As proposals are released to build atheist temples across the UK, Holly Brentnall explores the idea that lab coats could be exchanged for clerical vestments, as social science provides the moral and social supplements for atheists in need. Is it not beauteous to think that we are the product of stardust, carried on the infinite wake of a violent explosion originating at one single point of concentrated matter? From the Big Bang onwards we evolved and spread like bacteria in a Petri dish, premising the inevitable chaos of our sociality. Now, as we are born upon the fluctuating slipstream of cosmopolitan society, striking individualism intercepts vibrant traditionalism and accumulates as a glistening froth of cultural variability. The two products of human activity persistently taking stance at the forefront of this cascade
are science and religion. The possibility of atheism and religion existing harmoniously is greatly inhibited by virulent opposition of advocates of the two. Richard Dawkins, the most prominent atheist of our times, condemns religion as “the brain virus of faith,” reading aloud hate-mail from reproachful Christians with scorn and contempt. The sociologist Emile Durkheim compared the evolution of religion to a delirium: “The more it develops the more it eludes observation and the possibility of treatment”. Similarly, Sigmund Freud construed religion as the universal neurosis, keeping the population in a perpetual child-like state of illusion and serving only to hamper the development of the promising young buds of reality-based science. In the 19th Century, J. G. Frazer went to arduous lengths documenting the beliefs and practices
of every pre-recorded ‘primitive’ society, culminating in the beautifully written but nonsensical work The Golden Bough. In it he sets out an evolutionary model, according to which religion and magic are merely superstition and error, whilst science is the most advanced stage humanity can reach.
Is Science the New Religion?