Socrates or Buddha?beauty we feel when facing our mortality, say. Hence, science
has a capacity to instil a new kind of wonder in us.
What is probably more accurate to conclude, therefore, is that
the scientifi c revolution and the birth of modernity have not led
to the end of spiritual sentiments. What they have done is force
religious tradition to engage with new understandings and, often,
that leads to theological changes which distance us from the old
myths. Hence, there are religious liberals who worry about issues
like the virgin birth – or the historicity of Moses, or the origins of
the Koran. And there are conservatives who reheat cold myths by
emphasising a purely emotional and deliberately anti- intellectual
connection with them. One sees this, in Christianity, as the
extraordinary growth of individuals who feel they have a one-
on-one relationship with Jesus, quite as immediate as their best
friend. Perhaps more so. It’s a conceit that would have shocked
most Christians in history, for whom Jesus was lord and judge.
These are not entirely unprecedented problems. Theologians
have long realised that negotiations between religious wisdom
and scientifi c insights are inevitable. As far back as the thir-
teenth century, Thomas Aquinas addressed contradictions
between our understanding of the natural world and the literal
meaning of the Bible. A case he considers is when the psalmist
wrote that there are ‘waters above the heavens’. That cannot be
the case, Aquinas reasoned, as water is heavier than air. He con-
cluded that the literal meaning of the Bible must give way. But
whereas in Aquinas’s day, this was no reason to doubt the basic
truths of the Bible, today it is, especially when linked to another
feature of modernity, its pluralism.
What’s happened in the modern world, according to pluralis-
tic accounts of secularisation, is not the disappearance of religion
but a massive diversifi cation of belief and non-belief. A plural
world is one in which every day you can meet people who
think radically differently from yourself. It’s a context with real
options. We must choose what we make of assorted beliefs and
how we might pursue spiritual matters, or not. There’s a freedom
in that. It’s an individual quest. Again, one way of signalling that