So You Exist, What Now?

The Lie We've Told Ourselves

Humanity has lent itself to a lie for most of its existence: that we do not know where we come from, that we are above this planet, and — if you are a Gnostic — that there is a deeper knowledge that can help you escape this cold earth, as clearly humanity must be bigger than what we are ourselves. However much comfort this lie may offer us, it is still, regardless, a lie. Especially in the 21st century, with our understanding of the universe and science accurately pointing to where humanity came from, where we were, and what our reality is — how does religion still survive? I must admit this introduction has targeted religion thus far, but it is not the actual goal of this essay to lay out the bad aspects of religion or the proofs we have against it, as I believe that has already been done countless times by people much better versed in it. Instead, this essay's goal is to explain why religion still exists, why it remains strong — if not undergoing a resurgence — and what our alternatives are to a religious ordering of the world.

The Greatest Crime

This essay, like so many of mine, came to me while I was outside. In Hamilton, Ontario, at their art crawl, walking James Street among vendors presenting their creations, people smoking and enjoying themselves, talking with friends and indulging in each other's presence — I realized a simple truth: that the greatest crime one can commit against oneself is isolation. To isolate yourself from the other, from your fellow man, is a crime no human can sustain. Here's a simple but dark way to illustrate that: think about the most common form of torture used on prisoners — solitary confinement. It's an odd punishment when you think about it. From a purely logical standpoint, there must be a harsher punishment than simply forcing someone to be alone, right? Well — yes and no. I believe that if you told the average person you were going to whip them 50 times, or lock them in solitary confinement for two days, they'd choose to be locked away. But tell that same person it'll be a week instead of two days — or until they accept the whipping — and I'd bet that by the third day they'd be begging the guards to just get the whipping over with.

The Prison Policy Initiative supports this point with the underlying neuroscience: prolonged isolation has been shown to physically shrink the region of the brain responsible for memory. Because humans are inherently social creatures, cutting someone off from social contact produces what researchers call "social pain" — the psychological distress that comes from deprivation, exclusion, or rejection. Critically, this pain registers in the brain much like physical pain does, and may be even more damaging, since people can re-experience social pain vividly months or years after the fact (Herring, 2020). Given this understanding, we can begin to see the answer to how religion has persisted: it provides community, a point I'll explore further in this essay. But a more interesting question arises — why do non-spiritual people so often end up isolated?

A Personal Divide

The question I've set for atheists is simply this: why do great thinkers so often isolate themselves? And the answer we've discovered for religion — specifically the Abrahamic ones — is that it exists precisely to protect against this isolation. That answer comes from a very personal part of me. I grew up with a Catalan father, son of Spanish Republicans who despised the Church and everything it stood for, but also with a Mexican mother whose life was centered around being Catholic. So, I must admit there are two sides to this problem within me, separate but united. Funnily enough, my parents show a clear difference in their attitudes toward my studying philosophy — my dad believes it's a noble pursuit of knowledge, justice, and morals, while my mom believes it's a waste of time and that one is better off learning technical skills than reading.

The Disease of the Learned

So, if we understand philosophy as the pursuit of knowledge, justice, and morals, then why are so many atheists — people and scholars alike — so isolated? This is an undeniable pattern that seems to befall any great thinker. David Hume, for instance, was diagnosed with what was then called the "disease of the learned." This 18th-century diagnosis was, in essence, a nervous breakdown brought on by excessive thinking and isolation. It's a condition nearly every serious thinker seems to have lived through — I write from experience with it myself — from Nietzsche's death of God, to Camus's absurd, to Sartre's vertigo. This overthinking might be described as the Hegelian antithesis to philosophy itself — where someone thinks so much that their thinking becomes useless. I believe Descartes' philosophy is a great example of this: a man so obsessed with rationality that his philosophy becomes irrational in nature. There is no way to defend the Cartesian split in the 17th century, let alone the 21st — yet his goal was for his cogito ergo sum to last for all time.

