Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Some months back, I wrote a piece about Galileo's science, and how the discoveries of his telescope ought to have led him to conclude that Copernicus was wrong. This morning I had a letter – an actual posted, folded, paper letter – from Kentucky. It came from Christopher Graney, the science teacher whose work lay behind the Nature article, and contained a copy of his original paper setting out the full reasoning in terms that even high school students and national newspaper journalists can understand.

Given the resolution of early telescopes, and the assumption of all early astronomers that what they saw through them were the stars themselves, and not the apparently much larger "Airy disks" produced by diffraction, Galileo's telescope showed that the earth must rotate (so the mediaeval picture was wrong), but could not have gone round the sun, as Copernicus believed.

What Galileo should have believed, according to this reconstruction, was the system put forward by Tycho Brahe, which had the earth at the centre, and the moon and sun orbiting us, while all the other planets orbit the sun. This piece was based on a short note in Nature and provoked a fairly lively debate about science and judgement here.

It's still complicated, of course. There is a reason why Galileo and Kepler are remembered as geniuses. But two facts are important. The first is that there is no way to decide from the measurements of planetary orbits available in the seventeenth century whether Tycho was right and all the planets orbit the sun except the earth, around which the sun revolves, or whether Copernicus was right and all the planets, including the earth, revolve around the sun. An evidence dalek would have been stuck on the staircase here, because the evidence of planetary observations gave no ground to choose between the two theories. What mattered in making the decision were the observations of the stars.

Steve Fuller is the sociologist of science notorious for arguing that Intelligent Design was not necessarily a bad research programme even though it was rotten science. In this capacity he appeared as a witness for the defence in the Dover trial in the US, the most recent attempt to smuggle creationism into the public school system there. He has written a new book on science as the heir to religion, which will be published later this spring, and there will be a Question series about this later.

Commissioning pieces for this got me thinking about the boundaries of natural theology and how we can classify it. It is an undisputed fact that many great scientists have been driven by Christian faith and the roots of modern science lay in the belief that the scientist was "reading the book of Nature", which was understood to be a revelation of God's purposes and character quite as much as the other Book, the Bible was.

This was certainly Newton's motivation, and Faraday's. But it seems also to have been contested from an early stage. Looking back at Wesley's pamphlet on the Lisbon earthquake, which was written much closer to Newton's death than Faraday's, we can see him already arguing against an atheist who believes only in "the fortuitous concourse and agency of blind material causes." So we know that there were materialists to argue against. What there were not, then, were believers in scientific progress, nor anyone who could foresee the enormous advances of the nineteenth century. For Wesley the response to plague was prayer, not bacteriology.

The progressive or whiggish account of natural theology would say that in order to find the hidden regularities of nature we needed to believe they were there, and, Christian faith gave scientists the confidence needed to do so. But – this account continues – once the architecture of the universe had been sketched out, the need for an architect receded. The elegant mathematics of the universe that physics revealed became their own justification: Laplace, when asked what God did in his model of the solar system, replied "I have no need for that hypothesis"; later, something similar happened in biology under Darwin's influence.

Natural theology had started as a way of understanding God; in the eighteenth century it became a way of proving God's existence, which is something rather different, which turned out to be catastrophic for Christian apologetics, as is shown by the fact that Richard Dawkins works entirely within this tradition: he shows instance after instance of design in the natural world, and then shows that there is no need for a designer, and that if any agency had designed the natural world we see, we couldn't call it wise or loving.

But Dawkins, here, is kicking at an open door. Many others have been through it before him. Once you destroy the idea that science can prove the existence of God, or can discover things that only God's existence can explain, the first half of natural theology also looks pointless: why investigate the nature of a non-existent being?

I went last night to a marvellous talk by an American anthropologist who has been studying Californian charismatic Christians. Tanya Luhrmann's enquiry into how these people construct their idea of God will result in a book eventually, but in the meantime her talk on her work with the Vineyard churches was full of insight, sympathy, and deadpan humour.

