If I was still in search of beliefs, many atheists would object, I hadn’t really gotten over my religious upbringing. A good atheist deals not in faith but in facts, not in belief but in knowledge. Yet I could find no obvious factual, knowledge-based answer to the question that was most pressing to me: How am I to live?
I don’t mean to suggest that the New Atheists had no moral sense. On the contrary, they were largely fuelled by moral outrage at the needless suffering religion caused. But the nature of morality was seemingly the only thing about which they did not care to argue. They thought it simply self‑evident that we desire pleasure over pain for ourselves, and that any decent person wished the same for others. One of religion’s greatest harms, they believed, was that it turned people away from this basic intuition. Of the Four Horsemen, only Harris aspired to a “science of good and evil” which could subject moral claims to the same rational scrutiny as all other claims, but his chapter on the topic quickly devolves into an argument about the indefensibility of pacifism and the moral necessity of government torture. (It was a strange time.)
Anyway, I wasn’t really looking for practical guidance. To ask “How am I to live?” is to inquire as to not just what is right but what is good. It is to ask not just “What should I do?” but “How should I be?” The most generous interpretation of the New Atheist view on this question is that people ought to have the freedom to decide for themselves. On that, I agreed completely, but that left me right where I’d started, still in need of an answer.
Setting down the popular polemics of the day, I began to read modern philosophy, which I understood to be the primary means by which humans have sought secular answers to life’s questions. I read the philosophers most frequently cited as models by modern‑day atheists—John Locke, David Hume, John Stuart Mill—as well as those whom meaning‑hungry young people habitually embrace as secular gurus: Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Camus. But I also read philosophers who are mostly read just by other philosophers.
Even when I was struggling with the most challenging of these works, the reading felt urgent to me. I wasn’t submitting papers or getting grades; I wasn’t looking to earn a degree or to pursue a career. I wasn’t even trying to impress people at literary parties. (For that, I had thousand‑page postmodern novels.) I was just trying to figure things out. Immanuel Kant’s three “critiques” are often cited as the works that first made philosophy inaccessible to nonspecialists, but in Kant’s opinion he was addressing very straightforward questions—What can I know?, What must I do?, and What may I hope? I was decidedly a nonspecialist, and these were the questions I wanted answered.
Among other things, this reading taught me that atheists do hold beliefs, not just about morals and ethics but about how the world actually is and how humans fit into it. Of course, not all atheists hold the same beliefs—just as not all theists do—but I found that modern atheist belief tends to cluster into two broad traditions.
The most prevalent atheist world view goes by many names—empiricism, positivism, physicalism, naturalism—but the term that best captures the fullness of its present‑day iteration, as I see it, is scientific materialism. Roughly speaking, this view holds that the material world is all that exists, that humans can know this world through sense perception, that the methods of science allow us to convert the raw data of these perceptions into general principles, and that these principles can be both tested and put to practical use by making predictions about future events.
As world views go, scientific materialism has a lot to say for it. It tells us that humans are capable, without any supernatural aid, of coming to understand, and ultimately to master, all of reality. It tells us that the store of human knowledge is constantly increasing and continuously improving our material conditions. To this end, it points to the astonishing human progress that has occurred in the time of science’s reign. And it encourages us to enjoy the fruits of this progress as much as possible, since our life here on earth is the only one we’ll get.