The Material Atheist

Years ago, when I was commuting by bus to work in downtown Denver, I used the time to read. There were people who preferred to spend the ride making small talk with the stranger sitting next to them. My reading time has always been precious to me, and I resented people interrupting it with pointless babble. Usually, answering them grunts while keeping my eyes glued in the book made the point, and they’d turn their attention elsewhere or even change seats.

Except for a smiling young man who sat down next to me and asked me what I was reading.

“A book.”

“What’s it about?”

“Mumble.”

“Oh.” Pause. “Do you know what I like to read?”

I looked at his smiling face and realized what was coming. “The Bible?” I asked.

He seemed  disappointed that I had seen through him, but he persisted, jabbering about Jesus—witnessing, I suppose, that annoying word Christians use to mean interrupting the precious reading time of someone who hasn’t intruded on them, is trying to ignore them, and is hoping to be ignored by them.

Finally I told him to stop talking to me and that nothing he said would affect me. I was an atheist and thus fully immunized.

He looked nonplussed for a moment and then asked me to define “atheism” for him.

I told him that in my opinion it was essentially materialism. I thought that would put an end to it.

He pondered and then said something like, “Have you ever thought that maybe there’s more to life than the accumulation of worldly possessions?”

I realized that he only knew that use of “materialism,” so I told him that I was using it in the other sense, the philosophical one, that the universe consists of matter and nothing else.

He digested that for a while and then finally left to find another victim, mouthing platitudes about blessings and praying for me as he went.

Recently, I’ve been trying to remember the process by which I became an atheist. At the time it was happening, I wasn’t looking at myself from the outside. I was concerned with what to believe or not believe, but I wasn’t analyzing myself. Now that all of that’s in the distant past and I’m an old fart who’s toying with writing his autobiography (because why not?), I’m trying to look at that period in my life objectively and analytically. When I remembered the incident of the twit on the bus, I realized that I was always a materialist by nature. It just took me a few years of intellectual and emotional struggle to cast off parental conditioning and become my true self—a materialist, which is to say, an atheist.

When I was a child, I believed what my parents believed. The mythology in the Old Testament, the existence of God, the inherent rightness of the wackadoodle Jewish dietary laws, and so on—that was how the Universe was. At the same time, I really wanted to understand how the Universe worked. I read science books written for children and absorbed their contents, which I placed on the same level of truthfulness as the religious nonsense fed to me by my parents. It was all equally true and equally important to understanding everything. My parents were pleased by the religious part of the preceding and assumed that I’d follow path of religious self–brainwashing everyone in their families had followed, which they thought was the right and proper path for a Jew, especially a male Jew. I was very good at parroting religious rubbish. One of my sisters once called me the little rabbi.

An important difference, though, was that science was exciting and satisfying. It appealed to me emotionally as well as intellectually. Judaism was just there. It was true (as I still thought) but increasingly uninteresting. The rituals and seemingly endless time spent in the synagogue were annoying and oppressive. That was time I could have used to read science books (and science fiction and comics).

As far as I can remember, it was that emotional disconnect that moved me steadily away from religion and toward science as a way to understand the Universe. Well before increasing understanding of science showed me the absurdity of the creation story in the book of Genesis, this lack of a need for a religion, and therefore a lack of interest in it, made me a Jew in name only. God and religious belief disappeared from my life.

Not so with outward religious display and observance. As the rabbi’s son, I had to keep going through the motions. That would last until I left home for college. At the same time, I was struggling with what to call myself. I think I had arrived at “atheist” by the time I left home.

On an emotional level, the Universe was a material thing to me. But what a wonderful thing! As a teenager, I devoured books on astronomy. The astonishing size and age of the Universe and the variety and strangeness of the objects and energies that filled it delighted me. I wanted to know everything I could about it. I wanted to understand it. Clearly, religion was not a path to that understanding; it was only a path to fantasy—boring fantasy. I could see that science was the path to understanding. It wasn’t that science led me to atheism. Rather, it was materialism that led me to science.

Space and astronomy fascinated me, but so did books about the opposite end of nature, what we see through the microscope and what we learn from particle accelerators. There is another stunningly wonderful Universe below us in size.

LaPlace told Napoleon that God wasn’t mentioned in his book explaining the workings of the Solar System because “I had no need of that hypothesis.” For me, in our vast and wonderful Universe, there is no room for that hypothesis. How trivial, shallow, and silly the idea of God is compared to immense reality. To an ancient people who thought of a small part of the Middle East as the entirety of existence, the concept of a god who had made all of it might not have been so absurd. Expand that view to the entire world, with all of its natural diversity and wildly different human cultures, and already you have to strain to believe in such a supreme being. With what we now know of the Universe—and knowing that we can only observe a tiny part of it—you have to willfully restrict your conception of reality to something cramped and simplistic in order to still believe in a god of any kind.

One of the reasons I want to be immortal is so that I will live to learn about further scientific discoveries on both the microscopic and telescopic levels. What wonders we’ll uncover! Who needs childish fairy tales?