The Vineyard churches are a loose international network of mostly white, mostly middle class, very charismatic churches. They aren't exactly fundamentalist but they see the Holy Spirit everywhere and talk to God every day. They were the source of the "Toronto Blessing" - a craze which swept through the English charismatic network in the 90s where people fell on the floor and made animal noises. Luhrmann is interested in how you get to talk to God like this. After all, most churches for most of history, haven't done anything like that.

Her answer is that you need a certain kind of temperament, one which makes you good at make-believe, and then you need to work at it. The personality traits which make it easiest to talk to God are those measured on the Tellegen absorption scale, which she summarises as the ability to focus attention on a non-instrumental subject: in other words, some thought interesting for its own sake, whether or not it is obviously useful. It's the facility you need to construct compelling daydreams.

If you have this talent, or temperament, in the first place, these churches will nourish it. By treating God as real, you come to detect his presence more easily; and the God for whom the are searching is one just like another person. "People learn about God by mapping onto Him what they know about persons; then they map back what they suppose about God onto the world around them."

All this activity is the subject of tremendous social reinforcement. These are not Sunday only churches. Members can fill their lives with meetings with other members – and with God. "They pay constant attention to what's going on in their minds. They are constantly looking at their thoughts and images. It's a social shaping of what you would imagine to be a private space in their minds.

The General Synod this morning held a debate on whether science and religion are mutually exclusive, full of ordained scientists arguing that of course they are, and indeed the final vote was 241 to two in favour of the motion. I have failed to establish the identity of the dissident two. Faced with such a consensus I thought it might be fun to flip the question on its back and ask to what extent science is compatible with atheism.

Obviously the two are closely linked, in as much as science assumes the falsity, or at least irrelevance, of supernaturalism. But science is more than physics and chemistry, more even than biology, and the human sciences challenge a lot of beliefs held by many atheists.

The modern efflorescence of evolutionarily inspired psychology and sociology tells us that the elements of religion are natural, and unavoidable, and sometimes useful; that they are present in all societies, whether literate or pre-literate, whether in states or hunter-gatherer, though they are combined in very different forms of social organisation.

So we learn at the very least that they can't be abolished. This doesn't show that they need be combined into things we call "religions"; but at the very least they will tend to combine into social groupings and mechanisms which perform the same functions.

Further, the sociology of religion shows clearly that modern monotheistic religion is not an intellectual pursuit. People do not join churches because they agree with the doctrines. Nor do they often leave for intellectual reasons. They join – and leave – for all sorts of largely social reasons, and even within the churches, their allegiance to, and knowledge of, the official doctrine is slight. Heresy can matter enormously, but that's because it defines an outgroup. And the execration of heretics flourishes among atheist societies, too. It seems to be very widespread social mechanism.

The easiest way to change a mind forever is to destroy bits of the brain. It's not very precise, but it is remarkably effective. This has been known ever since Phineas Gage, an enthusiastic railway worker, detonated the charge of dynamite he was tamping into a hole, so that the spike he was tamping it with flew out, smashed his cheekbone and burst through his brain and out the top of his skull. He lived for years after that but he had lost almost all his inhibitions. They had somehow been contained in the part of his brain that was destroyed.

This story is known to everyone interested in the relationship between mind and brain. But there is one strange and horrifying pendant which I only learned last week, at a seminar in Cambridge. Brain injuries of a certain sort can disinhibit adults. In children they can permanently prevent the formation of inhibitions at all. Such things are fortunately very rare. But they are recorded, especially at the university of Iowa, which collects patients from all over the state and thus as an unmatched, unenviable knowledge of ghastly childhood brain injuries, whether from cancers, epilepsies or simple accidents.

The classic paper on this is more than ten years old: in 1999 Antonio Damasio and colleagues at the University of Iowa published a study of two young adults who simply did not live in the same moral universe as the rest of us. One of them was a girl who had been run over as a toddler. She appeared to make a quick and full recovery. But as an adolescent, she became more or less psychopathic. Although intelligent and academically capable, she stole, she fought, she lied chronically; at 18 she had a child whom she neglected. Most tellingly of all, she could not see anything wrong with her behaviour, nor even pretend that she did.

