Why Atheists Keep Finding God (in everything) - Alex O’Connor (4K)

He says he’s become less comfortable being “militant” about positions on God, consciousness, and foundational philosophy, because he doesn’t think his confidence should track anything like certainty on those topics; he also says he prefers calling himself an agnostic now.

He claims philosophy doesn’t “progress” like physics because it isn’t about establishing unrefutable consensus; instead, it’s about clarifying intuitions and is often overtaken by experience, citing cases where major thinkers pivoted after mystical experiences.

He emphasizes that consciousness is the starting point of all inquiry—everything is mediated through experience—so attempts to study or define it run into a self-referential problem (“trying to point a flashlight at the flashlight”), and he calls it literally impossible to define precisely.

He argues science is fundamentally descriptive (regularities, mathematical structure, behavior) rather than a source of “what-it-is” substance claims, using gravity as an example: Newton describes how gravity behaves while refusing to speculate on its essence.

He says “materialism” is hard to defend because once you ask what matter actually is (beyond dispositions/behaviors), the “substance” becomes unclear; he suggests the foundational nature of reality may be inaccessible to scientific methods as such.