Music Doesn't Need God

Art can be transcendent and numinous without deferring to the supernatural

I, dear reader, am an atheist and I have been for a very long time.

I’ve talked about my childhood growing up in the fundamentalist and life-controlling Christian cult Jehovah’s Witnesses in previous articles here on my ‘Stack. I’ve also explained how from an early age I was a sceptic who inherently leaned towards philosophical materialism and a hard-deterministic outlook on all of existence long before I knew the meaning of any of those terms. 

I became interested in the works of Richard Dawkins in my early twenties and read the God Delusion and The Selfish Gene but beyond that never really gave too much thought to the matter of theology after I escaped the cult. I was too busy drinking beer/partying and then starting a family and building a life during those years to really concern myself with any matters beyond my immediate social circle. Early twenty-something me certainly had no time for reading non-fiction, watching lectures and thinking deeply about philosophical matters like the God V Science debate. 

Due to this closed circle of concern, I missed the publishing phenomena of the late noughties that is colloquially known as the New Atheist Movement when it happened. I read the God Delusion because I knew of Dawkins already and was interested in his career but I never read the books by Dennett, Hitchens, Harris and Hirsi Ali in that time. I never watched any of the debates, lectures and conversations with these academics during this phenomenon, either. I missed the whole debate.

I came into it late a few years later when I finally relented and bought a smartphone (I resisted getting one until about 2012 or so because I was a bit of a Luddite). I had never really been much of a YouTube watcher nor a regular internet user for the first 25 years of my life, preferring to use paper books to source my information. I still had a library card and fines for late returns which I never ended up paying as the library is now gone (RIP libraries). 

But with my new phone I had instant access to all accumulated human knowledge and I quickly became addicted to YouTube. One of the things I watched most was science lectures by the likes of Carl Sagan, Brian Cox, Richard Feynman and, of course, Richard Dawkins’ lectures on evolutionary biology. I ended up becoming acutely interested by the latter of these and consumed endless hours of Dr Dawkins’ content. Eventually, the algorithm started sending me the New Atheist lectures and I got hooked on the debate (better late than never) and read all the aforementioned books and watched all the content I could. 

One thing that bothered me more than most was one particular Theistic argument that these academics faced all too often: Transcendence. Namely, without invoking God, how does one explain it? Without deferring to the supernatural, how can one explain feelings of the numinous, awe and the deep and seemingly spiritual connection that people feel when they are moved by art?  

Some theists even went as far as to suggest that without god, there can be none of these feelings which in turn suggests that the existence of art necessitates the existence of god. This argument gets repeated in different ways. 

Phrases like ‘Atheists have no songs’ is something that I have heard a lot over the years; it's an old Steve Martin stand-up bit but claims akin to it are made often. Jordan Peterson has made similar claims in recent years too, that atheists can’t create art of any substance because they deny the connection to what he believes is the only possible source of inspiration: God. 

Although it must be said, his definition of what god actually is, is so broad it is functionally useless as a term. I see what he does as ‘goal post moving’ and as the same sin that he bemoans the postmodernists for doing: redefining words so that their definitions become so fuzzy that they can encapsulate something else entirely, normally their own arguments. In this case, a set of innate human psychological traits and instincts that can be redefined as the presence of ‘God’. It’s apologetics: circle squaring at its most egregious. 

Theists have argued to Richard Dawkins that, because he is moved by the devotional music of devout Christian composer Johann Sebastian Bach, he must concede that that music is divinely inspired. Dawkins correctly says no and states that it just means he has to concede that Bach HIMSELF believed in god and that his belief motivated him to write devotional music. Bach could have been right or wrong about his belief, regardless of the quality of his music. It is a non sequitur. The fact that Bach created excellent and moving music is in no way proof of the existence of anything other than Bach’s talent for writing music. The fact that Dawkins or I enjoy listening to Bach is in no way evidence of anything other than Bach possessing the requisite skills to write music that people enjoy listening to and can appreciate.

To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, one does not need to believe in the cult of Athena to appreciate the beauty of the Parthenon. Millions of tourists flock to see the ancient ruins of religious buildings in Athens, Rome and Egypt every year and are deeply moved by them. But not one of those tourists believes in the existence of Zeus, Jupiter or Ra. The appreciation of devotional art and architecture is in no way contingent on belief in the deities that they were inspired by.

But my main reason I think this ‘without god there can be no art’ argument is bullshit is this: I make art, and have even moved people to tears with it on occasion. I also have been moved to great emotional heights by works of art myself, and felt like I was feeling something ‘outside of myself’ during. 

But I do not believe in God. I do not believe in the supernatural. I do not believe that the transcendence I feel when I listen to an incredibly moving piece of music is anything other than a chemical reaction in my brain: the by-product of billions of years of psychological and neurological evolution. 13.8 billion years of determinism playing out.  

