Religion

rug

(82,333 posts) Mon Apr 20, 2015, 03:48 PM Apr 2015

Where Does an Atheist Find Purpose?

April 18, 2015
by Neil Carter

I hear this question a lot, and it can come from two totally different places. Some who ask this are not genuinely asking a question, they’re making an accusation. I’ve previously noted the same variation of motives behind a similar question: “Where do atheists get their morals?” Sometimes when people ask this they already know their own answer. They believe their worldview is uniquely capable of satisfying the longings of the human heart, and they’re asking that question in hopes that you will find their story better than all the others.

To that group I say: Of course your story speaks to our deepest longings; that’s why it was created in the first place. Your story fits the needs of the human heart in the same way a puddle fits the hole it fills. Douglas Adams famously quipped that reasoning from our need back to our own mythology would be like that puddle deciding that the hole it is in must have been designed precisely for the puddle to fit into. But of course that’s getting it “bass ackwards” as my dad would say. We project our own wishes and ideals onto a cold, impersonal universe because we prefer to believe that a benevolent intelligence is behind everything, guiding the events around us to a logical and meaningful end. It’s also our way of dealing with mystery. When a person encounters a world he can’t explain, he says: “I think a person must be behind all of this—a really big, powerful person, a person who can do absolutely anything,” much like my children probably once thought of me when they were very small.

But not all who ask “Where do we find our purpose?” are trying to assert an alternative story. Some are genuinely asking, “How can anything have meaning if everything is an accident?” For them this is more of an existential cry for perspective and often it comes out of a place of deep anguish and loneliness. A reader asked this question once in response to my article on “Becoming Human,” which was about discovering peace and happiness in my newfound godlessness even in the midst of some tumultuous circumstances. But even as I wrote it, I thought about how incongruous my words would feel to anyone who has started down the same path and has found no such happiness, only loneliness and emptiness. Clearly a lot of people deal with this because it comes up a lot. So what is the answer? What is yours? I’ll give you mine in a second and we can go from there.

False Starts in Our Search for Meaning

First of all, humans are meaning makers. We like to find meaning even in things that don’t naturally have it. The arrangements of stars, for example, make us think of shapes, but the order we see above us is artificial—it’s an optical illusion. We superimpose a structure onto those lights which would totally change if we were standing on a different planet in a different solar system. We create the order ourselves, and that’s fine. It’s a fun game—call it a useful fiction—and it helps us keep track of our location in the world. The shapes we describe may not be divinely ordained or universally consistent, but they’re still useful to us. They help us get where we want to go even if they are something of a man-made fabrication.