According to recent estimates, more than fifty percent of the UK population don’t believe in God. This statistic has been steadily rising for the past thirty years — and with the exponential increase in scientific discoveries it seems set to keep on growing. Many of the answers and insights that religion provides us have been tackled in a more convincing way by science. We now know what is above the clouds and beyond our solar system.

Yet one of the consequences of this destruction of belief is that nothing has developed to fill the gap. For centuries religion has changed and evolved, but it has always been present in one form or another. When Augustus replaced the Roman Church with Christianity there was a flux for a time, but Christianity prevailed. When Henry VIII replaced Catholicism with the Church of England, there was a period of unrest, but again it settled. Unlike these countless moments in history, today we are at a unique point where our sense of faith and belief has been damaged and removed, with nothing to fill the void. As a result, the true nature of humanity is revealed. Disparity, divorce and depression have soared across the world. Our beliefs have been replaced by a deep materialism, because if God is dead, then who is to judge us?

Fundamentally the issue with a destruction of belief is that it threatens the whole narrative arc of our lives, and of humanity as a whole. We used to believe that the beginning and middle of our stories took place in this world, and the blissful happily ever after awaited us at the end of our story. Our narrative arc transcended life and death. Without a belief in something greater than the here and now, though, the narrative is restricted to this current moment. If you are hit by a bus tomorrow, how can that possibly make sense in the overall narrative of your life? As a result, complete narratives don’t seem to make sense any more, because, as Jean-Paul Sartre said “Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.”

These complete narratives have been replaced by fragmented stories. One only has to look at the popularity of box sets that run for tens of seasons to see that we crave short, ephemeral, stories. We consume technology in the same way, with recent O2 ads proclaiming that two years is much too long to replace your phone. By creating faster, shorter narratives about our lives we can try and cope with the death of the longer story. This wouldn’t be problematic if it wasn’t for the fact that this short term thinking results in things like huge amounts of debt. The temptation to fulfill our our short term narrative of being a happy, successful person means that debt is irresistible.

Yet there is also a twist to this. The destruction of all encompassing narrative arcs have resulted in an extreme lust for anything that can help piece together the fragmented stories. The popularity of conspiracy stories demonstrates this perfectly. Rather than suggesting that sometimes terrible things just happen, conspiracy theorists weave moments together into a broader story, one that has a meaning and point to it. In the same way, news outlets are becoming more and more editorially led. Rather than a tragedy occurring in isolation, it is typically indicative of a wider point or meaning.

So, whereas belief used to underly our sense of self, it is now short stories that have filled the void. Unlike belief, though, these stories are completely unfiltered and uncensored. You can choose to live your life exactly as you wish, and the story that you tell only has to convince yourself. The American Dream, for example, is a story that keeps many thousands of millionaires from questioning what they did to deserve their wealth. A famous occultist, Aleister Crowley, based his religion on the “Law of Thelema”. At the time, this law was controversial enough for arrest warrants to be issued across the world. The law simple stated: “Do what thou wilt.”

With just stories to replace our beliefs this law has become the de facto ethical standard across the Western World. Yes, there are laws in place to prevent us from embezzling and murdering, but there is very little ethical guidance beyond these absolutes. Stories are similar to beliefs in the sense that they both solve the same problem, attempting to read meaning into a world that, on the surface, has no meaning. Stories on their own, though, surely cannot be enough to sustain a society which is devoid of belief — and this is an issue that will only become more pervasive as more and more people start to believe in nothing.