So how DO I explain that numinous feeling I get when being moved by art? How do I explain the goosebumps I get when I hear John Williams ‘Binary Sunset’? Or the weird feeling of emptiness I get when I finish a great fictional book and I can’t live in that world any longer? Or the tears that fall out of me when I listen to ‘Cleaning out my Closet’? Well, I think Roberta Flack said it (or sang it) best…

‘Strumming my pain with his fingers

Singing my life with his words [...]

Telling my whole life with his words

Killing me softly with his song’

In the song, Flack is singing about one of these numinous and transcendent experiences when listening to a singer perform a song that resonated with her own experiences so much that it left her feeling ‘flushed with fever’ and emotionally exposed. He was speaking (singing) her language, so to speak. The song echoed her own emotional state to such a degree that she felt like he had somehow stolen the subject matter straight from her own thoughts. 

I felt he found my letters

And read each one out loud

It is this mirroring of our own feelings that I think causes this emotional response of overwhelming connection to a piece of art. Hearing how we feel but often struggle to articulate into words presented so succinctly and concisely that it instantly cuts right to our emotional cores. This I find is what happens with me. It happens with instrumental music, as is the case for me with the John Williams piece and evidently Dawkins with Bach. But this has most often happened to me in the past when I hear lyrics that resonate with my own experiences or when I see myself in a character on film whom I can relate to their experience. Normally for me, the trigger for goosebumps is a lyric that I feel relates directly to my own life.

Like a heartbroken girl listening to break-up songs, we connect with art that mirrors our own experiences. I believe, as in the Roberta Flack song, that when a piece of art perfectly describes our own feelings, it triggers this reaction and a feeling of transcendence. An uncanny and uneasy sense that we are being seen or our emotional state is being validated. Like when you say ‘I thought I was the only one’ when you realise someone else feels the same niche emotion that you do.

Historically, I have felt a lot of these instances when listening to Eminem. He was the voice of a generation (my generation) and captured the anguish of the teenage masses around the world in the early noughties. 

In ‘Sing For The Moment’, Eminem describes a young teen, or ‘problem child’ who is growing up in a family life he hates. I identified with this character so much as a 16 year old boy and the song STILL gives me goosebumps to this day. Thankfully, I wasn’t violently abused like the boy in the song, but still many of the lyrics felt like they were directly describing my life.

 ‘It's so scary in a house that allows no swearing. To see him walking' around with his headphones blaring'….

‘Brainwashed from rock and rap’….

‘A sinner's mind is a sanctum. Holy or unholy’…..

‘That's why we sing for these kids who don't have a thing

Except for a dream and a fuckin' rap magazine 

Who post pin-up pictures on they walls all day long

Idolise they favourite rappers and know all they songs

Or for anyone who's ever been through shit in they lives

So they sit and they cry at night, wishing' they'd die

'Til they throw on a rap record and they sit and they vibe’…

Goosebumps, every time. But that isn’t the only Eminem song that does it to me, nor the most powerful example. That is… ‘Cleaning Out My Closet’. 

Eminem has since distanced himself from this song, and publicly apologised to his mother and reconciled with her in recent years. But the anger, the resentment, the vitriol he feels for his mother in this song,.. well it resonates with me so much it actually hurts. I struggle to hear it without crying uncontrollably and simultaneously being moved to a state of rage. 

To be clear, I didn't suffer anything nearly as bad at the hands of my mother as Marshall did by his. My torture was more psychological and passive aggressive in nature. But the sentiment behind the song hits me every time. It moves me in deep and troubling ways and I feel like I am experiencing a dark emotion that is outside of myself. Like a negative transcendence or something. 

The lyric ‘My whole life I was made to believe that I was sick when I wasn’t’ is the hardest part to listen to. My siblings and I were all told as children that we carry the stain of the ‘Original Sin’ of Adam & Eve and need to give our lives to Christ to be made ‘clean’. We were taught to be ashamed of several other perfectly natural parts of our humanity, such as scepticism, entrepreneurial ambition and sexual urges, which were painted to be the literal influence of Satan on our souls that we had to fight against if we were to be ‘saved’. 

Original Sin is one of the most disgusting concepts ever created by mankind. The idea that a baby is born guilty of anything, instead of being completely innocent, is perverse. That they are guilty of a sin that they had no part in committing, rather inheriting it by blood, and were created with that burden by the all ‘loving’ creator of the universe, is worse. As the Baron Fulke-Greville said, we were apparently ‘Created sick, commanded to be sound’. It is absurd nonsense. 

[Side Bar: I get that nowadays it reads that Eminem is blaming his mother for everything and playing the victim card in this song. That is done to death now and doesn’t fly with the masses quite so much these days, but in 2002 it was a novel angle for a song in the mainstream and really resonated with the disaffected youth of the era. However, looking back in hindsight, this song may have played a part in normalising the victim mentality and culture that we see today].

But the most I have been moved by a song is an instance that is a perfect refutation of the ‘Atheists have no songs’ claim and the ‘Without God, there is no transcendence’ claim simultaneously. 

