…memories are not enough to sustain a faith. It was in my teenage years that believing finally became impossible; after I\u2019d learnt a little science, the meaning of creation in six days and conception by means of the Holy Ghost had to be understood metaphorically rather than literally, and once that was done, there was only God himself left. Although I carried on a fairly anguished one-sided conversation with Him for some time, the silence on His part was complete.<\/p>\n
Nowadays, I\u2019m as sure as I can be that there is nothing there. I think that matter is quite extraordinary and wonderful and mysterious enough, without adding something called spirit to it; in fact, any talk about the spiritual makes me feel a little uneasy. When I hear such utterances as \u201d\u02dcI\u2019m spiritual but not religious\u2019, or \u201d\u02dcSo-and-so is a deeply spiritual person\u2019, or even phrases of a thoroughly respectable Platonic kind such as \u201d\u02dcThe eternal reality of a supreme goodness\u2019, I pull back almost physically. I feel not so much puzzlement as vertigo, as if I\u2019m leaning out over a void. There is just nothing there.<\/p>\n
Consequently, the immense and complicated structures of Christian theology seem to me like the epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy \u201d\u201c preposterously elaborated methods of explaining away a mistake. When it was realised that the planets went around the sun, not the Earth, the glorious simplicity of the idea blew away the epicycles like so many cobwebs: everything worked perfectly without them.<\/p>\n
And as soon as you realise that God doesn\u2019t exist, the same sort of thing happens to all those doctrines such as atonement, the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, original sin, the Trinity, justification by faith, redemption and so on. Cobwebs, dusty bits of rag, frail scraps of faded cloth: they hide nothing, they decorate nothing and now they mean nothing.<\/p>\n