Here I ask your indulgence in a foray into my private life. When Christians find out that I’m not one any more, they generally assume one of two things: either that I never really had those experiences, or else that I went through a rough patch in my life and blamed God for it. The first assumption is false. The second is about half true — I did suffer depression for quite some time, but the connection with the change in my beliefs is not as direct as it might first seem.

My immediate family were, and still are, Evangelical-shading-to-Pentecostal. I grew up believing what they believed, and as I got older, it became more important to me. How much this was due to my Asperger’s syndrome (then undiagnosed) and consequent loneliness at school, I’m not sure. I do know that I often felt angry at the people around me, and I sometimes expressed these feelings in ways that then made me feel guilty, because a real Christian would have forgiven. Additionally, at ten years old I was just beginning to be aware of my own sexuality; from the silence of the adults in my life on the topic, and the intense embarrassment they displayed when it was raised, I concluded that proper Christians didn’t think about that sort of thing either. It never occurred to me that the problem might be my own tender years.

At a Christian youth camp when I was almost eleven, I decided that if Jesus wanted to deal with this guilt instead of me, which was after all what we were being taught, I would turn it over to him. I remember my emotions following this decision: an intense feeling of peace, a heightened sense of God’s love for me, and an impression, rather difficult to convey, that I was part of a much bigger reality which transcended the little world of my immediate surroundings. From then on, I considered that moment to have been the beginning of my Christian life. People who have not encountered the Evangelical tradition may find this strange, since I had grown up in a Christian home, but it is central to Evangelical doctrine that you are not a proper Christian until you have personally signed your life over to Jesus and had a born-again experience.

My church was a “charismatic” one, given to prophecies, speaking in tongues, and the like, and this was especially true of the youth group, which for some years was almost the entirety of my social circle. I spoke in tongues frequently, and at times manifested more striking works of God, including what we rather over-dramatically referred to as being “slain in the Spirit”, which is to say I passed into an ecstatic trance and fell to the floor.

We were taught to pray regularly. This didn’t just mean talking to God; you also had to listen. God knew your thoughts, so you didn’t have to pray out loud. And, sure enough, God also answered in your thoughts, in the “still small voice” of I Kings 19:11–12. At first he told me all kinds of things, with dazzling specificity, but as time went by and most of the very impressive messages turned out to have been either Satan or my imagination, God seemed to become wiser and more reserved. Naturally, I put this down to “Christian growth”, as we called it — God made you a better Christian little by little, and that’s what he was doing with me. It had to be me getting better at listening, because God couldn’t be changing. I am no stranger to that feeling of absolute assurance of faith in Christ, nor to the intense desire for something beyond the mundane, to be satisfied (it is said) only by union with God in heaven. Turning away from these things was once as unthinkable to me as it is to any Christian reader.

My mother teaches high school biology, and my family are theistic evolutionists. As a small child I was fascinated by dinosaurs, and later I developed a similar interest in monkeys and apes. I read everything about both that I could get my hands on. Given the former’s long extinction and the latter’s relation to humans, I could hardly help becoming quite well-informed about evolution. Nevertheless I became a creationist at twelve. I’m sure I would have been deeply affronted if someone had suggested that this was my chosen mode of adolescent rebellion against my parents, but, in retrospect, that’s exactly what it was. Be that as it may, my new views made my old interests difficult to maintain. At every turn of a page I’d see another reference to evolution, and it would irk me. Yes, I’d think, but how do you know? Mightn’t there be another explanation entirely? And I’d stop reading for a while to formulate that alternative explanation...

So at seventeen I switched my academic focus from the classics to the sciences, especially biology and geology, the latter being my major when I began university in 1996. I quickly discovered that there was a very good answer to the question “How do you know?” But the habit of questioning received wisdom, once formed, cannot be comfortably stifled. I applied it to the creationism it had sprung from, which blew away like straw on the wind; but I was not satisfied. I began to fixate on philosophical questions on eternity and morality, and to research the history of the Bible (especially the Gospels).

