Introduction

All of these essays might be seen as wrestling with a single and very

knotty problem – not so much a problem, in fact, more a predicament.

All the writers are agnostics, most are atheists. They are not persuaded

by any of the arguments for the existence of God, or the truth of any

religions. They do not, for the most part, find they need to make use of

religious concepts. They can get on just fine without believing in the

divine godhead, the devil, or the existence of supernatural or tran-

scendent realms. Yet most of them do not find it easy simply to jettison

the concept of the sacred. As Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most

renowned freethinker of our times, admits, there are some things he

can’t but feel are sacred: the Grand Canyon, early human skulls and

important fossils. At the very least, many of these writers worry that

viewing everything on a level – as uniformly profane, perhaps, or at

least secular – would represent a real impoverishment in moral

outlook.