The last census recorded that one in four Brits no longer identify with a religion, one of the most quantitative measures of our transition to a more secular society. Fewer of us follow a faith than ever before, and we are one of several industrial nations at this juncture.  We now have two choices: either replace a religious world view with a scientific perspective or an uninspired apathy.  I hope to show that losing our religion does not mean losing our sense of purpose, awe, morality or indeed anything at all.  I hope that in the future we will neither lapse into apathy or back into faith, but will endeavour to see the true beauty and mystery of our lives through the clear lens of science.

Perhaps the main reason for worshiping god(s) is to thank them for creating such an amazing world.  Looking at the complexity of life, the distant stars and the nurturing light of the sun, we find ourselves in a justified state of wonder.  Taking this country’s largest religion; Christianity, as an example we find a god only willing to take credit for and describe one very small corner of creation.  No hints are given as to how the universe began, whether or not there are other solar systems, other intelligent beings, and we are kept in the dark about such magnificent things as galaxies, black holes, supernovae, nebulae, quasars and all the other beautiful and strange forms that other planets, solar systems and stars can take.  There is no suggestion of the existence of a multiverse and we are led to believe we are alone.  The small aperture through which religion shows us the world leads us to believe in a poorer, smaller and less diverse universe than we actually inhabit. 

But at least religion is poetic in its descriptions of its small world.  The notion of us as divine created beings, made in the image of a god is surely preferable to science’s description of a heap of chemicals in a messy self-replicating dance.  However, as I’ll further explain later, science can inspire more poetic descriptions of Humans and the world than religion could ever manage, because it knows more and is in some ways more open to interpretation than holy texts.  Instead of being made from dust (as was Adam) we can look further back to where the atoms of the Earth came from.  The young stars of our universe only contained hydrogen and helium, which have to be fused together to create the larger atoms like carbon and oxygen which are essential for life.  So from a scientific perspective, the dust God made Adam from was either stardust or nuclear waste.  Both are true.  Regardless, the image of the atoms now in your body, being born in bursts of light at thousands of degrees within a star is, in my view, more exciting and more aggrandising than for us to believe we have come from simple dust.

And then there is the numinous: moments of non-rational awe and complete bafflement at what we experience of external reality – the experience of a power higher and separate from Human power.  Historically, the numinous has lived in religion’s territory, but I see no reason it should remain there today.  We can’t deny when looking at art, listening to powerful music or viewing a landscape that we feel something which seems to transcend material existence and Human inspiration.  I couldn’t tell you why or even be sure if we evolved to find beauty in landscapes.  At times it does feel as if there is something more, something beyond explanation.

The mistake our civilisations have made so far is attributing these phenomena to something divine or mystical, when there is as much reason to do this as there is to praise your next-door neighbour for the sunset.  While there may be parts of experience which will always be beyond the reach of science, this is no excuse to jump to religious conclusions.  Many agnostic scientists actually do believe in other realms of reality beyond our familiar physical.  For example, Max Tegmark believes that physical reality is an illusion and that we live in one of an infinite number of mathematical structures, while Edward Frenkel believes in a “wholly other realm” in which exist some of the unphysical phenomena which appear to interact with physical reality.  In fact, Wadham College’s Roger Penrose also believes there is something mysterious about the relationships between our perceived mathematical, physical and mental realities – each of which present themselves as if they have emerged from one of the others.  Penrose believes that mathematics has its own platonic existence. 

So it isn’t unscientific to speculate about the mysteries of reality yet, and neither must it be mystical.  Science isn’t merely the facts on the table and the best theories of today, but a guided imagining to be tested by tomorrow’s experiments.  However, there are times at which not even the most mysterious and beautiful things, physical or not, fail to move us.  At these times, even today, science with all its predictive power would seem incapable of helping us.

The times at which we most need religion are death and grief.  I’ll admit that as a boy I would often pray to God for things to turn out fine.  I’m sure most of us have pleaded in such selfish ways to whatever supernatural guardian we thought was listening.  But selfless belief is most often resurrected by the most difficult Human phenomenon to understand: death.  When a person we are close to dies we will be found, most likely, in a church singing hymns and praying at a funeral.  Our sadness that the person we were so happy to have known now no longer exists can only be consoled by the promise that they are still alive and with us, but in a different form.  Most religions do this by promising an afterlife, while assuring us that we should not fear death because we will join our loved ones when we die.