Meanwhile, I still had Asperger’s syndrome, and still didn’t know it. Somehow, every new group of friends realized, as my high school peers had, that there was something not quite right about me. I knew I had trouble interacting with people, but I didn’t know why or what to do about it. I prayed about it, and I confessed every sin I could think of that might be the cause, but the trouble continued. Lonely, confused, and loveless, I fell deep into depression, and that raised further questions. God allowed suffering to make you a better person, but I was patently not a better person when I was depressed. I was self-absorbed, infectiously gloomy, and even more shut in than usual. What was going on?

When in doubt, go to the library. I sought solace, and answers, in books. Four in particular stand out in my memory. In Terry Pratchett’s Carpe Jugulum, against all expectation, I found a mirror:

       Oats dropped the book into his pocket and grasped his medallion thoughtfully. After four years of theological college he wasn’t at all certain of what he believed, and this was partly because the Church had schismed so often that occasionally the entire curriculum would alter in the space of one afternoon. But also—
       They had been warned about it. Don’t expect it, they’d said. It doesn’t happen to anyone except the prophets. Om doesn’t work like that. Om works from inside.
       —but he’d hoped that, just once, Om would make himself known in some obvious and unequivocal way that couldn’t be mistaken for wind or a guilty conscience. Just once he’d like the clouds to part for the space of ten seconds and a voice to cry out, “YES, MIGHTILY-PRAISEWORTHY-ARE-YE-WHO-EXALTETH-OM OATS! IT’S ALL COMPLETELY TRUE! INCIDENTALLY, THAT WAS A VERY THOUGHTFUL PAPER YOU WROTE ON THE CRISIS OF RELIGION IN A PLURALISTIC SOCIETY!”
       It wasn’t that he’d lacked faith. But faith wasn’t enough. He’d wanted knowledge.

Then Daniel C. Dennett’s Consciousness Explained drew to my attention a point that had never occurred to me before. I’d always thought of mind as being simply “other” than matter. There was the physical world, and then there were minds, which were little demi-worlds in themselves, linked by some kind of mystical gateway that, by God’s grace, reliably popped into existence in every human brain. Consciousness Explained convinced me, first, that this idea was no explanation of anything; second, that mind was something that happened, not something that was; and third, that mind was something brains did to satisfy biological needs, rather than some self-existent thinking substance. And it was that third point that really had me puzzled. God had no biological needs, or needs of any kind. How, then, did his mind work?

I tried to organize all these inconvenient thoughts into a coherent philosophy that worked out to Christianity in the end. It wasn’t working very well. Then I read Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, espousing scientific scepticism, not as a belief but as a method of arriving at beliefs. If your hypothesis doesn’t fit the facts, said Sagan, then, no matter how important it is to your self-esteem or your world-view, the only honest thing to do is to drop it.

And I did.

Are the religious experiences that I, and many Christians through the ages, have had, direct evidence for God, analogous to the daily first-hand experience of other human beings from which we all routinely deduce that there are minds besides our own? I’ve already made it clear that I don’t think so any more. Recent studies indicate that there is a strong genetic component to people’s susceptibility to such experiences. That, in itself, doesn’t prove that they aren’t a direct window on reality; there is also a genetic component to how well people see and hear. But people who can see agree on what they see, while people who have mystical experiences do not agree on what the experiences mean. People brought up Christian have mystical experiences of the Christian God; people brought up Hindu have mystical experiences of the Hindu gods; people brought up Buddhist have mystical experiences of “enlightenment”.

For the kind of Christian that I, at least, used to be, the explanation for this is that other religions are inadequate substitutes, if not demonic counterfeits, for the truth. That’s as may be, but how can anyone be certain which is the counterfeit and which the authentic truth? Most people have only been really committed to one faith, and those who have tried more than one invariably find their current spirituality the more satisfying — regardless of what they have exchanged for what. I have certainly found it so. These days, the feelings which once came when I thought about God and Jesus now arise when I contemplate the Universe and the variety of life on Earth. People of all different faiths and world-views report similar experiences. Of course I can’t be sure they are in fact similar experiences; as my own effort shows, these things are very difficult to describe with any precision. But, by the same token, no-one can be sure that people of the same faith have similar experiences. At any rate, those of us who feel like this from time to time, feel that we recognise one another’s state of mind when we try to express it. For want of a better word, I shall refer to it as Inspiration for the remainder of this article.

