No Satisfying Alternative to Religion? Try Reality.

On April 18^th, the New York Times published an article by Lauren Jackson called “Americans Haven’t Found a Satisfying Alternative to Religion”. It’s very long, but you can probably guess what she correctly lists as unsatisfying alternatives, failed attempts to fill the void of existential insecurity, the god-shaped hole: New Age “spirituality”, astrology, you know the kind of thing. She was kind enough to quote me, so I offer a brief response here.

I am sorry if there is, as she says, an “epidemic of loneliness”. But the remedy for loneliness is human fellowship, the warmth of real, live, flesh-and-blood companions and loved-ones; not prating in a vacuum to an imaginary friend for whose existence there is no vestige of serious evidence. Even an AI robot is better than that. At least ChatGPT exists, really talks back at  you, will actually hold a friendly conversation. But talk to the imaginary friend which is God (Allah, Virgin Mary, Lord Krishna, Thor, Zeus, Mithras, name yours) and the only reply you’ll get is conjured within your own imagination. You’ll be talking to yourself, which is really rather sad, and hardly an antidote to loneliness.

I feel I should qualify, even apologise for, the optimistic tone of what follows. Americans might feel anything but cheerful just at present. Of course I acknowledge this and sympathize. But it has nothing to do with the eternal cosmic angst that religion aspires to assuage, and which prompted Lauren Jackson’s search for alternatives. Moreover, I don’t want to downplay the anguish of the search, nor the epidemic of loneliness that she discerns, and I regret that I was a little facetious when she interviewed me on the telephone. My humorous frivolity went so far as to recommend golf as an alternative, and for this I apologise. I’m better at writing than speaking, so let me now try to express more seriously what I should have said to her. She began with a remorseful testament of her own loss of faith, so forgive me if I too bare my soul when I offer my personal non-religious alternative to religion.

There is joy in understanding, true joy, rising to little short of ecstasy. I suppose you could call it the poetry of reality. Peter Atkins concludes his lovely little book, The Creation, with a vision of the limitless future of science: “Complete knowledge is just within our grasp. Comprehension is moving across the face of the Earth, like the sunrise.”

You tumble into existence, open your eyes, come to consciousness, find yourself on a spinning sphere orbiting a nuclear furnace in one arm of a barred spiral galaxy, hurtling through spacetime alongside 300 billion galaxies. The fact that you exist at all is a piece of shattering good fortune. Not only did your parents chance to meet, not only did one particular sperm outrun 100 million rivals. The same massive luck attended every generation of your ancestors, back to a single Devonian fish and a greater distance beyond. Any slight deviation in what happened, anywhere, anytime, would have sufficed to throw your future existence off the conveyor belt of lucky contingencies. You certainly owe your existence to Julius Caesar, Napoleon, even Hitler, but less obviously to a humble peasant who didn’t sneeze at a crucial moment in some forgotten marital bed. You owe your life to a particular dinosaur, on a particular Jurassic day, who stumbled and failed to catch the ancestor of all the mammals. You are prodigiously lucky to be alive. So please stifle your entitled moaning. Revel in your own existence.

Not just your existence but the existence of others to share your world and sweeten your time in it: fellow voyagers to smile at you, laugh with you, hold your hand along the pilgrim’s way through your personal slice of time. You and I are privileged not only to be alive but to inhabit the twenty-first century when so much is already understood. We who live after Newton, Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein, and their legions of clever but lesser-known followers, we are blessed with the opportunity to know so much. But also to know what we do not know, and so experience the joy of curiosity, of constructive wonder, the buccaneering adventure of the restless mind.

Who needs New Age spirituality (“sound baths”, “energy healing”, “astrology”),who needs to thumb-suck under a mental comfort blanket, who needs gods, when reality is there for the taking?