nabokov wrote: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”)
However, I suspect that the Brutalists represent a minority of atheism in the western world. A much more common breed of atheist is the Saganists, which I have named after that great hero of western thought, Carl Sagan. Sagan was an astronomer and a clear-eyed rationalist, one of the most outspoken of his generation. He wrote an entire book warning of the dangers of superstition and radical religious belief. And yet, Sagan’s most famous work was his land-breaking television show (and book) named, simply, Cosmos, which is a brilliant and almost lyrical exploration of the beauty of nature. As Sagan wrote:
The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we’ve learned most of what we know. Recently we’ve waded a little way out, maybe ankle deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
Obviously, such statements as these imply a kind of quasi-religious belief. The key difference, of course, is that Sagan and those like him do not believe in a personal God or deity. Rather, the Cosmos represents an impersonal force—a non-intentional structure, to borrow the terminology of David Bentley Hart—which has no consciousness, itself, but which nonetheless imposes a kind of direction and ontology to the universe—i.e. the evolution of base atoms into organic molecules, life-forms and, ultimately, intelligence.
This is still a form of atheism, I would assert, but it’s a far cry from the arid fatalism of the Brutalists. Sagan was, I think, an optimist, and perhaps even a bit of a mystic. And his sub-set of atheists, the Saganists, do believe in a higher reality—one which will ultimately be accessible and understandable to human beings (provided we don’t blow ourselves up first).
Interestingly, Albert Einstein was also a kind of Saganist. He often expressed his desire uncover the mysteries of the “old one,” which was his tongue-in-cheek way of describing the cosmos and all its hidden natural laws. For Einstein, the universe might be Godless, but it was not random. In fact, he spent the latter half of his life railing against the idea that randomness might be an inherent property of reality (as was theorized by the founders of Quantum Theory.)
Now, in the early 21st Century, we have what I would argue constitutes a new form of atheism—the belief in the so-called Simulation Theory. This belief (I won’t call it a theory) posits that all of what we call existence—including our own consciousness itself—is part of some enormous, Matrix-like simulation that is being run inside some cosmic computer. The belief has gotten a lot of buzz lately because several famous adherents such as Elon Musk have begun discussing it openly. The belief is held, apparently, by more than a few serious, credible thinkers, most of who hail from the worlds of science and academia.
I have no opinion of the intellectual underpinnings of Simulation Theory. However, it does make me smile, mainly because it seems to resolve nothing regarding the issues of God or creation or consciousness. Rather, it merely pushes these issues back a notch, to that of the Cosmic Coder (or whoever is writing the simulation.) For this reason, people raised in the Hindu faith might be amused by Simulation Theory. The Cosmic Coder will inevitably remind them of Vishnu, who dreams the dream of universe.
In fact, this kind of atheism—or, as one might say, non-theistic religion—is really the norm in the east. This is true even in those eastern religious that (like Hinduism) worship individual divinities—there is always some deeper, impersonal force that underlies those divinities. As Joseph Campbell put it:
And our way of thinking in the West largely is that God is the source of the energy. The way in most Oriental thinking, and I think in most of what we call primitive thinking, also, is that God is the manifestation of the energy, not its source, that God is the vehicle of the energy. And the level of energy that is involved or represented determines the character of the god. There are gods of violence, there are gods or compassion, there are gods that unite the two, there are gods that are the protectors of kings in their war campaigns. These are personifications of the energy that’s in play, and what the source of the energy is. What’s the source of the energy in these lights around us? I mean, this is a total mystery.
To return to my original point, it makes very little sense to reduce the great range of theistic and atheistic points-of-view to just two options. But one way in which it does make sense is this: the ultimate question that philosophy must answer is whether the universe is a created thing or not. One must fall on one side or another of this issue. There is no middle ground.
There is a funny anecdote which illustrated this dilemma. The great film director Stanley Kubrick, deep in the production of his classic horror movie The Shining, called the author of the book, Stephen King, in the middle of the night. “Do you believe in God?” Kubrick asked King. “Yeah,” King answered. “That’s what I thought,” Kubrick replied, and hung up. Kubrick’s disappointment matches that of all atheists, who, I suspect, regard any form of religious belief as a sad delusion, a barrier to genuine wisdom.
It is, of course, a supreme irony that Stanley Kubrick created one of the most power religious pictures of all time, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like Carl Sagan, Kubrick was obviously in touch with the music of the spheres, regardless of who the composer of that music is.
But it does make a difference, I think, whether you believe in a composer or not, and whether that composer is oblivious to the beauty of the music. As for myself, I would find it very difficult not to believe in God—and not only in God, but in a fully personal God, with all the baggage implied therein. To me, a God who can’t laugh or get angry is not really God at all.
In her excellent memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert sums up this idea beautifully:
…let me explain why I use the word God, when I could just as easily use the words Jehovah, Allah, Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu, or Zeus. Alternatively, I could call God “That,” which is how the ancient Sanskrit scriptures say it, and which I think comes close to the all-inclusive and unspeakable entity I have sometimes experienced. But that “That” feels impersonal to me—a thing, not a being—and I myself cannot pray to a That. I need a proper name, in order to fully sense a personal attendance. For this same reason, when I pray, I do not address my prayers to The Universe, The Great Void, The Force, The Supreme Self, The Whole, The Creator, The Light, The Higher Power, or even the most poetic manifestation of God’s name, taken, I believe, from the Gnostic gospels: “The Shadow of the Turning.”
I think that says it all.
(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)
Ash Clifton, Writer 