“We are spirits in a material world,” goes the bestselling rock album from the early ’80s.

And while the spiritual aspect of this lyric might be difficult for many skeptics to pin down, there’s plenty of hard evidence supporting the material part.

The most recent example involves a 38-year-old Texas atheist who wants to be a U.S. military chaplain.

Jason Heap, a religious scholar and an avowed humanist, applied recently to become a chaplain with the U.S. Navy, saying he wants to serve his country and his fellow man.

While the Navy has yet to respond, Heap contends he’s an earnest applicant. He holds a master’s degree from Texas Christian University’s Brite Divinity School and another from Oxford University, where he studied ecclesiastical history. He’s passed a physical, so his flesh is good. And he has the endorsement of the Humanist Society, an organization founded by former Quakers in pursuit “of a genuine union between science and ethics,” according to their website.

Heap says he’s qualified to minister to the spiritual needs of military men and women — needs acknowledged by the military which employs 2,884 chaplains representing 81 religions.

But none of those chaplains is listed as a humanist because humanism — atheism — is not a religion. It’s the exact opposite. It’s the absence of religion. As in, “Have you no faith?”

No, Heap has no faith. As a humanist, he is an atheist. And as the old saying goes, there are no atheists in foxholes.

Men and women of the cloth talk about a common experience that led them to ministry. They describe “the calling,” a beckoning to their spirit that drew them into a life of service to God and his flock of faithful. Catholics use the word “vocations” to describe the experience in the heritage of Jesus calling fishermen and tax collectors to follow him.

By contrast, a humanist can’t claim he was called into ministry, not even as a chaplain. Heap’s declaration of nonfaith disqualifies him for most pastoral careers; but government, unlike church, professes to be an equal-opportunity employer — except maybe when it comes to hiring chaplains, which makes this an interesting test case.

Heap sounds earnest in his desire to serve, perhaps as a counselor to enlisted men and women, or to veterans.

But not as a chaplain. It’s an absurd position, when you dwell on it: Humanists like Heap are deceiving themselves in a belief either that the individual spirit is the center of one’s own universe (sounds a lot like a religion); or, that there is no such thing as spirit, in which case a humanist has no business applying for a chaplaincy in the first place.

It’s a material world, indeed. To paraphrase an old Navy slogan, Heap’s not looking for a spiritual adventure, just a job.