Peter Kreeft, following C. S. Lewis, presents an alternative argument for using Inspiration as evidence for God: the Argument from Desire. Inspiration often takes the form of an intense longing for something that we cannot fully articulate. Kreeft distinguishes between two kinds of desire: natural or innate desires (“food, drink, sex, sleep, knowledge, friendship and beauty”) and artificial, externally conditioned desires (“sports cars, political office, flying through the air like Superman, the land of Oz and a Red Sox world championship”). There are several differences between the two kinds of desire. For the “natural” desires, we recognise corresponding states of deprivation — hunger, thirst, sexual frustration, and so on — whereas “There is no word like ‘Ozlessness’ parallel to ‘sleeplessness’”. Natural desires are common to everybody, while artificial desires vary from person to person. Most importantly, Kreeft says, “the natural desires come from within, from our nature, while the artificial ones come from without, from society, advertising or fiction.” Once again, Essentialism rears its head; but here, we cannot reject the distinction as meaningless, because it can also be made without invoking such a “nature”. The “natural” desires are for things we really can’t do without, biologically speaking; the “artificial” desires are generally for unnecessary things, commonly means to other ends such as status or freedom.

Now, as Kreeft points out, the “natural” desires are always for things that really do exist. Even on purely biological grounds, we can surely see that a desire generally implies a need — we are seeking something that really is important for our survival. We wouldn’t get hungry if there were no such thing as food; we wouldn’t get lustful if there were no such thing as sex. Likewise, say Kreeft and Lewis, we wouldn’t get Inspired if there were no such thing as the supernatural.

Therein lies the flaw. There is not, in fact, such a “thing” as sex; it’s something we do, not something that is. Strictly speaking, there is no such “thing” as food, either. Raw materials only become food when they are deliberately processed for the purpose of being eaten. Whether a thing is food or not depends on whether we eat it, not on its existence in itself. Our capacity for hunger doesn’t prove that food exists; it proves that eating is a useful thing to do. Which gives us a whole new angle on the question: what does Inspiration prompt us to do?

Let’s answer that by asking another. What triggers Inspiration? When do we feel that it is, at least partially or temporarily, satisfied? C. S. Lewis’ life was dominated by Inspiration, and it is the subject of many of his writings, including his first published Christian work, The Pilgrim’s Regress. In the preface, he notes that it is aroused by beauty, whether natural or artistic (“the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves”). Lewis argues that the beautiful things that make us feel Inspired do not, in fact, satisfy the longing; the pleasure is in the desire itself. This, he asserts, makes Inspiration unique among desires, and here, I think, he is wrong. Sexual lust is also felt as pleasure, and, like Inspiration, is aroused by the very stimuli we seek to fill it. But let us consider beauty. What is beauty? Why does it make us feel the way it does?

In the work already cited and elsewhere, Lewis rejects the notion that beauty is to be identified with latent sexual pleasure. In Psycho-analysis and Literary Criticism he phrases it thus:

If we are disappointed at finding only sex where we looked for something more, then surely the something more had a value for us?... Poetry is not a substitute for sexual satisfaction, nor sexual satisfaction for poetry. But if so, poetical pleasure is not sexual pleasure simply in disguise. It is, at worst, sexual pleasure plus something else, and we really want the something else for its own sake.

Some common criteria for mate choice are not even restricted to human bodies. Symmetry, for example. Many species, including humans, are known to find symmetrical features more attractive than asymmetrical ones, and there is a sound evolutionary reason for this: disease is not at all likely to strike both sides of the body in exactly the same way, so symmetry is an excellent indicator of health, and therefore a reasonable sign of genes for a robust immune system. Having thus clearly arisen for sexual reasons, the human fondness for symmetry has become the foundation of visual aesthetics for every culture in the world. Every artificial object you will ever see, from a pin to a city-scape, was designed with symmetry in mind. But in the vast majority of cases, you don’t actually lust for them.

