What Would an Atheist Say About Everything?
I volunteer at a Chinmaya Mission kitchen locally. It’s a simple act of service — chopping vegetables, washing dishes, serving food. As often happens in quiet work, a question found me there.
One of the sevaks tossed a gentle prompt across the counter:
“What would an atheist say about what we are doing?”
That stayed with me. Later, I kept turning a few questions over, one by one:
Is the “self,” in science, basically electrons, protons, and neutrons?
If everything is made of the same particles, do different arrangements alone explain such different properties — and even feeling?
What would an atheist say about all this?
What follows is my attempt to sit with those questions without rushing to close them.
The Scientific View
Science looks from the outside. Neuroscience maps the brain’s electrical patterns and chemical flows. It shows correlations between brain states and experience — what lights up when we see, love, remember.
But correlation isn’t causation. Even if arrangement explains solidity, color, and conductivity, there’s a further leap:
Why does matter arranged a certain way begin to feel like something?
This is the “hard problem of consciousness.”
One natural answer says: it just does. Consciousness is — like liquidity emerging from countless H₂O molecules.
Ramana Maharshi’s View
Ramana flips the direction of inquiry:
“Who is it that asks where consciousness comes from?”
He would say consciousness doesn’t come from anything — it is. Body, brain, electrons, and even the idea of “arrangement” appear within it.
You don’t “have” consciousness. You are that consciousness — temporarily identified with a form.
The scientist sees patterns giving rise to awareness.
The sage sees awareness giving rise to patterns.
The Atheist’s Lens
A thoughtful atheist keeps everything inside the natural order. No extra entities required. Consciousness is what matter feels like when it’s organized as a brain. When the brain stops, experience stops.
Some extend this without invoking God: perhaps consciousness is a fundamental property of nature — not supernatural, just basic, like space or time. Still natural, still testable, simply deeper than today’s instruments.
The Bridge
Maybe these aren’t opposing answers but different vantage points.
Science studies the pattern of matter.
Self-inquiry attends to the presence of awareness.
Two languages for one reality: equations and silence.
The body is electrons and protons in motion.
The Self is the stillness that knows the motion.
Closing Thought
My questions began in a kitchen, not a lab or an ashram. Perhaps that’s the point. Service, science, and silence can meet in the same place: this aware moment.
So instead of, “Where does consciousness come from?”, another question might be gentler and truer:
Who is it that is aware — right now?
Look there, and see what remains when every other answer changes.
Inspired by Ramana Maharshi’s silence and the science of wonder.
ChatGPT was consulted in this matter.