When I was first working at the Independent we were very proud of our photographs. One day there was a tragic little item on the PA wire about a young man who had hanged himself because he had been turned down for a job because of his terrible acne. The news editor looked at it. "This is a story crying out for a picture" he said.

That kind of demonstrative hard-boiledness is one journalistic vice. But the annual display of Church of England attendance figures brings out another one: the need to make sure that everything is exciting. I am reasonably certain that all the papers who notice it tomorrow will carry stories saying that the decline in church attendance continues. This is true, but it is another story crying out for a picture. And what the picture shows is not a graph that you could ski down, but one which would make for one of the duller stretches of a long cross-country trudge.

Nothing dramatic is happening. The Church of England says it's a little less of a decline; its various enemies say it's huge; journalists say that whatever it is, it must be dramatic. (note how the axis in this graph is chosen to maximise the drama) But, actually, what this suggests is that the action is happening elsewhere. There are graphs that would like much hillier: the collapse in Roman Catholic vocations was one; the rise in pentecostal subcultures here is probably another.

The previous blog discussed how creationist opinion formers think: given that formal creationism is a belief that must be taught, this seems a sensible line of enquiry. By formal creationism, I mean the belief that most scientists have more or less malevolently misinterpreted the data for the last 200 years to prove that the Bible is not literally true. That survey dealt only with 50 opinion formers, interviewed in depth. But how many people do they represent?

The answer to that comes from an earlier Theos survey, published this spring, which contained truly shocking figures as to the amount of biological ignorance in the country; but at the same time, it suggested that this had nothing much to do with religion. How could it, when the number of people reporting either Young Earth creationism, or ID, at 25% is something like five times as large as the combined Muslim and evangelical population of this country? Twice as many people are confused about what they believe, and only another quarter are convinced of the truth of evolution.

These results were obtained by a fairly sophisticated set of questions, designed to discover what people actually believed, rather than the labels they would attach to it. Much of it, I think, is the result of innumeracy in general: someone for whom all numbers above about a thousand are indistinguishable blur may very well think that the earth is 10,000 years old and mean by this that it is really really seriously, like, old.

Such people don't pose any threat to the teaching of science in schools. They just make it look entirely pointless, since they have themselves been "educated". But that is a different and more serious problem than religious creationism. The anti-Darwinians interviewed in the most recent survey are a tiny, articulate and self-conscious minority. The real problem for public understanding, as anyone knows who has done any science writing, are the millions of people whose position is that they don't know, don't care, and don't want to do either.

The admirable Theos project on Darwin concludes with the publication of a study on how British creationists think (pdf). To forestall the entirely predictable accusation that it's not science if Christians do it, this research was actually carried out on Theos's behalf by the ethnographic research firm ESRO. By interviewing 50 prominent anti-evolutionists, mostly Christians, but some Muslims and agnostics too, whose views ranged from intelligent design to young earth creationism, the researchers managed to get a picture of a movement whose most interesting characteristic is that it isn't one. In fact one of their interviewees was taught at Sussex by John Maynard Smith, an experience he describes as "a real privilege".

Interviewees did not seem to be united in either a geographical or a political sense. They did not necessarily belong to or attend any creationist groups or organisations and, where they did, they belonged to different ones. They did not keep contact with their counterparts in the US and they did not necessarily communicate with each other. There were vehement disagreements over theological matters and over the means by which evolution scepticism could be promoted. Intelligent design had not successfully created a paradigm through which all evolution sceptics might engage in the debate around evolution.

About half of their interviewees were full-on young earth creationists, believing in the literal truth of the Bible, and hence of a 6,000-year-old earth: but the interesting thing about this is that much of their propaganda was directed not against the evil Darwinians, but against the backslidden old-earth creationists, or, worse, ID-ers.