Of course sex is not the only need we have evolved with, and not all the sensations we appreciate as beautiful are sexual in origin. The emotional significance of some elements in music seems to hark back to the way we communicate with infants by tone of voice: high-pitched cadences are soothing, deep staccato notes are alarming. Beautiful landscapes are often those with healthy plant growth, which would indicate a bountiful food supply and plenty of water. Generally, “beautiful” stimuli can be related to our biology. Even so, this doesn’t account for the quality of Inspiration; why do these things make us long for something inexpressibly larger and more important than our everyday surroundings?

Art often seeks to capture Inspiration, but some art-forms do so more reliably than others. One particularly effective source of Inspiration is the kind of traditional story we call myth. Indeed, we often describe Inspiring ideas as having “mythic grandeur”. A few generalizations can be made about myths. Most set out to explain either why the universe is the way it is, or why it ought to be the way it is. Often, they do so by blurring the boundaries between conceptual opposites, such as life/death, earth/sky, human/beast; the goal is either to explain why the boundaries appear to be real, or to demonstrate why it would be bad if they weren’t real. Thus the dead come to life, and the living visit the dead; the sky is inhabited like the earth, and the earth’s inhabitants rise into the sky; beasts speak like humans and humans turn into beasts. In modern industrial society, we have a value system centred on material progress, and, like other value systems, it has spawned a mythology of its own, called science fiction. Our mechanized, computerized world gives us a new pair of conceptual opposites: person/machine — and, sure enough, the new mythology is full of creatures that straddle that boundary (as well as the much older tropes of sky travel and sky creatures). Finally, most myths describe the universe in social terms, with nature-spirits or gods or hyper-intelligent aliens, and most are quite strongly moralistic. These common features work together to make the laws of the universe appear to mirror the social world. Through myth we connect ourselves, the relationships we treasure, and our moral intuitions, to universal laws. Let us now ask: how precisely does this connection work in Christian thought?

I once believed that God spoke to me when I prayed to him, and I was far from alone in this. Many Christians, including many with far more maturity than me, identify some of the thoughts that occur to them as originating from God and not from themselves. Now, most people are familiar with the phenomenon of random ideas that pop up out of nowhere, and certainly mature adults would not seriously attribute them all to divine interference. So how do you tell when a thought is from God? There are a couple of tests. First, it must be in line with the church’s teaching, and (even more importantly, to Evangelicals) with the Bible. This of course is not proof by itself; an Evangelical Christian is quite likely to have Bible-prompted thoughts. What really makes the difference is whether the idea is clearly deeply wise and moral. Because, as I would once have explained, and as I have had Christians explain to me, I am not capable of such wisdom in myself. It has to come from God.

We can now see the thematic connection with some central elements of Christian theology. We have been sinful since Adam and Eve, and God has had to come and rescue us. We cannot achieve our own salvation, but must simply trust in God through Christ. The Scriptures are God’s own Word, breathed from on high, and automatically trump anything a human mind, however intelligent, might have produced. Moral behaviour consists of subjecting our own rebellious will to God’s command. He must increase, and we must decrease. In short, Christianity would have us constantly belittle, despise, and condemn ourselves to the glory of God. Speaking for myself, when I realized that God didn’t exist, my depression suddenly lifted — to my own great surprise. Since suffering was God’s way of making you the kind of person he wanted you to be, I had logically deduced that my continuing depression showed I was, in some way, not good enough for God yet. And the guilt induced by that belief had been a major cause of the depression itself.

