The Aries Objection: Why truth is not enough

I am sitting in St Pancras station, waiting for a delayed Eurostar, still carrying the weekend in my head. London has been extraordinary: two days with a room full of entrepreneurs, technologists, business builders from four different continents, most of them twenty or thirty years younger than me. The kind of people who speak in terms of market gaps and machine learning architectures with a fluency that I can only admire. Sharp minds. Serious ambition. The sort of gathering where you leave feeling slightly inadequate and entirely alive.

The keynotes and the breakout sessions were superb, and I will be processing what I learned from them for weeks. But what stayed with me most were the conversations at the bar.

Because somewhere between the craft beer and the small hours, I discovered that several of the cleverest people in the room believed things that astonished me.

There was the IT consultant, a man who builds enterprise systems for a living, who told me with complete sincerity that his personality was best explained by his horoscope. When I said I thought astrology was nonsense, he smiled knowingly and said, ‘That’s such an Aries thing to say.’ There was the former drug addict who encountered Jesus at twenty one, became a pastor, and now runs his own church with the same operational rigour he brings to his side businesses. An agentic AI enthusiast assured me over dinner that the link between consciousness and quantum mechanics was settled science, and seemed genuinely puzzled when I asked by whom, and where, and with what evidence. A young woman who grew up in a secular family described a conversation she had with Jesus while praying in a sauna, and she described it the way I would describe a phone call: ordinary, factual, unquestionable. And there were devout Muslims, warm and generous, sipping water while the rest of us drank beer, who advised their younger peers to find the meaning of life by opening themselves to God.

These were credulous people by nobody’s definition. Founders, engineers, investors. They ran companies and managed teams and read market data with discipline. And yet they also believed in things that, from where I stand, have no more evidentiary support than the existence of Father Christmas.

I pondered on this for most of Sunday, and I am sitting with it still.

My first instinct, if I am honest, was irritation. How could people this intelligent not see what seems so obvious? We have five hundred years of scientific method behind us. We understand, at least in broad outline, how the brain constructs meaning, how pattern recognition misfires, how cognitive biases distort perception. We know that the plural of anecdote is not data. We know that personal experience, however vivid, is not evidence for the supernatural. And yet here they were, smart people, building the future while clinging to explanations I associate with the pre-Enlightenment past.

But irritation is cheap. And I have been irritated about this before, decades ago, when I first shed my own beliefs. What I have since learned is that irritation is usually a sign that I am not thinking carefully enough.

So let me think more carefully.

The human brain evolved for survival, and truth was never part of the specification. This is one of the most important things biology ever taught me, and I keep having to learn it again.

Our ancestors thrived because they could detect patterns, form alliances, construct narratives that held groups together, and act quickly on incomplete information. Epistemological rigour had nothing to do with it. The pattern detection was so advantageous that evolution overbuilt it: we see faces in clouds, agency in randomness, meaning in coincidence. The technical name is apophenia, and it is a feature, tuned for a world where a false positive (‘that shadow might be a predator’) was far less costly than a false negative (‘that predator is probably just a shadow’).

What this means, practically, is that believing things without evidence is entirely, predictably human. Our cognitive architecture is tilted toward meaning over accuracy, toward comfort over truth, toward belonging over verification. The real wonder is that anyone manages to believe only what the evidence supports.

I am not immune. I spent the first eighteen years of my life inside the Catholic framework, absorbing its cosmology, its rituals, its consolations. When the cracks appeared, they appeared slowly: a question here, an inconsistency there, a growing discomfort with answers that no longer matched what I was learning about the actual world. The departure was gradual, and it was lonely, and it was painful in places I had expected to feel nothing. Because belief, whatever its content, serves functions that have nothing to do with whether the belief is true.

Consider what a belief system provides.

Fear of death is perhaps the deepest anxiety any conscious creature faces. Religions answer it directly: there is something after. An afterlife, a reincarnation, a reunion. The specifics vary; the emotional function is identical. And once you have that answer, the alternative, that consciousness simply ends, is almost unbearably stark.

Loss of control is nearly as primal. The world is chaotic, unfair, and largely indifferent to individual human outcomes. A cosmic plan, a destiny, a benevolent intelligence behind the chaos, transforms the unbearable into the purposeful. Something terrible happened *for* you, they say. The suffering had a purpose all along. That reframing is psychologically potent. I understand its power, even though I reject its premise.