Although the interviewees were anonymous, one of these backsliders is described as the principal of a theological college. But it is important, I think, to notice that the reason for rejecting evolution, for those who put biblical authority first, is not that biology couldn't work that way (a later rationalisation) but that an evolutionary story is incompatible with the age of the earth.

Although both terms creep into the debate over evolution, being YEC [young earth] or OEC [old earth] does not in itself imply anything necessarily about beliefs regarding the truth of evolution; rather, they are positions on the age of the earth (as taught by the Bible) which have implications for beliefs about evolution

This is an important example of the way in which rejecting evolution leads inexorably to the rejection of the whole of modern science – history, ecology, and physics as well as biology.

It's easy to suppose that the whole vast apparatus of modern creationism has taught us nothing at all. All those books, the endless arguments on usenet and then on the web, the museums, the theme parks, the teaching materials – all of it dedicated to teaching lies; none of it contributing so much as a moment's thought to the advance of knowledge.

But I think there is one important thing which all these millions of hours of labour has shown that could not have been learned any other way. It wasn't intentional. But creationists have proved that most scientists have a very naïve and inadequate idea of evidence. In particular, they believe that the justification for believing scientific claims is that they are reproducible and produce irrefutable evidence. The creationists have shown this is mistaken. Of course the experiment must be reproducible. Of course the results must be clear. But it's just as important that we take both these things on trust. When scientists report results we take them at their word. Without a belief that they are trustworthy, nothing they do compels belief. That is why fakery, when detected, must be so severely punished.

This was known before creationism was a problem. Richard Lewontin has written about the way in which even scientists cannot still less reproduce and judge, experiments outside their fields. But he's a sort of Marxist and easy to ignore. In any case, his assumption was

The justification for burning heretics was perfectly simple: dissent threatened the survival of society. Nothing was worse than anarchy. This is a viewpoint most people in the West today find pretty much incomprehensible. It is a self-evident truth to them that morality must be a matter of individual choice. And if you believe that, the arguments around the Tim Nicholson case are very difficult to resolve. If there is a moral imperative to preserve the human race, or as much of it as possible, collective consequences must follow. It is not enough for us to do the right thing. Others must as well. If you don't believe that, then there is no point in agitating for success in Copenhagen.

But if collective consequences follow, others must be forced to do things against their will by our moral imperatives. This is exactly the quality that is supposed to be so very obnoxious about religion.

The idea that morality is and must be a matter of individual choice is taken as axiomatic in these debates. It is thought true in the sense that it is held to describe a fact about the world. Very often the same people who believe this will also believe, and maintain with equal vehemence in other contexts the belief that morals are merely opinions, or at least that there couldn't in the nature of things be moral facts: true or false statements about whether something or someone is good or bad.

This was neatly if not nicely expressed by one of the commenters on Tim Nicholson's article here, who said

You may believe less flying and driving, and more wind farms, and so on to be moral imperatives. I don't. You are entitled to your beliefs, and should not be persecuted for them. But they are just beliefs. You want to argue the politics of how to respond to climate change: great. But you can stop wrapping your proposed solutions up in 'moral imperative' cotton wool.

These are not the only confusions which the Nicholson case raises. Many people who are upset by the court's equating a scientific opinion with a religion belief suppose that science is true and rational, religion is false and irrational, and that this division of the world is itself factual and rational. If this is how the world appears to you, then there is no question that climate change is not a religion. That would mean that it wasn't really happening, and that we were free to ignore it. Both supporters and opponents of environmentalism can often agree both that it might be a religion and that would be a bad thing. This is why, in general, the people who maintain that environmentalism is like a religion are opposed to it; while those in favour deny it is anything like a religion. (A further complication is supplied by right-wing Christians like Daniel Johnson who maintain that religion is a good thing, but environmentalism is a false religion.)