At the same time, the very same premises mandate extremely arrogant behaviour towards those who disagree with Christian belief. After all, Christianity is not our wisdom, but God’s; therefore, those who reject it reject not merely us, but God. That is why Christianity places such a high value on unquestioning faith. That is why so much evil has been committed throughout history, in the name of Christ, against Jews and pagans and Muslims and witches and indigenous people and homosexuals. And that is why Christians tend to read any disagreement with Christianity, including, perhaps, this very article, as persecution. Christianity was especially persecuted in its early days, and defence mechanisms against that persecution became integral parts of its structure; see Matthew 5:10–12, for example. This kind of thing made perfect sense when Christians might be burned alive or fed to lions, and still does in places where they are imprisoned and tortured. But disagreement is not persecution, no matter how heated or contemptuous it gets.

C. S. Lewis wasn’t quite right to say that the longing feeling of Inspiration is never satisfied. We do, in fact, feel it to be satisfied, if briefly, during moments of communitas, the state of consciousness frequently experienced in group rituals or other situations where normal social order is suspended. We have met communitas earlier on in this series, in the context of prophecy (Part 4), and with regard to the mental illnesses that, according to some researchers, seem to result from a lack of it (Part 5). This is a step in the right direction, but as we don’t yet know the biological function of communitas, we’re not finished. We don’t yet have the synthesis of neurobiology, evolutionary psychology and cultural studies that we really need to scientifically investigate the nature of consciousness and answer our question. The guesses and hypotheses I hereby offer are therefore, at best, a starting-point for those with better resources at hand to form their own ideas.

Communitas is regularly experienced in ritual, especially those where participants are deeply immersed in their alternative rôles; as I mentioned in Part 4, it strengthens loves and friendships between those who share it. It has many parallels with the state of mind we call “falling in love” — they are both intense positive emotions, quite disproportional to the actual qualities of the beloved. Humans are a pair-bonded species, for reasons too complex to go into here, and human children take far more time and energy than most other young animals, even primates, to raise to maturity. Having chosen a mate and produced a child, it commonly makes more sense to stay with that mate and co-operate in the child’s upbringing than to seek for other partners who, however good carers they might hypothetically be, have no genetic interest in its survival... although that, of course, depends on just how bad a carer the true co-parent actually is. Communitas, likewise, allows us to commit strongly to the social group we share it with. We may surmise that it evolved partly as an incentive for group cohesion through trust-dependent relationships.

However, Inspiration goes further than this. It is implicit in art, myth, and ritual. Intuitively, these activities seem, in evolutionary terms, to be a waste of resources — shouldn’t we expect people who don’t bother with them, and just get on with the business of feeding and reproducing themselves, to out-compete us fools who spend so much time and energy on things that are not biologically useful? Perhaps not. Cultural anthropologists connect them with another activity, found in many other species besides our own: play.

Playing brings several benefits. As well as being crucial to both cognitive and motor development in young animals, it can function as an “all’s well” signal. Basically, to play is to act as if things were other than they are: as if your mother’s twitching tail were prey, as if an ordinary rock were prime real estate, as if your siblings were deadly predators. Needless to say, one cannot indulge in this sort of behaviour in situations of real danger, hence its use in signalling “all’s well”. Play is, in fact, the basis of behavioural flexibility, the advantages of which we discussed in Part 2. Naturally, so beneficial an activity carries a reward as an incentive: a pleasurable emotion we refer to as fun.

In our species, however, not all play is pure fun. Stories are verbal play, and myth is a kind of story. The conceptual-opposites pattern of myth is clearly a class of as if behaviour. And the motive for myth is not fun but Inspiration. Art, similarly, is play taken seriously. We pretend that a piece of stone is a god, or that a sheet of canvas is a beautiful landscape; some artists work for years on end bringing the pretence closer to reality. But the most serious kind of play is ritual. Myth provides a narrative structure on which to hang our understanding of the world we live in, and in ritual we enact that structure. As in play, we step into rôles quite different from our day-to-day persona, but ritual rôles are understood to be reflections of a deeper and more permanent reality. Thus a Roman Catholic priest pretends to be God forgiving sin and granting absolution, because he and his parishioners believe that God forgives sin, and the ritual of Confession puts this otherwise theoretical belief in the realm of the immediate and practical. Christians of nearly every stripe regularly pretend to ingest the flesh and blood of Christ. The precise degree to which this pretence approaches reality was once a killing matter, and remains contentious in some quarters.