You may wonder how science could offer any greater comfort than eternal afterlife, regardless of its believability.  You may be surprised to find that, supplanting holy books, an alternative comfort can be found in reading Relativity, by Albert Einstein. 

One of the most interesting ideas from Einstein’s studies was a novel way of thinking about space and time.  In our experience they are distinct phenomena, but are in reality part of one fabric: space-time.  In Einstein’s universe, time doesn’t flow but we feel as if we flow through it.  Time is a fourth dimension different to the three spatial ones but just as unchanging.  This means that while your brain only experiences around three seconds of time at once, you exist at all times from when you became conscious in your mother’s womb until your death.  Max Tegmark likens Human beings to four dimensional trees in space-time.  This is easy to explain if we first think about a simpler system than a whole Human and instead look at the earth and the moon.  If we make them two dimensional and view them as time flows, then we see the moon circling the Earth, however if we treat time as the third dimension we see the moon as a twisting cylinder and the Earth as a straight cylinder in 3D space-time.  This is how the Earth and moon really are, but in four dimensions.  A Human looks like a tree in this perspective, with atoms flowing into your body before birth like roots, twisting together in a complex dance during your lifetime before spreading out into the world again after you die, like branches and leaves. 

Science doesn’t define a Human as an object, but as a process.  The atoms in your body are completely replaced every eight years so that not a single atom from your birth is part of you today.  A wave on a pond seems to move across the water over time, but in reality the atoms at each point on the wave’s path are just bobbing up and down.  The atoms in the wave at its beginning stay where they are and none of them move with the wave to its resting place.  Just like us, the wave isn’t matter, it is the interaction of matter.  The dropping of the stone into the pond is the wave’s birth, and its dissipation is its death. 

Personally, I find it more interesting and comforting to see people as ever changing processes – processes which are never born and never die, but always exist as a beautiful tree like structure in space-time.  When someone we know dies it means we have found the end of the section of time in which our lives overlapped.  We should be happy that they overlapped at all and take comfort in the fact that we will always be together somewhere in time.  This new perspective means that every good, bad and indifferent event in your life will always exist and is not erased by the illusion of flowing time.  This is perhaps an incentive to make as many moments of your life ones you’ll be happy to record.  While God may forgive you for an empty life as long as you submit to him before death, Einstein’s time neither forgives nor forgets. 

Perhaps the last preserve of religion is moral teaching.  You will certainly never hear a scientist commenting on morals in a professional capacity will you?  Yes.  In the early 1980s, embarrassed that his book The Selfish Gene had been so widely misread that it had helped Thatcher win the election, New College’s Richard Dawkins made a programme called Nice Guys Finish First.  In the program, morality was explained by evolution, as most behaviours can be.  Computer simulations were run in which groups of nice, nasty, revengeful and random ‘animals’ interacted.  The animals which survived best in the simulations were those which were altruistic and so did favours for others, but which would resent other animals who cheated.  These animals would then pass their ‘genes’ onto the next generation.  In fact, we don’t need a computer to see that altruism and an ingrained moral code must have helped Humans to survive and indeed have continued to help us thrive as a cooperative civilisation.  Science shows that in most groups, it pays to be altruistic and to act morally – not from fear of hell, but from the knowledge that we were made this way because it helped us succeed.  Interestingly, aside from small variations, religions carry the same moral message and almost all have anthropomorphic gods.  This has been more succinctly put by Balliol’s Christopher Hitchens that ‘man made God in his image’.  I would add that we also taught God his morals. 

I should close by reassuring those of a religious disposition that I don’t intend to interfere with your perspectives.  This is an article for those who have left religion and are looking, as we all do, for meaning.  As I hope you’ll agree, leaving a religion is not a reason to live a more cynical or empty life.  In fact, if a scientific view of life is taken, a much richer one can be lived.  Science offers more.  More explanations, deeper insight and the most precious of all things to the Human mind: a sprawling future of new questions. 

