Time & Perspective Quote by Paul Nurse

A scientist recalling when he "abandoned religion" isn’t offering a conversion story so much as a timeline: the moment when inherited certainty met a curriculum built to stress-test certainty. Putting it in secondary school is doing quiet rhetorical work. It frames disbelief not as a dramatic rebellion or a later-life disillusionment, but as an early, almost procedural outcome of education - the kind of shift that happens when you’re taught to ask for evidence, to reconcile contradictions, to prefer explanations that survive cross-examination.

Paul Nurse’s wording is deliberately plain, which is part of its force. "Abandoned" is unsentimental: no rage, no heartbreak, no evangelizing atheism. It implies leaving something behind because it stopped being useful as an explanatory system. The subtext is methodological, not spiritual. For a working biologist, religion can read less like a villain and more like an outdated model: once you have better tools, you don’t need to keep defending the old ones.

Context matters because Nurse is not a professional provocateur; he’s a Nobel-winning cell biologist whose authority comes from institutions that often stand in cultural for religion (lab, peer review, the lecture hall). The line also nods to a familiar British story: postwar schooling as an engine of secularization, where science education and social mobility quietly loosened the grip of churchgoing without requiring a grand ideological fight. The intent, then, is less "religion is wrong" than "here is where my intellectual allegiance shifted" - a personal data point offered with the cool confidence of someone for whom the scientific worldview is not a position, but the default operating system.