Paper darkens as it grows old, but vellum just goes duller white, like the belly of a snake: looking at some of the manuscripts through which learning made its serpentine passage across the medieval world makes it obvious that you couldn't call those ages "dark". The library of The Royal Observatory in Edinburgh holds one of the finest collections of early astronomical books and manuscripts in the world, collected by Lord Crawford in the 19th century. He left them to the city on condition that they built an observatory to house them. Being civilised, the city fathers did. So there I was on Tuesday, touching the vellum of a 13th century manuscript of Alhazen, another of Aristotle, and then a first edition of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus and one of Kepler's Nova Astronomia. In the shelves on the wall were Galileo's works.

We were meant to be making a radio programme – an interval talk for Radio 3 – but the producer and I and our guest Ken MacLeod just frolicked round that room of priceless books like salmon woken by a spate. Serious work was impossible for a while. There was nothing to say that was adequate in the face of so much beauty and so much history; for anyone who writes, the feel of a physical object which has been read for 800 years is a quite extraordinary thrill.

Alhazen is almost forgotten now, and Aristotle little read or acknowledged outside the Roman Catholic intelligentsia. But when those first manuscripts were only three hundred years old, the books which we all know have changed the world were published. First there

Perhaps nobody has ever looked at death, hell, human nature and God quite so uncompromisingly as the lawyer born in Noyon in 1509, who gave his name to one of the fiercest and most influential forms of Protestantism.

John Calvin believed in a world where God controlled all, and who went to heaven and who went to hell was predestined - Christ died for only a select few. Nothing except the Bible was tolerated in church which led to Calvinism's terrible reputation as a destroyer of art.

It is argued that Calvinism influenced many aspects of our modern society - science, economics, philosophy, democracy - but such claims are considered by historians to be overblown. They instead highlight the strangely paradoxical qualities of a faith which fuelled both the religious wars of the 17th century and the enlightenment which followed.

Moving from Geneva to Scotland, and talking to historians Diarmaid MacCulloch and Bill Naphy, as well as novelists Marilynne Robinson and James Robertson, Andrew explores the sometimes unexpected legacies of this extraordinarily polarising system of belief. With works by Calvin read by John Sessions and music by Cappella Nova.

Anyone tempted to believe that the abolition of religion would make the world a wiser and better place should study the works of Sam Harris. Shallow, narrow, and self-righteous, he defends and embodies all of the traits that have made organised religion repulsive; and he does so in the name of atheism and rationality. He has, for example, defended torture, ("restraint in the use of torture cannot be reconciled with our willingness to wage war in the first place") attacked religious toleration in ways that would make Pio Nono blush: "We can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene" ; he has claimed that there are some ideas so terrible that we may be justified in killing people just for believing them. Naturally, he also believes that the Nazis were really mere catspaws of the Christians. ("Knowingly or not, the Nazis were agents of religion").

"A bold and exhilarating thesis" is what Johann Hari said of Harris's first book (from which the quotes above are taken), though on reflection he might think it more bold than exhilarating. Richard Dawkins was more wordily enthusiastic in a preface for Harris's next: "Every word zings like an elegantly fletched arrow from a taut bowstring and flies in a gratifyingly swift arc to the target, where it thuds satisfyingly into the bullseye." (where else does he expect to find the bullseye?)

Hundreds of thousands of people bought the books, and perhaps the ideas in them. And now Harris has had an op-ed in the New York Times, in which, in his bold and exhilarating way, he makes the case against appointing a Christian scientist, Francis Collins, to the important American government post of Director of the National Institutes of Health. This is not because Collins is a bad scientist. He is, actually, quite extraordinarily distinguished, both as a scientist and as an administrator: his previous job was running the Human Genome Project as the successor to James Watson.

But he is, unashamedly, a Christian. He's not a creationist, and he does science without expecting God to interfere. But he believes in God; he prays, and this is for Harris sufficient reason to exclude him from a job directing medical research.

Of course this is a fantastically illiberal and embryonically totalitarian position that goes against every possible notion of human rights and even the American constitution. If we follow Harris, government jobs are to be handed out on the basis of religious beliefs or lack thereof. But what is really astonishing and depressing is how little faith it shows in science itself.