Descartes, the Gnostics, and the Wrong Way to Know

Descartes is a great example of a mistake philosophers often make — whether on purpose or by accident — a mistake that a certain offshoot of religion, the Gnostics, makes as well. Both believe, for the same underlying reason, that a complete pursuit of knowledge will lead to a successful end: for Descartes, [complete scientific certainty — unclear in the original, worth revisiting]; for the Gnostics, escape from this false plane. This, however, is the wrong way to pursue knowledge. To return to my previous essays — Merleau-Ponty's line, "Je ne suis pas devant mon corps, je suis dans mon corps, ou plutôt : je suis mon corps" ("I am not in front of my body, I am in my body, or rather: I am my body"), often called the tacit cogito, is why religion persists today, while philosophy is looked down upon by the average person. Consider the classic joke: "How many philosophers does it take to change a lightbulb? Three — one to change it, and two to argue whether the lightbulb actually exists." A Catholic, a Jew, a Muslim, even a follower of the John Frum movement would simply change the lightbulb.

Daring to Live

The rationalist movement had its moment in the Enlightenment and opened us to the noble pursuit of understanding our universe — we must now recalibrate. If Kant asked us to "dare to think," I believe that today we must "dare to live," as there is no philosophy without life. This echoes an excellent answer I once heard to the question of why humanity exists at all: because the opposite of non-existence is existence. To put it simply — why does humanity exist? Because we do. That is where philosophy must start, and religious people tend to understand this instinctively. I've argued with many religious people, pointing out the parallels between the story of Adam and Eve and the Adapa legend, or the fact that even if God exists, he seems to want nothing to do with humanity, among many other reasons — and yet they always answer, "Well, Alec, I have faith, and I have a life to live." My sister is a great example of this. I asked her the other day, frustrated, how it's possible that we're twins, raised with the same education, and yet she's religious and I'm not — because from a philosophical standpoint, the Abrahamic God is a violent God, one who has attacked humanity and demands worship. She answered, "I know if I thought about it logically, I would stop believing — but it gives me comfort, and it helps me live." There is no argument philosophy can mount against that.

Religion's Genius

So why does religion still exist in the 21st century? It's worth turning to Slavoj Žižek, who recently quoted Lacan on this very point. Lacan's argument, in short, was that religion's endurance has little to do with competing against science on factual terms — it will outlast psychoanalysis and much else besides, and its power is easy to underestimate. As science advances into the domain of the real, it inevitably unsettles people, introducing new and destabilizing truths into everyday life. Religion's genius, in Lacan's view, is that it has always specialized in exactly this: taking things that once felt natural and, once science strips that naturalness away, supplying them with meaning instead. Priests, he suggests, are trained precisely for this task — giving sense to anything, including the unsettling new discoveries of science itself, and even to the anxieties those discoveries provoke in scientists.

So You Exist, What Now?

Religion still exists because life still exists. As long as humans are breathing, a God will be worshiped — simply because, as a friend once told me, "the great part of being Catholic is that I'm connected to my loved ones from four thousand years ago." There is no arguing against that.

This essay has hopefully not served as a basis for the reader to become religious. I write as a firm atheist — a believer in evolution, in the idea that our soul is crafted through our years of life, that our consciousness emerges from language. And yet I write also as someone who understands that religion may answer problems philosophy cannot. Problems like solipsism, or the hard problem of consciousness, ask you to be religious in a certain sense — to accept their frameworks on faith. And often, great thinkers refuse to, and enter isolation and panic instead. But there are two simple alternatives to that panic.

First: if you're going to accept a framework without fully being able to prove it, you may as well accept a good one. Be Catholic — believe you're here because a good God put you here, and that something better awaits you. But better still, as a more courageous champion of reality, accept that you are alive: a result of the universe, a result of great cosmic accidents, but not a mistake yourself. Do not punish yourself with isolation. Instead, face life with the courage it requires — for religion exists, at bottom, as a way to let humanity live. Kierkegaard is often (mis)credited with the line "life is not a puzzle to be solved, but a reality to be experienced." The goal of philosophy must be the same: not to build roadblocks in front of a great reality for all of humanity, but to open the way toward it.