Far from worrying us, we should see the decline of faith as liberating

"When a man stops believing in God," said GK Chesterton, "he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything." If he's right, we must tremble now that data from the National Centre for Social Research published on Monday suggests the majority of Britons (53 per cent) say they have no religion. Responding to this in the Times, Daniel Finkelstein worried that "the decline of religion will leave a hole that will be filled by something worse" like extreme nationalism, just as both fascism and Bolshevism emerged as alternative religions.

Chesterton and Finkelstein belong to a long line of Jeremiahs who have warned of the dangers of abandoning religion. As an atheist I find these insulting, both to me and the supposedly credulous masses who can't possibly be trusted to behave themselves without a God to scare the crap out of them.

The argument doesn't survive its first encounter with the facts. Nationalism and populism are much more rife in God-fearing countries like Russia, Poland and the USA than they are in the more secular Nordic counties or the Czech Republic, where the religious have been the minority for decades. But then it seems that advocates of the atheism as nihilism theory are more interested with what rings true to them than what is true for all. They happily repeat the Chesterton aphorism even though there is no evidence that he ever said it.

The heart of the error is revealed in the vacuum metaphor so often employed. The assumption is that religion has some kind of natural place in the human psyche and so if it is removed, it leaves an empty space that must be filled. The fact that many people are atheists who feel no void doesn't seem to bother people who peddle this myth. They insist either that atheists are yearning for something deep inside but they just don't realise it, or that they have made a kind of religion of their  humanism or science.

For sure, there are some who believe religiously in their lack of religion, but to insist all or most atheists are like this is implausible to say the least. The insistence that atheists are somehow insincere when they say they have no religion is a product not of any evidence but a belief in the vacuum thesis so firm that all counter-evidence is dismissed.

In its favour, many point to the theory popularised by Nicholas Wade's The Faith Instinct that human beings have evolved a need for religious belief. It is ironic when believers themselves look to this for support, since it would suggest belief in God has nothing to do with the Almighty and everything to do with purposeless natural processes. Even if it is true that we have an innate religious impulse, that is no reason to indulge it. What's more, any such instinct would have to be incredibly elastic to account for all the forms of belief that have become dominant around the world, many of which are not religious in any sense readily recognisable to monotheists.

The only way to make the claim of a universal need for religion credible is to dilute the meaning of "religion" so much that any sets of beliefs counts as one. This is actually what many do. Atheists are told that they too have faith, since you cannot prove conclusively that God doesn't exist. But lack of belief in something we have no good evidence to believe exists requires no faith at all. Normally, in the absence of good evidence for the truth of something, we do not believe in it. For atheists, this makes lack of belief in God no more a leap of faith than a lack of belief in talking horses or intelligent life on Mars. Theists, on the other hand, either believe there is good evidence God exists, and so don't believe on faith at all, or believe on faith in the absence of such evidence.

A far more economical and credible theory is that there is no religion-shaped space that needs to be filled. Rather, there are many spaces which religions have managed to occupy. The need for meaning, for example, is not religious, but it is a need religions attempt to fulfil. The same is true of the needs for values, community, the marking of life-stages.

Admitting this is difficult for believers since it means accepting that what they personally find essential is nothing of the kind. That need to believe in something universally and transcendentally important is very common, of course, but like religion, we can do without it.

The credulous masses need not be at the mercy of any old huckster or snake-oil merchant who passes them by.