Belinda Kembery was pregnant with her second child when she realised something was wrong with Robbie, her first. "He didn't quite get to walking, and then, when he was just over a year old, he stopped sleeping well. He would wake in the night and it would be as though he'd just had a shot of caffeine... he would be rocking backwards and forwards, very agitated, and it would be very hard to calm him down."

Kembery, 41, a solicitor before her marriage, is sitting in a spacious, shining kitchen conservatory in Clapham, south London, a room so calm and tidy you would think it had never had children in it at all.

"The next sign we noticed was that he would be sitting up or crawling around, and he would suddenly fall over. That's why we put him in a bike helmet. One day, watching him very closely, we realised he was having a blackout. I went to the GP. We had weeks of appointments - brain scans, blood tests, lumbar punctures. The day we had the diagnosis, I was 22 weeks pregnant." The child she was then carrying is now a healthy, seven-year-old boy.

But Robbie, she was told, had Batten disease, caused by the malfunction of a single gene - CLN1, on chromosome 1, in Robbie's case. Normal copies code for a protein that helps to break down fatty molecules - lipofuscins - within brain and nerve cells. Without it, the cells are choked in fat and die. The first symptoms are seizures; then comes blindness, dumbness, paralysis and worse. Robbie would never walk, never speak, and by three he could not see nor swallow. The weakened muscles of his diaphragm gave him acid reflux so terrible that it stripped the enamel from his teeth. Eventually, an operation closed off the top of his stomach. Today, he is fed through a tube.

"Nothing at all had prepared us for this diagnosis," Belinda says. "In the hospital, they asked me to count the number of seizures he had had, and I got to 100 and stopped counting - and that was before lunchtime. Poor little thing. He was really suffering. They told us

I have been reading Freud, for the first time in decades: Civilisation and its Discontents, which I have in a nice Dover paperback. Some of it is thought-provoking, and some is just self-parody:

Psychoanalysis unfortunately has hardly anything to say about the derivation of beauty ... All that seems certain is its derivation from the field of sexual feeling.

You have to admire that use of "certain". But the thing that really caught my eye was his attack on religion, because it states very clearly one of the central New Atheist rhetorical moves. This is to define religion as the belief system of ignorant fools, the people whom Freud, writing in a much less democratic age, did not hesitate to call "the common man". Watch how it's done. He is concerned, he says, less with

the deepest sources of the religious feeling than with what the common man understands by his religion–with the system ; doctrines and promises which on the one hand explains to him the riddles of this world with enviable completeness, and, on the other, assures him that a careful Providence will watch over his life and will compensate him in a future existence for any frustrations he suffers here. The common man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously exalted father. Only such a being can understand the needs of the children of men and be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse.

Having set up a system in which only fools could believe, he then points out that only fools could believe in it: The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able rise above this view of life. Yet this, he says, is "the only religion which ought to bear that name." Why? I really don't see this. Intelligent, cultured and brave believers do pose a real problem for atheists, but it's not one we honourably solve by simply denying their existence. Freud goes on to dismiss anyone with the brains to see that a God who is merely an enormously exalted father can't be worth worshipping – yet who still isn't an atheist – on the grounds that they are not getting real religion at all:

A district court judge in southern California has ruled that a teacher who described creationism as "superstitious nonsense" was making a religious statement, which is impermissible in US public schools. On the face of it, this is completely absurd, even for southern California. Creationism is superstitious nonsense, and teachers should be able to say so. But when you look at the background, the case becomes in some respects less absurd, but also more threatening – especially for hardline rationalists such as Richard Dawkins, who would like to dismiss creationism as beneath contempt.

The first thing to say is that Judge James Selna seems, from his 37-page ruling, to be no friend of fundamentalists. Of the 20 complaints made against the teacher, James Corbett, he dismissed 19; many of them on the face of it much more anti-religious than calling creationism "superstitious nonsense". Second, the lawsuit was clearly a premeditated strike in the culture wars. Orange County, where Capistrano Valley high school is located, is one of the most conservative places in the US. Corbett had been involved in a controversy over John Peloza, a science teacher at the school who in 1994 sued his employers, demanding the right to teach creationism in his science classes. He lost.

