Common to most progressive thinkers of the twentieth century was the conviction that human enlightenment would sooner or later banish religious dogma. If religion was merely irrational superstition (Voltaire) or a way to manipulate power relationships (Marx), the arrival of a better educated or a more equal society would eliminate the space it occupied. Those thinkers are still waiting. Indeed, the delay has sparked interest in a different question - whether the persistence of belief suggests that the inclination to believe is hard-wired into the brain - on the basis of Darwinian theory that would suggest that it bestows some evolutionary advantage. It was recently announced that two research bodies in Oxford have joined forces to investigate these and similar matters, financed by the Templeton Foundation.

The foundation normally supports work that advances religion, and the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion is named after a former Bishop of Durham, so their collaboration with the Centre for Anthropology and Mind should not be thought of as anti-religious. But it is still a sign of these secular times. In the days when religious belief was universal, the need for an explanation of its survival would hardly have arisen. That does not mean that there are not good questions to pursue. A theological system that is not open to scientific input will eventually be as dead as the dodo. On the other hand, a gene pool that fails to be enriched by the best genes from previous generations - which is one possible result of clerical celibacy - is not as good as it might be.

As long as human culture has existed, religion in some form has been a central part of it. Even where it has been eliminated by ruthless state decree, it has reappeared. Why? To a theist, the human mind appears to have an almost instinctive capacity for religious belief that must have come originally from God - the Creator who wanted to be known and loved by his human creatures. To an evolutionary biologist, ...

A week is a long time in an archiepiscopacy, as Dr Rowan Williams found last week. First, a learned lecture, coupled with a radio interview. Then vitriol poured upon vitriol through newspaper headlines. There were 17,000 emails of complaint to the BBC and 30,000 to one newspaper alone, expressing outrage at the Archbishop of Canterbury's thoughts on Islam and sharia law. But, day by day, a more considered response ...

The German theologian, Johannes Baptist Metz, once posed the rhetorical question: was it any longer possible to pray "with one's back turned to Auschwitz"? He felt that the immensity of suffering and evil inflicted on the Jews in the Holocaust, for which Christianity itself had to accept some responsibility, had implications for almost every detail of Christian theology and worship. It is instructive ...

There is recognisably such a thing as Catholic fundamentalism. It might be defined, by reference to Protestant and Islamic parallels, as believing in a strict and literal interpretation of basic texts and leaving no room for development. When the new head of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, told Catholic journalists recently that it was not the role of the Catholic press ...

Laïcité is not an easy concept to translate from French to English, nor is it easy to interpret the argument now raging in France about its implications. It refers to the supposedly secular character of French public life, and to the maintenance of a proper distance between Church and State. President Nicolas Sarkozy has stirred up fears, particularly on the French Left, that he wishes to modernise the ...