“Religion says the existence of God can be proved; the agnostic says it can’t be proved; and the atheist claims proof of the nonexistence of God.” (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions)
That was Bill W’s understanding of the terms atheist and agnostic, definitions that I think seem to hold for his writings on the matter in the Big Book.
“If you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it—then you are ready to take certain steps.” (Chapter 5, Big Book)
Before one can start the Twelve Steps, one must want what effective AA members have: a functioning relationship with God as a solution to alcoholism and, collaterally, to all other problems.
Atheism, under Bill’s definition, could be a narrow atheism, namely the conviction that God, as understood in one’s own culture, does not exist, but a person with such a conviction could still be quite open to the existence of the realm of the spirit, the ability to draw down direction and strength, and the ability to communicate (conventionally termed prayer and meditation), and such a person is broadly not an atheist at all. They do believe in a power greater than themselves; it is just not the God of Abraham.
The ‘true’, broad atheist might be characterised as having the belief that there is nothing but the material, there is no soul, and that mind emerges out of the cells of the physical brain as a sort of holographic mirage, real in the way that a film is real but in reality no more than non-sentient, non-rational, and non-feeling pixels and sound waves, with free will a chimera, a trick of the light. This is not an extreme image at all: one can certainly read biologists and academic philosophers who take this view (though physicists are less likely to hold it, it is sometimes said).
Someone in that position will not want what the ‘we’ of AA have: one cannot want something sincerely if one is convinced it does not exist.
It’s one thing believing that religious believers are wrong about their conceptions but believing there is ‘something’ there, that human will is real and not merely an automated process reducible to sub-atomic forces, that when I appreciate a sunset something really is happening beyond photons and neurotransmitters, that my observation of the truth of the proposition really is a spark of rational insight not a product of an unknowing machine programmed to parse syllogisms. To such a person, explaining the God side of the programme presents no difficulties whatsoever and is a pleasure.
It is quite another thing believing that religious believers, all of them, are quite deluded, that we are living in a cold hard universe of atoms and no more. Someone asked me the other day how one might carry the message to such a person. I do not think one can. One can throw only if someone is catching. I used to stand with my arms folded in a certainty that there was nothing beyond the material and so no God, no gods, no higher power, no forces, only an endless sequence of contingent events in a closed system going back to the big bang, and the programme contained no real substance, only a set of tricks to induce the sensation or apprehension of happiness, satisfaction, achievement, closeness to others, which, themselves, were mere functions of white matter secretions and electrical charges.
What’s the way out?
In my case, increasing realisation of the horror of my position plus repeated and increasingly unmistakable, active intervention by God.
There is one fly in the ointment with the latterly described position of faith, as it were, in the purely material universe:
I found it, at times, profoundly depressing. If there were no other reality, whence my point of comparison to find this world depressing? Certainly the material world does not teach the existence of an overarching benevolent reality. Chemistry and evolutionary theory do not teach it. History does not teach it. Economics does not teach it. Why the sense of smallness and loss? My mind and consciousness I felt to be larger than this entire cuckoo-clock of a mechanical universe. It is precisely because the consciousness of a single person has more real substance and value than the nuts and bolts of the material universe that the material universe will be felt to be intolerably constraining. If you have a friend and then compare that friend to an infinite number of senseless atoms, which is more valuable? The friend. If I was disturbed at the lack of apparent meaning, the sense of meaning must come from somewhere. Such a sense is not not evolutionarily beneficial and not even convenient to have: it actually gets in the way and can render the person hopeless ineffective. Such a sense is also ineradicable by experience apparently pointing to a meaningless universe. It is funny how few people really surrender to the evidence they cite: one can never quite make the final step to accepting meaninglessness in an utter, final sense. Unhappiness at it indicates non-acceptance of it. It was this sense that there was or ought to be a meaning and the insistent urge to discover that meaning that gave me the clue that the entire system of reality I had grown up with and been relentlessly taught was fundamentally wrong: all its elements were in a sense true but lacked a context. There was a play going on on the stage alright, but the play was not reality: the true reality comprised the actors, the theatre, the director, and the world in which the theatre existed.