It’s a song by an atheist that describes the feelings of being an atheist and addresses the claims I am refuting directly (meta or what?). And it moved me because it not only explained how I feel about these matters, but also perfectly addresses the one thing about religion that causes me the most emotional pain: family. 

The song is ‘White Wine In The Sun’ by the Australian musical comedian, satirist and actor Tim Minchin. What is strange is that as much as the anti-religious stuff in this song perfectly resonates with my experience, the family themed stuff in it is the perfect opposite of my experience. It describes the positive part of family life that religion denied me in terrifyingly poignant fashion, highlighting how religion ruined my family by showing me a perfect antithesis of my own family life. 

I first heard this song in the run up to Christmas a few years ago as it is describing the Christian holiday in the song. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not celebrate Christ’s birthday (long story) so I never had any connection to the holiday at all. The 25th of December was always ‘just another winter’s day’ to me, in the words of David Essex. 

So when Minchin describes the holiday as a time where families get together and share each other's company, it makes me resentful that I never had that experience. It makes me pine for a family life that I never had. 

The chorus starts with the line ‘I’ll be seeing my Dad. My brothers and sisters, my gran and my mum’.

It made me cry when I first heard it. I had never, could never and would never have THAT experience, and not just at Christmas. We rarely interacted with our non Jehovah’s Witness family members at all, (which was in accordance with the dogma of that faith), let alone ate and made merriment with them. This included my Catholic Nan who I loved dearly and gladly had a great relationship with after I left the cult. This family get-together Minchin describes is a completely alien notion to me. 

Then he sings about how he is adding his daughter to these family gatherings. How she will have all the same loved ones at each and every Christmas for years to come. This made me think of my son and the song had found another way to move me to tears. It highlights that my son will also never have this kind of relationship with my side of the family either. The rot of dogmatic faith spreads to yet another generation. Most of my family doesn’t even know him at all. They would almost certainly pass him on the street and not recognise him. All because I don’t believe that deferring to bronze age texts is the best way to organise a society in the twenty-first century. They have shunned me, and my son by proxy because they believe I am evil because I don’t share their faith. They didn’t watch my son grow up because of their fealty to their dogma, but apparently I am the bad guy. I would have had no problem continuing my relationship with any of them, as long as both parties were free to believe what they wanted in peace. Live and let live. But no, I am an apostate, must be shunned entirely and my son is therefore guilty by association. Fuck religion, I hate it. 

A few months later, my Dad died and I listened to the song again. When the chorus hit, I broke. I had never been moved by a song, or any piece of art as much in my entire life. It was as if I was floating on a sea of pure emotion; transported into another realm that is completely removed from this one. It was a religious-like experience that was motivated by grief, relatedness and atheism. More than that, it was motivated by a resentment of religion and what it took from me. I didn’t need God to feel a sense of the numinous. I just needed someone to ‘strum my pain with his fingers’. To perfectly sum up how I felt in a piece of art. 

I, a nonbeliever, was moved to tears by a statement of non-belief from another nonbeliever. The absence of God was the precise thing that brought about the sense of transcendence I felt. 

I understand that many of you out there are religious and your faith means a lot to you. That’s fine, it’s your right and I wish you well. But I will not suffer anyone telling me that I cannot experience a deep connection to art without appealing to the supernatural or the god of Abraham. I can and I do. 

Regina Spektor is a singer/songwriter who is an overtly Christian theist but has managed to avoid being labelled as a ‘Christian Artist’ somehow. She sings about her devotion to God in her songs as well as engaging in philosophical arguments against Atheism on occasion, most notably in the song ‘Laughing With God’. I disagree with her on all of it; her claims, her epistemology, the fundamental meaning she places in faith. But her devotion to god still moves me, even if I don’t share it. I connect with her passion for her craft and the beauty in her songs, in spite of the message within and where it comes from. This points to something more fundamental at play then people believing the same thing, sharing a faith. She cares about something so deeply that the passion becomes unmissable, moving and infectious.

I could be equally moved by other’s displays of passion on matters that I have little interest in. I have no strong feelings on guns and firearms, but have heard plenty of passionate speeches of Americans talking about their constitutional ‘Right to bear arms’ that I have found quite spurring. I have no interest in dance as an art form (none whatsoever) but I do appreciate the sacrifice, discipline and passion that ballet dancers put into their craft. It can be quite inspirational. I have zero interest in Formula One, but when I see people lose their shit over it, cheering in elation as their driver crosses the chequered flag, I can feel how much it means to them. I love to see passion and a zest for life in other people, I respond to it and it doesn’t matter if it comes from sport, art or religion. Nor does it matter if I share their interest or beliefs.

Thanks for reading.

I’ll leave you with one last song that made me cry because it perfectly summed up how I felt at the time when I first heard it. Also because it addresses this argument so perfectly and succinctly. I felt seen and validated when I heard it. It was an incredibly transcendent and distinctly faithless experience. This is ‘Glory Hallelujah’ by Frank Turner. 

Stay passionate…

The Common Centrist