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What does God mean to an atheist? That is, does the notion of a deity mean anything at all to a non-believer?
As noted elsewhere and many times before, I am an atheist. In polite company, I will admit to agnosticism—“not knowing”—but really, for myself, I know.1 There is no omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient being that created and guides the universe and everything in it. Not when that “universe” was a rocky patch of ground under a firmament of shell-like spheres pierced by stars and hung with the Sun, Moon, and a few planets, and that deity created all of this and all of humankind but loved only one tribe in one place before all others. And not now, when we know our universe encompasses upwards of a trillion galaxies, each with about a hundred billion stars, and must be generously seeded with life throughout. The mind boggles. The omniscient mind boggles even more.
And yet, the concept of God is meaningful even to me.
In my view, God is the personalized abstraction of all that is good and valuable in human nature and society: happiness, love, affection, friendship, compassion and charity, freedom and dignity, humility, and a wider perspective on the world. Decent societies have decent and supportive gods. Corrupt societies have evil and destructive gods.
In the same way, concepts of the devil—other than being the gods of other people you don’t like—are the abstraction of all that is harmful in human nature: misery, hatred, anger, betrayal, envy, deceit, trickery, slavery, and a narrow focus on the self. People who hate themselves and hate others tend to worship corrupt gods.
As I have said elsewhere, morality and good behavior do not require the watchful eye of a guiding deity, who proposes rules of behavior and promises reward or punishment in a supposed afterlife. Anyone with an understanding of reciprocity and fair play can figure out that things work better between people if they treat each other with respect, offer courtesy and small acts of kindness, refrain from vandalism and theft, and avoid giving offense. Such an attitude not only repays a person with the occasional returned favor, but it also means you can walk down the street without having to constantly watch your back—or at least most of the time.
And gods are often styled as “father” and “mother” because they represent the civilizing and nurturing forces that most of us—at least those of us who had good parents—acquire as babies and tend to lose in adulthood. The hunger to have someone not personally known to us, and not so human as to be prone to fallibility, watching out for us, caring about our well-being, and perhaps guiding our thoughts and actions—all of that survives into adulthood. We mourn the living parent and yearn for the invisible one.
So yes, God means something, many things to me, even as an atheist. I don’t have a war with God; I just don’t happen to believe in him.
You might say that my view accords with that of the Greek philosopher Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things.” Given our self-reflective nature, we create the world around us and our thoughts about it in our own image. Well, no, we are not the measure of that universe of a billion-trillion stars and all the possible life within it—although we do use our instruments and counting system to measure the cosmos from our singular viewpoint on the edge of the Milky Way.2 But certainly, we are the measure of everything we value here on Earth.
1. But, also as noted elsewhere, I am not a proselytizing atheist. I fully acknowledge that I may be wrong about these things. (I don’t know everything!) And if you believe in a deity of whatever nature, then that is your business and not mine. We each go in peace. And if I die and am undeniably confronted with a knowing presence, I won’t spit.
2. And, in the literature of science fiction, almost every “alien” species reflects one or more human qualities, either accentuated or inverted. We cannot think of conscious life in terms very different from our own. That, and authors often consciously use alien life as allegory and criticism of humanity. Truth to tell, though, I think most of the alien life in the universe is at the microbial level and of no human interest at all, except scientifically.