So another factor favouring the evolution of communitas may be that it has had a dramatic effect on the human capacity to refigure our world. Ordinary play is all very well, but it is limited in scope because we do not devote much of our resources to it. Through myth and ritual, we may be Inspired to make much deeper changes to our environment, both technologically and socially. But this can’t be the whole story either; the connection between spirituality and survival, via innovation, is too tenuous to have provided a consistent selection pressure through human history.

We’ve already noted the similarity between communitas and the giddy intensity of romantic love; perhaps it’s time to introduce another parallel with both. Many people seek solace, enjoyment, or spiritual fulfilment, in mind-altering drugs. It doesn’t seem intuitively obvious that unfamiliar states of consciousness would necessarily be pleasurable, but people seem to find them so. Nor is this behaviour confined to people; cats are very fond of catnip, which appears to have a hallucinogenic effect on a majority of them, and many animals actively seek fermenting, alcoholic fruit in the appropriate season. What can the evolutionary advantage of this behaviour possibly be? For that matter, the brain readily generates dreams without pharmaceutical help during sleep. What are dreams for? Again, I can only guess, but, for what it’s worth, my guess is this: we need to disengage our brains from day-to-day reality once in a while to keep them in working order. The purpose of the brain is to allow us to behave in novel ways; perhaps it’s counter-functional to etch the patterns of the real world too deeply and fixedly into it. Humans, having particularly bloated brains, would then naturally need an extra large dollop of fantasy to stay sane. Perhaps.

Which, of course, raises a whole new objection to my argument against God. Suppose I’m right, and God doesn’t exist; what then? Arguably, if I convince people of the fact, I’m doing them a disservice by taking their healthy fantasy away. Where else am I going to find Inspiration — in the cold, hard, numerical factuality of science? Surely it’s absurd to expect a system whose core principle is rigorous adherence to real-world data to provide any opportunity to disengage from the real world. Surely you can’t get mythic satisfaction out of an enterprise based on debunking myths. Or can you?

Science has generated some pretty out-there ideas in its time, including the following, among many others:

• The sun, moon and planets are all mounted on revolving transparent crystal spheres.
• The world is round like a ball. Everything on the other side is upside down in relation to us, yet somehow things don’t fall off.
• The Earth is a planet and goes around the Sun.
• Everything in the world is made from combinations of four simple substances: earth, air, fire and water.
• The world was once inhabited by giant reptiles.
• Disease is caused by tiny, invisible animals.
• The Earth is hollow, with openings at the poles.
• The continents move; once upon a time they were all stuck together.
• Whether two different things happen at the same time or at different times depends on how fast you’re going.
• The ancestors of humans once lived in the water like seals.

In Part 1 we saw that all knowledge is provisional, and in Part 3 we argued that cherishing preconceptions over the truth is profoundly immoral. The scientific method, discussed near the end of Part 2, is based on these two propositions. In scientific experiments, it matters not a whit whether the hypothesis under consideration makes intuitive sense or fits any established orthodoxy; what counts is the real-world result. Does this open an unbridgeable abyss between science and other intellectual endeavours? Not at all. Cultural anthropologists likewise suspend their own cultural assumptions to immerse themselves in the world-view of the subject. Even art follows this principle: to draw accurately, we must set aside our knowledge of the “true” shapes of people and objects, and attend to the forms and textures actually in front of our eyes. The common thread to all three is the refusal to close one’s mind totally either for or against any proposition; the constant re-examination of learned assumptions in the face of new evidence. When I call myself a sceptic, this guarded openness of mind is what I’m referring to. In any form, it takes mindfulness, and patience, and a certain amount of both courage and humility. This is, quite appropriately, beginning to sound like some kind of spiritual meditation.

Scepticism can be boiled down to one basic rule: nothing is unquestionable. If you know something, then you must know it somehow; therefore, “How do you know?” is an applicable response to any statement. You can’t, for practical purposes, apply it to every situation in ordinary life, but when somebody presents you with something they want you to believe, you should at least ask that question until you get down to something you’re reasonably certain of. And even “reasonable certainty” should always be considered provisional.