Editor of the online magazine, Spiked, and regular columnist with publications as varied as the Big Issue and The Spectator, Brendan O’Neill is no stranger to controversy. With a ‘telling-it-like-it-is’ attitude, he speaks his mind freely, and without pretense. Nothing is off-limits, nothing is sugarcoated and rather than “a right to offend”, in his latest appearance at the Oxford Union, O’Neill went a step farther – arguing for a “duty to offend”, and be offended. Freshly primed, always ready to pounce on the latest ‘student activist’ preaching in “posh cut-glass tones”, O’Neill was very forthcoming about his views. And, with Oriel’s recent decision concerning the statue of Cecil Rhodes, our exchange could neither have been livelier, nor could it have come at a more pivotal time.  

Commenting on the ‘safe space’ trend that has been sweeping across campuses up-and-down the country, O’Neill observes how it has been “growing for quite a while now; perhaps for twenty years or more.” The telltale signs were evident, but only now has it reached a fever pitch. The situation has “weirdly intensified over the last couple of years” he explains, “we seem to have a new intake of students on campus who arrogantly, narcissistically believe that they have the right to go through their three or four years of university life without ever hearing a word or an idea that challenges their belief system.

“There’s been a lot of [media] coverage over the last year in particular about the censoriousness of student leaders and the insanity of student unions who want to ban hats and newspapers and songs and everything else.” 

Picking up on this theme of “backwardness”, we quickly moved into a discussion about media presentation, and whether or not the press really had ‘the full scoop.’ In other words – to what extent were such depictions misunderstandings, or even willful misrepresentations.

“The media is now giving a skewed impression that all students are like this” says O’Neill, “Perhaps they’ve pushed the boat out too far because, to my mind, when I go to campuses – as I do quite a lot – I’m always struck that most students are still very normal. Most think that freedom of speech is still a pretty good idea. They either dislike their unions or just have nothing to do with them.” With a 14.2 per cent turnout in the most recent OUSU election back in November, some would argue that such claims are not too far wrong. Those other students, the four-fifths or more that chose not to cast a vote, are what O’Neill term “the silent majority”; the ones who “are not offered opinion pieces in the Guardian.”

Keen to disparage against “tarring all students with the same brush” O’Neill warned against two things: one, the media, who “always on the lookout for something scandalous and sexy” and two, “neo-colonialist” student activists; “shameless self-promoters” and spin-merchants in their own right. Neither of these groups do justice by students, argues O’Neill.

Likening student activists to Mary Whitehouse, “an old social conservative from the 60s and 70s who wanted to ban everything”, O’Neill writes off the ‘countercultural left’ as being “deeply conservative, deeply Victorian [and] deeply regressive.” To this end, he does not recognise any of these activities as “being left wing.” Rather, they stultifying and authoritarian.

Posing the question of an ‘educative’ intent behind these campaigns, of their self-professed desire to enlighten and raise awareness, O’Neill is broadly dismissive. “I think it’s about elitist campaigners cutting themselves off from the rest of society and distancing themselves from the average person”, he responds.

“And so, that’s why I think they’ve developed their own language, which makes absolutely no sense to the man or woman on the street. That’s why they’re constantly fretting about the impact of tabloid newspapers on peoples’ mushy minds; why they are suspicious of mainstream pop music – which they think is sexist – and why they hate big corporations and McDonalds, and all these other things. They’re constantly thinking: ‘how can I demonstrate my moral, ethical superiority to everyday society?’ It’s not about educating the public; it’s about expressing contempt for the public. They really fear and loathe ordinary people – and that’s normally the case with people who want to censor things.” 

Yet, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction; or at least, so the saying goes. To hang the ‘student left’ out to dry would not only be unfair, but underhand, too. The rise of the ‘safe space’ has been matched, if not in scale, then in character and scope, by contiguous ‘right-wing spaces.’ Of course, I am referring to the likes of Open Oxford, and what it has, as of late, devolved into – a suitable counterpoint to the excesses of ‘the Stepford Student.’ O’Neill expresses a worry that those who are against safe spaces, “which is a very reasonable position to hold, are effectively creating their own safe spaces where you can be as knowingly offensive, as knowingly disgusting and as knowingly misogynistic, as you want.” This is “an infantile response” scoffs O’Neill, “it brings to mind Frankie Boyle, and those ridiculous, offensive, unfunny jokes of his.” But it all comes back to the same motif: the need to try and “wriggle free of the politically correct straitjacket of modern times.” 

