We are creatures who readily perceive or invent patterns, and we often find it difficult to live with ambiguity or areas of uncertainty. We tend to develop, seek out, and promote comprehensive or encyclopedic worldviews: systems of belief and practice that try to explain the human condition (or much of it) in an integrated way, while also offering detailed guidance about how to live our lives. Letting go of a religion can mean letting go of a cherished system of explanation and guidance—and that can be disorienting, perhaps frightening. It doesn’t follow, however, that any religious explanations of the world are actually correct.

In the light of secular intellectual progress over the past four to five hundred years, the world’s various religions stand revealed as premature and discredited systems for understanding the human condition. Unfortunately, people who reject religion often turn to comprehensive secular worldviews, most usually in the form of political ideologies. The intellectual merits of these may vary; nonetheless, they have a poor record of producing convincing justifications for belief. Worse, they show a similar tendency to religions in fostering dogmatism, tribalism, authoritarianism, and sometimes fanaticism.

How, then, should we understand the world and live our lives? I will not offer you a comprehensive belief system of any kind. Instead—more radically—I’ll invite you to imagine the possibility of living without one. The natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities have done much to advance our knowledge and understanding, but they do not provide us with any finished, comprehensive picture of the natural world, or of human history, culture, and society. They provide enough in the way of well-established findings to reject many existing explanatory systems, but much remains to be discovered.

What’s so bad about that? Think of the process as a great ongoing adventure of the mind, rather than as a source of anxiety. You can face the complications of life with a mindset that is open to an element of perpetual incompleteness in our best understanding of the world around us. You can cultivate virtues that bring their own satisfactions, even if they can seem difficult to practice: intellectual honesty; tolerance of differences; openness to evidence and argument; and an appreciation of complexity, ambiguity, and doubt. As you move toward that sort of healthy mindset, your need for any religious or ideological crutch may disappear. —Russell Blackford