Now, simply on the basis of this questionability rule, you can make a couple of deductions. First, Essentialism is not true. Essentialism, remember, is the theory that things have fixed, central “essences” or identities which cannot be analysed or pared down to anything more basic. So a chair is a chair because, well, that’s what a chair is, and there’s no more to be said. It’s a very seductive way of thinking, but it violates the questionability principle because it is simply a way to forestall questions without answering them. Second, there is no such thing as the supernatural — because, as we noted in Part 1, supernatural in practice means “not available for investigation by nit-picking sceptics”. It’s entirely possible — at least, it’s not unquestionably false — that the universe might turn out to contain things we are not accustomed to thinking of as natural. I’m pretty sure it contains human minds, for instance. But such things are capable of being discovered and investigated, and are, therefore, not supernatural.

To understand why things happen without recourse to Essentialism or the supernatural, we must reduce systems to their parts, then examine how those parts work together. This methodology, reductionism, is often criticized as cold and dismissive, not to say highly un-Inspiring. It need not be so. The core message of reductionism is that big things happen because of little things. If you look at it right, this is a mythic conceptual-opposites pair of the first water. One of the most Inspiring ideas of Christianity hangs on just such an opposition: the Humble God, the still small voice, the Creator of the Universe swaddled in a manger or riding a donkey-colt. Aren’t atoms and molecules, cells and chemicals, simple elementary forces, even humbler? Isn’t the spiritual irony of reductionism, with the great utterly dependent on the small, even more poignant?

Here is another element of the new spirituality: physicality is glorious. Peter Kreeft, I think, recognises this when he says “But what right do you have to call physical forces ‘mere’?” Unfortunately he also presents the opposite message, when he decries

...the dusty, dirty, smelly little dungeon of a universe that “Enlightenment” thought gave us: a universe in which love and beauty and praise and value are mere subjective fictions invented by the human mind, in which the only things that are objectively real are blind bits of energy randomly bumping into each other.

This should also answer those (many, I’m sure) who felt that my biological explanation of beauty would take all the magic away. Does it spoil our enjoyment of art to know that it is strongly connected with our enjoyment of sex? Not for me; in sex we enact the creation of life, ritually and, from time to time, literally. If sex strikes you as being perverted or sordid, chances are it’s because you’ve been brought up in a culture permeated by Augustinian prudery. Our other biological needs likewise should not be rejected as undignified. When we eat, to take just one more example, we transform the death of other creatures, plant or animal, into life. Those of us who get most of our food from supermarkets need reminding of that from time to time.

Speaking of life and death, what does happen to us after we die? If our consciousness is purely a function of the workings of our brains, then it follows that once our brains cease working in death, we will never be conscious again. I think part of the fear of death (besides the biological drive to avoid it) is the worrisome but muddled thought that we will be conscious — of endless nothingness. However, there is a sense in which we will keep living: in our posterity. Our genes are a key part of being us: the part that is a gift from our ancestors. We will in turn pass it on to our children. More personal still, however, is the posterity of our memes — our ideas, passing from us to those we interact with, through speech, through writing, just as genes pass on in reproduction. In a sense our brain patterns will continue. In a sense, our minds, or at least the elements of them, will survive; and in the same sense, we are still in contact with the spirits of our ancestors through their surviving memes.

Spiritual experiences are not necessarily illusory, and they’re certainly not worthless, but they don’t count as evidence that God exists. Yet, for that very reason, as I hope I have convinced you by now, they can fill our lives with meaning and satisfaction no matter what belief system they come attached to. It is perhaps too much to hope that this series will actually attract many believers to the dignity and serenity of the sceptics’ way. If I have strengthened the convictions of any who might have been wavering between faith and reason, I am content. But to anyone who sees God or belief in him as a rock to stand on, and atheism as a river, a torrent that may sweep away all you hold dear, I can only smile and say: “Come on in, the water’s fine.”

Last updated: 21 March 2007