Some fundamentalist parents were obviously out to get Corbett. His lessons were secretly recorded to compile evidence against him, and the words for which he has been found guilty were part of a discussion, or argument, about the earlier case: "I will not leave John Peloza alone to propagandise kids with this religious, superstitious nonsense," he said, and those were the words that Judge Selna has found unconstitutional.

Clearly, Corbett walked into a trap that had been dug specifically for him. The fundamentalist lawsuit demanded that he be sacked, rather than pay damages, though both the school and the judge rejected this demand.

From the material quoted in the judgment it does look as if Corbett was the kind of atheist concerned to eradicate religious belief; but you might argue that he was just trying to get students to think. He claimed to have been selectively quoted in some instances, but in

Several people in comments seemed bewildered that I think you have to teach children atheism. There's a confusion here that needs clearing up. If by atheism you mean "not being a Christian" of course you don't have to teach this explicitly in modern Britain, any more than you have to teach your children not to believe in Shinto deities of ancient Egyptian ones. It's the default position of the culture.

But any worthwhile atheism is far more than not believing in some particular god. It's supposed to be a superior replacement for all religious belief. Even if it is not a doctrine, it is an attitude of mind, a way of looking at the world and of sifting evidence about it. This has to be taught.

One of the classic, if rather squirm-making examples of this process is supplied by Richard Dawkins himself, with an anecdote where his six-year-old daughter tells him that wildflowers "are there to make the world pretty and to help the bees make honey". So of course, he has to explain to her that this is an illusion, and they are really there to serve the purposes of DNA.

But even if you're not a doctrinaire atheist you have to teach children the values and skills that you treasure or else they will die. This is something common to religious and atheistic approaches to life. It would still be true even if children did not in fact have a bias towards supernatural rather than naturalistic explanations. I am sure that they do, and there's plenty of research to show the process.

In that sense, it seems to me completely incontestable that atheism has to be taught, even if the process consists largely of the transmission of attitudes and habits of mind rather than dogmatic statements.

Not to see this is an instance of a more general blindness, which Xenophanes ascribed to theologians: "The gods of the swarthy and flat nosed; the gods of the Thracians arre fair haired and blue eyed ..."

People who no longer believe in gods, or even God, tend to believe in Humanity instead, but their Humanity bears a remarkable

We are not going to understand the growth of creationism in modern England so long as we think of it as a primarily Christian phenomenon, or even a religious one. Take a look at the most recent surveys of creationist belief among teachers and among the general public. One was conducted by Theos, the Christian thinktank, and has been attacked by the BHA – more of this later – and the other measured attitudes towards creationism among school teachers.

That found that nearly a third of teachers with science as a specialism saw nothing wrong with teaching creationism in class. Now, I have only come across one school where an open attempt was made to do this – the notorious Emmanuel Academy in Gateshead. But the headmaster there told me, and I have no reason to doubt this, that although he was himself an evangelical Christian, the impulse towards creationism in science classes had come from Muslim parents.

So, does this prove that the problem is simply one of religion versus science? Not if the BHA is right about the decline of religious observance. Their most recent press release claims that less than 10% of the British population is religiously observant. But the figures for the rejection of evolution produced in the latest Theos survey completely dwarf the most generous estimates for religious observance.

Watching Obama's inauguration with its repeated invocations of the deity, both formal and informal, it struck me how astonishingly prolific America has been in religious inventions. A short list of religious ideas invented in America would include at the very least religious toleration (from Rhode Island) from the 17th century, the open-air revival meeting (from the Great Awakening) from the 18th, Adventism, and Mormonism, from the 19th century and Pentecostalism and Alcoholics Anonymous from the 20th.

