Why Atheists Keep Finding God (in everything) - Alex O’Connor - #1175

What It Covers

Alex O'Connor, philosopher and former militant atheist, explores why consciousness poses an unsolvable problem for materialism, why science cannot explain the foundational substance of reality, how mystical experience across cultures points toward consciousness as primary rather than emergent, and why the boundary between atheism and certain forms of theism is less clear than the New Atheist movement suggested.

Key Questions Answered

• •Confidence calibration in philosophy: On questions like God's existence and consciousness, intellectual humility is more defensible than militant certainty. O'Connor shifted from aggressive atheism to identifying as agnostic because the arguments on all sides are riddled with unresolved problems. Plato and modern philosophers battle identical questions with no cumulative progress, unlike physics. This suggests treating these as open questions rather than settled debates worth winning.
• •Science describes behavior, not substance: Newton's gravitational equations describe *how* objects fall, not *why* gravity exists — Newton himself wrote "hypothesis non fingo" (I frame no hypothesis) on that question. Science mathematizes regularities and reduces phenomena to more fundamental descriptions, but never reaches the underlying substance of anything. Asking science what matter fundamentally *is* — not what it does — falls outside its methodology by design.
• •Consciousness cannot be defined or pointed at: Every definition of consciousness requires prior conscious experience to understand it. Thomas Nagel's definition — "there is something it is like to be that thing" — is the most cited, yet remains functionally vague. Consciousness cannot be compared to external things because nothing exists outside it. Anil Seth's definition (what disappears under anesthesia) identifies the phenomenon but does not explain it.
• •Emergence arguments for consciousness are circular: Every example used to illustrate how consciousness "emerges" from matter — temperature, images on screens, zeros and ones — is itself an example of something appearing *within* consciousness. Heat is the felt sensation, not the atomic vibration. The image exists only when someone perceives the screen. Defenders of emergent consciousness are unknowingly citing conscious experiences as proof that consciousness emerges from non-conscious matter.
• •Meditation and psychedelics remove conceptual filters, not reality: Experienced meditators and psychedelic users converge on nondual awareness across cultures and centuries because both methods suppress the brain's habitual concept-layering. The brain constructs a simplified story of reality — optical illusions demonstrate this — rather than transmitting it transparently. Removing those filters does not reveal a different reality but the same reality without the brain's editorial compression applied to it.
• •Mystical experience resists scientific assessment by definition: If consciousness is the instrument through which all empirical investigation occurs, then subjective religious or mystical experiences cannot be evaluated using tools designed to eliminate subjectivity. Science moves toward objectivity; consciousness *is* subjectivity. Critiquing a transformative personal experience with manuscript dating, as Richard Dawkins did with Ayaan Hirsi Ali's conversion story, addresses a different category of claim entirely.
• •Idealism is no stranger than standard theism: The view that physical reality is an expression of a foundational mental substance — idealism — is at least as parsimonious as the monotheistic model where an omnipotent deity creates a material universe and selectively grants consciousness to some of it. Spinoza's formulation, *Deus sive Natura* (God or Nature), treats ultimate reality as one substance rather than two interacting kinds, which avoids the hard problem of mind-body interaction entirely.