Within the frame of materialism, God does not exist, and if you remain within that frame (as our co-host did until the age of 26) then New Atheism is a compelling and comfortable philosophy. If there’s no evidence for it, no scientific backing for it, it’s meaningless because it can’t affect you.

But as you grow older you start to recognise that materialism is its own ism. It’s a model that is useful, so that gives it a powerful claim on our attention, but you start to notice its holes. Epistemology, for example - the question of how we know we know things - is something that materialists tend to ignore, but there is plenty of evidence that our senses are not reliable. Think of how a straight stick looks bent when you put it in a glass of water, and the implications of this. We have to accept that our knowledge of an object is separate from the object itself, that the map is distinct from the territory, but how can we define the relationship between these two separate things beyond the vague sense that it seems to work.

If you haven’t quite solved this problem of epistemology, there’s this gap. It’s a small gap, but it’s in your foundations and your entire belief system rests precariously on top of it. This is not satisfying. The fact that we have knowledge of the world is not certain. What next?

Another problem is that within the materialist frame of reference you have no “why”. Why should we act morally? What’s the point? Yes utilitarianism, yes pain is bad and pleasure is good, but really? There’s a gap between what logic dictates and what you feel deep down, and you can’t help but notice that when a society is run along utilitarian lines (the USSR for example) it’s horrible.

What is our telos - our goal, our end, our destination? What’s the point of orientation for us to navigate by? The religious answer, to this and to the problem of epistemology, is God, but God cannot exist in the materialistic sense. So perhaps we need to start thinking of God in a different way. Perhaps God is not a material phenomenon. Perhaps God, rather than the Creator we’re moving from, is the destination we’re moving towards.

Francis Fukyama says the end of history is us moving towards a telos - recognising that human beings have inherent worth, ascribing value to the ideas of charity, grace and love as better than domination, exploitation and cruelty. The pre-Christian world contained immensely ethically sophisticated people, but none of them ever questioned the rightness of slavery. A belief in equality is new, and while we might chafe against its excesses it has led to an unbelievable flourishing of humanity over the last thousand of years. This belief, based on Christian teachings, has no material basis, but it has had material outcomes in the fact that everything has been getting better for a long time. A non-materialist belief has materialist outcomes.

This unjustified belief, this set of ideas, intuitively seems right and it takes us as a civilisation in a certain direction. A good direction. Perhaps God is an idea we share, an end state that we’re implicitly aiming for in what we do. Perhaps God is the telos, a telos that becomes more refined, more good, as civilisation develops. And in developing this telos, in some ways we could say that we are building God. The Creator, created.