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The title is ironic. "Faith" often means a firm belief in something that is impossible to demonstrate. My belief system is not that absolute: it is based on a series of provisional understandings of the universe and my place in it that are open to change.

Everything changes (except change). Some things change faster than others. There is no such thing as stasis. Without change, the universe, the solar system, the earth, and all its diverse life-forms would never have come into existence.

This now seems like a truism, obvious for all to see. But there was a time when some things, like mountains or diamonds, did not seem to change; they had been there apparently for ever. Even things that moved, like the sun, moon and stars, appeared to perform some endless cyclic dance. The earth we stood on seemed solid, immovable, eternal.

Now we have a different understanding: over the past few hundred years, all these impressions have been shown to be false illusions. Even the "building blocks" of matter (itself a misleading image), the atoms and sub-atomic particles, have been shown to be whizzing around at incredible speeds, and the universe expanding at a similarly mind-boggling rate.

Yet there is among many humans a yearning to deny these phenomena. Knut-like, they seek to create some things that do not change, like God and the immortal soul. They invent ingenious ways of reconciling this with change, like reincarnation and life after death. Why?

FEAR OF DEATH

An essential aspect of the change that brought us into being is death. Without it there would be no evolution. Whether or not you regard this as progress is another debate, but it is responsible for the change from simpler organisms to more complex ones, with the human bodymind being the most complex yet known. (Incidentally, it is interesting to speculate as to why, if God created life on earth, s/he/it left it at the stage of single-celled organisms for two billion years before allowing it to start evolving into something more complex; but I suppose if you've got infinity to play with, time doesn't mean much!)

But at the same time all organisms struggle, as far as they are capable, to survive, at least long enough for their genes to be passed on. Fear of death is a natural instinct, by no means confined to humans, but it runs counter to the evolutionary imperative that we must all die. Because of our more complex make-up, we humans need not only to pass on our genes, but also to stay alive for much longer than other species to support the next generation until it can survive without us.

Reinforcing this need is the social intelligence, evolving alongside group interdependency, that enabled us to develop as we have done with highly sophisticated communication skills, whereby older members of the community can pass on skills and knowledge to the next generation, even after their reproductive function has effectively finished.

So there is a fundamental contradiction at work: we don't want to die, but know in our heart of hearts that we must. I believe that this contradiction is responsible for the development of concepts like the immortal soul, life after death, and reincarnation; and that they are, to put it bluntly, wishful thinking. I don't know how those who believe in them imagine communication can take place without the brain, eyes, tongue, etc. that we use while alive; I certainly can't.

MAPS OF THE WORLD

I do accept that "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy", or at least than I can easily explain, such as a collective unconscious and serendipity; but that does not at all mean that the only possible explanation of these things is the existence of God.

Whatever exists (including concepts such as God and the metaphysical, as well as our knowledge of ourselves) is perceived by our senses, and understood to a greater or lesser extent by the accumulated genetic and cultural influences that make up our "map" of the world. Over the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, many fascinating models of the world and our place in it have emerged. Significantly to me, monotheism seems only to have developed since the Iron Age, alongside class society, the patriarchy and the suppression of the feminine. The Old Testament is a pretty graphic description of this process.

I think the increasing failure of human social organisation - religious and/or political - to cope at all adequately with the complexity of life on earth, resulting in massive poverty, starvation, war and environmental destruction (including an as yet unknown level of extinction of other species) is clear evidence that we have a very long way to go before reaching even a minimal understanding of our place in the universe, let alone of how to deal with these problems in practice.

Despite the efforts of many well-intentioned theists, I have no confidence in the ability of established belief-systems, most or all of which were founded well before the most recent acceleration in technological "progress" (if that is the right word for it!), to begin to tackle these immense challenges. Indeed, many of these belief-systems, especially if you include various distortions of Marxism, have actively contributed to the problems. (Nor do I have any faith in the blithe illusion that science will somehow solve them eventually; but that's another debate!).

LOOKING FOR "GOD"

As for God: I enjoyed Sunday school as a child, and liked the Bible stories; but they remained on a level with other stories, that is, fiction or myth, not necessarily to be taken as literal. That does not detract from their value as myth or "parable", which was of course one of Jesus' favourite ways of putting across a moral message. Many committed Christians rarely take every word of the Bible as fact: indeed they would have difficulty in doing so, since it contains conflicting accounts of every major matter from the creation of the world to the birth and death of Jesus, as well as several different gods.

I still believe in some of Jesus' teachings - especially his emphasis on love, his pacifism and contempt for the amassing of material wealth - but again, this does not require a belief in God.