And then there is belonging. We are social primates before we are rational agents. Our beliefs function as membership badges more than as private intellectual positions. Declaring your faith, or your star sign, or your commitment to quantum consciousness, signals which group you belong to. Questioning those declarations feels like rejection to the person being questioned, however carefully you phrase it. And evolution has wired us to experience social rejection as genuine danger.

This is why the IT consultant absorbed my scepticism so easily, filing it as a data point about me (typical Aries) without experiencing it as a threat to his worldview. He had a framework that explained even my objection. That is the genius of unfalsifiable belief systems: they incorporate their own criticism.

I find myself thinking about Daniel Dennett, who spent a lifetime studying consciousness and religion with equal rigour. Dennett argued that religions function first as social technologies: cooperative structures that evolved, culturally, because they helped groups organise, motivate, and cohere. The content of the beliefs matters less than their social function. A congregation succeeds because it provides community, identity, purpose, and mutual support. The theology is almost incidental.

The beliefs remain false, of course. But the explanation helps me understand why they persist in a world that should, by all rational accounts, be outgrowing them.

And it complicates the question I have been carrying since the weekend: should we try to liberate these people?

That word, ‘liberate,’ is mine. It is the title of the book I am working on about shedding inherited beliefs. I chose it deliberately, because leaving dogma behind genuinely felt like liberation to me: a lightening, a clearing, an arrival into a world that was more honest, more beautiful, and more strange than the one I had been given.

But I have to ask: liberation for whom?

The pastor who found Jesus after years of addiction is clean, purposeful, and running a church that gives structure and hope to others. Would his life be improved by reading Dawkins? I am not sure it would. The young woman who prayed in the sauna and felt Jesus answer her has a source of meaning so vivid it rivals anything I have found in biology or philosophy. Am I really in a position to tell her the experience is neurological noise?

This is where the secular humanist in me collides with the biologist. The humanist says: truth matters, even when it is uncomfortable; people deserve to build their lives on accurate foundations. The biologist says: organisms adopt the strategies that work for them in their environment; what ‘works’ is not always what is ‘true.’

Both are right. And neither settles the question.

What I think I have landed on, here at St Pancras, watching the departure board flicker, is something more modest than the crusade I might have launched at thirty.

I do not believe we should stop challenging bad ideas. Homeopathy is water. Astrology is pattern recognition projected onto the sky. Quantum consciousness, in the form it was described to me over dinner, is a misunderstanding of both quantum mechanics and consciousness. These things are worth saying clearly, because the alternative, a polite silence that treats all claims as equally valid, is its own kind of dishonesty.

But I also think the way we say it matters more than I once believed.

The frontal assault rarely works. Tell a person of faith that their experience is a neurochemical artefact and you have insulted them, whatever your intention. You have attacked something that sits at the centre of their identity, their community, their coping architecture. The walls go up. The conversation ends.

What works better, when anything works at all, is curiosity. Genuine curiosity, the kind that actually wants an answer rather than wearing a question mark as disguise for disagreement. Asking how they arrived at their beliefs. Asking what those beliefs do for them. Asking whether they have ever doubted. The interest has to be real, or the other person will sense the agenda within seconds.

Sometimes, in that conversation, a crack appears. The crack was already there; the question simply gave it room to breathe.

I know this because that is how it happened for me. Nobody argued me out of Catholicism. I argued myself out, one question at a time, over years. The people who helped most were the ones who asked me good questions and then had the patience to let me sit with my own answers.

The Eurostar is boarding. I gather my things and join the queue, surrounded by travellers heading home to Brussels, Paris, Amsterdam, carrying their own cosmologies inside their skulls: some tested, some inherited, some improvised, most a mix of all three.

Perhaps the honest answer is that we cannot liberate anyone. We can only create the conditions in which people might choose to liberate themselves. And even then, we have to accept that some will look at the evidence, feel the cold draught of a universe without a plan, and prefer the warmth of the story they already have.

I cannot blame them entirely. The universe without a plan is magnificent, but it is also cold. It asks you to find your own meaning, build your own structure, face your own death without the comfort of a sequel. I have made that choice, and I do not regret it. But I no longer pretend it costs nothing.

And perhaps that is the most useful thing I took from the weekend: a slightly deeper humility. These brilliant, driven people need what we all need: better questions, honestly asked, with enough silence afterwards for the answers to arrive on their own schedule.

The train is ready. Brussels in two hours. Reality, as always, will be there when I get home.