Peter C Glover is a British writer and journalist specialising in politics, energy and faith issues.

He is the author of The Politics of Faith: Essays on the Morality of Key Current Affairs and other books. He is also European Associate Editor with the US magazine Energy Tribune. Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. Albert Einstein

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. Mark Twain

Losing Our Religion?

Man is by his constitution a religious animal: atheism is against not only our reason, but our instincts. These are the words of Edmund Burke, the great 18th-century Irish statesman, political theorist and philosopher. Modern Secular Humanists, indeed all who consider themselves atheist, would beg to disagree.

Humanists those who hold that there is no higher being than man and the animals would insist that proven, empirical facts, and thus the discipline of Science and Reason (the latter derived from the former), are all that matter. They are likely to add that all religion is thus nothing but superstition and irrelevant to human progress. Yet it was Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientific minds of our age a man not known for being religious and very much a modern man who pronounced: Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. Here was a great scientist who plainly did not perceive religion and science as mutually exclusive paradigms. All of which is critical to any assessment of whether we in modern society are losing our religion.

In Britain today, the Monarch is still the Supreme Governor of Head of the Church of England. The role tasks the Monarch with being Defender of the Faith, that is the Judeo-Christian faith in its Protestant, postReformation, Anglican form. Christianity thus officially remains the established religion of the land. The law duly requires, for instance, that while a knowledge of other religious faiths be taught in schools, religious teaching and assemblies be predominantly Christian in character. However, membership of the European Union, expansive immigration, the pressures of multi-faithism and multi-culturalism, and the growing lack of pro-active Christian worship leading to a decline in church attendance and the closure of many churches, have all led to a growing marginalisation of church influence in national public life. This culminated in 2008 with a report from the Church of England castigating what they saw as the increasing anti-Christian bias in government policy. Some church leaders even mooted that a separation of church and state may be in the interest of the church as well as the state. Keep the faith Media polls on the state of faith in Britain dont help greatly in assessing the real state of our religion as they depend on how questions are asked and what is meant by various terms. What becomes plain, however, from the most recent national census (when all citizens are asked) is that a large majority of Britons still perceive themselves as, at least nominally, members of the Church of England, or Christian (see Census figures inset). Given that regular church attendance stands at around 4 million, other religions and Secular Humanists have a point when they maintain that while many in theory count themselves C of E, they are often, in practice, Secularists. This is the issue which makes the whole debate over a national church and national religion so difficult. With church attendances spiralling downwards in recent decades, we might easily conclude: yes, we have been losing our religion as Christian Britain over a long period. But are we any the less religious animals as Burke concluded? It rather depends on what we mean by the word religion. A Secular Humanist might claim that the core of established religion is belief in a higher being based on faith alone, not fact. But those who claim allegiance to many established religions, particularly the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam etc., see it quite differently. They would claim a foundation in both fact (i.e. Moses, Jesus and Mohammed

were historic figures) that witnesses or confirms their faith in a higher being. And herein is a key to all belief systems or what we may call religions. To one degree or another all are based on a fusion of fact and faith. We can see this in operation through classic debating scenarios. The Secularist will demand that the Religionist empirically prove God. But it is equally reasonable and logical for the religionist to counter with prove God doesnt exist. In the empirical sense, neither can scientifically prove their case. Both, at this level, are equally dependent upon a mixed system or pattern of fact and faith. While the Secularist will say, Aha, but I only believe in those things that science has proven, in the end such a claim must fail when so much modern science is dependent upon consensus of speculative theory in advance of empirical proof. Equally, though science answers the how? question, it struggles to cope with the why of existence. A science consensus or widely held belief, for instance, usually prevails in the public square of thought before the empirical facts can be proven, one way or the other. How often do we hear one scientist informing us one week that red wine, coffee and butter are good for you, only to have it refuted by another the next? Thus is what lately deceased science writer and Secularist Michael Crichton meant by, In science consensus is irrelevant. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. A consensus theory is far from being a science-fact. And the problem is only exacerbated when we fully appreciate the vast chasm between empirical (proven) science and popular (speculative) science and how much the popular understanding tends to be dominated by the latter until empirically proven. Science has a history of consensus belief or that word again faith that a particular theory is, or maybe, true. A theory that, as we saw from the good and bad foods scenario, is more than likely to change or be disproved as greater empirical knowledge accrues, first requires faith in that theory. Secularist Mark Twain famously made exactly this point observing wittily, There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. The point being that any belief system that claims to be wholly rooted in science, even Secular Humanism, means fact and faith. A higher being

While we may or may not agree with Burke about atheism (and thus a higher being), it is hard to disagree with his underlying observation that we are inherently religious animals if by religious we mean holding a view of the world which, to one degree or another, is governed by a mix of faith as well as fact. Einstein goes further, with a statement that asserts both science and religion are essential to what it means to be human. Hence we can safely conclude from the growing social evidence that, as a nation, we have gradually been losing our Christian religion, though, by dint of sheer numbers and self-perception, Christianity still predominates. But the issue of whether we are becoming any less religious is plainly far more complex. In that sense, it is perhaps more appropriate to talk of seeing our national religion fragmenting into a smorgasbord of formal and informal, established and privatised, belief systems or, dare we say, religions.