Unfortunately, there are now “two firmly entrenched camps; one which says we don’t like offensive material and we’re going to ban it, and the other which says, ‘because you’re banning offensive material, we are going to be as offensive as possible just for the hell of it.’ And, it’s just completely vacuous and empty and nonsensical.”  That is the negative side to all of this.

As a solution to the problem, O’Neill argues, “the whole of university just needs to be an open, free arena, where anything can be said and anything can be discussed. Creating special zones in which things can be debated is divisive and actually reproduces the idea that there are some ideas that are so dangerous that they need, and must, be kept in their own little space.” Newly founded organisations then, like the ‘LSE Speakeasy’ – a clever play on words of Prohibition-era liquor stores – has the right idea, but the wrong end of the stick in practice.

To the point of discrimination and inequality, again O’Neill proposes a clear and simple programme: free speech. No censorship. No privileging of voices. No advocacy work. Only individuals, treated equally. Let those who wish to speak, speak. And for those who do not speak, that is their decision – one cannot, and should not, assume their voices. “There should just be an open sphere… there’s nothing stopping you from speaking, that’s the whole idea of free speech.”

There exists “this horribly paternalistic approach of putting a soapbox in front of ‘the poor little people’ and helping them stand on it and speak to the world,” adds O’Neill. “I mean, get over yourselves. I think it’s a horrible argument. The aim for radical politics in the past was for those sorts of people – particularly women and working-class people – to force their own way into public life; that’s what Second Wave Feminism was about in the 60s and 70s. It was about saying, ‘Actually! Women are perfectly capable of negotiating independent, public lives without needing chaperons or without needing police guarding them from wolf whistles and everything else, so we’re going to do it.’” Now, what we have instead contends O’Neill, is “a complete flip-reversal…a new type of radical feminist, who say that women aren’t really cut out for public life because it’s scary and society is full of lads who listen to Robin Thicke and want to touch your ass.”

The final part of our interview dealt with Rhodes Must Fall. When asked about what progress has or has not been made with a view to BME movements, O’Neill brushed off this terminology – “Aw man, I hate the term BME.” It’s too contrived, too unnatural – and actually inverts the original intent. O’Neill coins it “an inhumane turn of phrase to describe someone.” Rather, “the people that are doing the most damage to black students” are of that aforementioned ‘altruistic’ variety – the white middle-class, well-to-do and educated, who “infantilise” black students, ascribing to them “a lesser form of moral agency than white students.” With specific regard to Rhodes Must Fall, O’Neill commented on how “they are essentially saying that [black students] are psychically vulnerable that they cannot walk past a statue without feeling harmed by it.”

Such activities sooner hinder the cause of anti-racism, than help it, urges O’Neill. These activists are the ones promoting racial division, by “arguing that because of their culture or their heritage, [black students] are less prepared for robust public debate than others. I find that a repulsive idea, and the problem that I have with Rhodes Must Fall is not that I think Cecil Rhodes was a great guy; of course he wasn’t – it’s because it is so paternalistic to minority students, and it gives this impression that they are simply objects shaped by the forces of history, harmed by statues, whose everyday lives are impacted upon by historical events. It’s all very deterministic. And, in the past, old racists argued that black people were weak or stupid or fickle on the basis of their biological heritage.

“I don’t think it’s much of a step forward from that for campus activists to say that black students are fickle and weak and easily harmed, on the basis of their cultural heritage,” points out O’Neill. “It’s the same argument, it’s just been given a bit more spit and polish to make it politically correct to a contemporary audience.”

Hypothesising, putting himself “in the position of a black student” O’Neill decries “so-called anti-racist activists who are basically patronising, paternalistic white kids who’ve read too much Noam Chomsky and should be given a slap.”