I clearly remember lying awake at the age of eleven looking for this "God" people kept talking about and not finding him; and I have never had any reason to alter that view since. As I grew older, the humanist influence of Bertrand Russell, Jacob Bronowski, George Orwell, and the Huxleys became the most convincing to me. The burning issues of the day were the Bomb and capital punishment: my view then and now was that if you pretend to be a Christian you must be against them; yet, with some honourable exceptions, the campaigns against them were not led by the established church, but by these atheists and agnostics. They taught me always to question those in authority and their motives, while the dominant attitude among established religions is quite the opposite: to accept without question the dogma handed down from above.

It is this fundamental difference that reinforces my atheism; for, however you might conceive of God on a metaphysical level, there are always the popes, bishops, ayatollahs etc. on hand to impose their - often all-too-human - interpretation of God's will! My own view is that if there were a superhuman being capable of creating the universe as we know it (so far), (a) we would be utterly incapable of comprehending it, and (b) it would be utterly uninterested in the activities of such an infinitesimally insignificant and destructive life-form as we are.

My earlier influences were reinforced, first by Marx's analysis of the role of religion in the development of class society, then by feminists' demonstration of its inherently patriarchal and hierarchical nature, and the way it repressed the earlier and more natural worship of "mother" nature. The nearest I can come to a religious belief is to the "Gaia" model of the earth as a single living organism in which all parts are interdependent. But I do not worship it in the way that some people do God; nor do I regard it as having anything like human characteristics, other than a common biochemical composition. I celebrate nature and our part in it.

The religion with which I have most sympathy is Taoism, because it has an anti-authoritarian emphasis, and a refreshingly simple, undogmatic approach; I thoroughly recommend The Tao of Pooh. Equally influential has been Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics, which makes clear how quantum science has completely overturned the earlier fixed, mechanical view of the universe. (Though neither, to be fair, negates or affirms God).

A POSITIVE VIEW

So what, if anything, am I?! I don't like the term "atheist", since it is a negative, reactive description, defining my beliefs by the rejection of other people's. I don't like "humanist" either, as it could be interpreted as placing humanity in some sort of superior role, as though we were the culmination of some sort of destiny, which I certainly do not believe.

My philosophy is eclectic, in that I have accepted parts of belief systems from many different, often conflicting, sources. I make no apology for that; on the contrary, as I hope I have made clear by now, I would be automatically suspicious of any ready-made, "off-the-peg" system which claimed to have the answer to everything and be superior to every other: such beliefs having caused most of the suffering and destruction in human history. I have developed my own world view drawing from a multitude of sources and adapting it according to experience; and assert its right to be as valid as anyone else's.

I have mentioned evolution several times, and find it a useful model for understanding our position in the universe. I'm sure, purely on a statistical basis, that there are many other life-forms "out there", probably including some at a "higher" level of development than humanity; and equally sure that we will never be able to communicate with them in the foreseeable future.

As to the "meaning of life", to misquote Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, it has precisely the meaning we choose to give it, neither more nor less. In fact the question is one of those that assumes an answer, where there may be none.

If this sounds pessimistic, it isn't. In contrast to those "right" evolutionists from Ardrey to Dawkins who think we evolve through individualistic, selfish-aggressive means, I believe it is that strain that is holding us back from realising our potential, and that when it inevitably destroys itself, we shall be liberated to forge a more productive and creative understanding of our place in the cosmos, in harmony with not only the rest of humanity, but with all of nature.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

For a very short period of human development - ten thousand years at the most - a small minority of the population has obtained a short-term gain by exploiting other people and the rest of nature, fostering individualism, aggression and competition, and causing incalculable misery to billions. I believe it is an evolutionary cul-de-sac that will burn itself out (with a little help!) The evidence for the decay of this system is mounting, with global warming, species extinction, and the worsening in quality of life even among the rich minority.

Humanity may have to undergo even greater upheavals before emerging into a saner, peaceful world based on mutual cooperation; but the positive alternative already exists in embryonic form (pre-adaptivity, to use the Darwinian term), and some of the great people I've mentioned have made positive contributions to the process.

Earlier on I mentioned "social intelligence", by which I mean the capacity human beings have developed for communication and joint activity in the common interest, including empathy and altruism. We have always possessed this to some degree, but it has been temporarily repressed and stunted by the dominant minority who caused the problems we now face. In the evolutionary imperative to find constructive solutions to those problems, I believe this quality will reassert itself.

To repeat my favourite metaphor, we are like the tiny nocturnal tree-shrews at the time of the dinosaurs who, when the latter changed into something else, emerged to eventually evolve into human beings. The difference is that this time, the catalyst will not be an "act of God", but an act of humanity.