Then there are all the American innovations which are either questionably religious, like worshipping your own constitution or the "free market", or were in some sense pioneered in Europe, like theocratic model settlements. This last also falls into the third category: American religious innovations that were ultimately unsuccessful, along with Christian Science, utopian communes, and, let us hope, scientology.

But the successful American religious innovations have all spread round the world. They have not just become ideas, but transnational cultures bound up with ritual and strengthened by myths about their own history. There has been nothing at any other period of history like that fountain of social invention emerging from one country or civilisation.

Their success is often taken to be an endorsement of the free market in religions: more precisely, it is argued that this is the outcome of consumer choice,

This is one of those books whose subtitle gives it away entirely. Robert Park is a physicist and sceptic, who believes in an age of science - so naturally Superstition: Belief in an Age of Science (Princeton University Press, £14.95) is one long howl of complaint that he actually lives in an age of unscience. This makes his book much more illuminating than it might have been; much more illuminating, in fact, than he intended it to be.

It is hardly news to the intelligent reader that homeopathy is nonsense, creationism is a lie, intercessory prayer has no measurable effect, Uri Geller is a fraud and so on. What's easy to overlook is the existence of another sect of determined believers, whose creed is the last sentence of Park's book: "Science is the only way of knowing - everything else is just superstition."

So much for philosophy, history, literature, art, and common sense.

Park is not original here. In fact the value of his book consists in his unoriginality and his willingness to say straight out the kinds of thing which lurk unsaid within more self-conscious writers like Richard Dawkins. The more that the New Atheism emerges as a social movement in the USA, the more it acquires the habits of mind that make monotheistic religion obnoxious.

Just like other monotheisms, scientism proclaims the brotherhood of humanity in theory, while in practice excluding unbelievers from

Nature, one of the world's leading science magazines, normally carries obituaries only of Nobel prizewinners and scientists of similar stature, but it made an exception for Sir John Templeton [subs nec], the financier and philanthropist who gave hundreds of millions of dollars to promote the scientific study of religious beliefs. He thought they were true, or at least referred to real facts about the world, and thus could be studied with profit by real scientists. Naturally, this infuriates the Dawkinsian atheists, who, for all their talk of applying reason to religion, want in fact to abolish it and extinguish its memory except as something with which to frighten children. So I was aware that writing the obituary was a controversial undertaking.

I only had one letter back, though, which surprised me, and it was a reasoned and interesting one from which I learned a great deal. A reader in Dallas, Texas, write in to protest because I had said that people who believed the universe was amoral must think of themselves as being on the losing side.

To many nonbelievers, like myself, we are perfectly content with believing that the universe is amoral and without purpose. Believing this way takes nothing away from our fascination with this place or its mysteries, nor does it make us less emotionally 'positive' than others. To me, believing this way feels neither false to the facts nor to be on a losing side. I assume that those who do believe in a purpose-driven, moral universe also don't feel that they are on a losing side.

Obviously you can be moral and still believe that the universe is not on your side: in some sense, morality wouldn't be morality at all if it consisted only in signing up with the big winner. But it seems to me obvious that if you believe that in the long run all good deeds are

Easter weekend is one of the great affirmations of faith in the Christian year. To believers, the death and resurrection of Christ is, according to traditional doctrine, the belief that defines their religious experience.

To non-believers, ideas like resurrection are the kind of proposition that makes religious faith impossible.

But for believers and non-believers alike there has been intense interest and much new research in recent years into what exactly religious faith means to people.

Religion is clearly a major influence in the shaping of the world. Yet how does belief actually relate to the way in which life is lived, how does it affect thought and action?

Are the sacred texts and doctrines of world religions the best guides to how religion is really believed and understood, or is there a new way of understanding its role in relation to individuals and societies?

In Analysis Andrew Brown explores this research, and talks to leading figures pursuing new understandings of religion and its application to daily life.

They include anthropologist Scott Atran, whose fieldwork has ranged from South America to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, the veteran British politician and prominent Catholic Shirley Williams, philosopher and atheist Antony Grayling, Justin Barrett,