Eagleton, furthermore, also seems to be saying that religion may be wrong about God but is nonetheless useful for societies. No one denies that belief in God or an afterlife may be comforting, but the point Dawkins is making is, ‘Yes, but what’s the price tag?’ To what extent are social cohesion, passivity, euphoria and fine songs offset by Hernando Cortez, paedophile priests, the Inquisition and the Singing Nun? In April 2005 the New Statesman, in a cover story marking the death of Pope John Paul II, noted that ‘He helped keep the continent of Africa disease-ridden, famished and disastrously underdeveloped.’ And: ‘He did more to spread AIDS across Africa than the trucking industry and prostitution combined.’ This latter was a reference to, among other things, the refusal of the Pope to condone the use of condoms.

The writer, Michela Wrong, went on, ‘When I think of the Vatican’s record in Africa, I think of its failure to acknowledge what happened in Rwanda, where priests and nuns not only led the death squads to Tutsi refugees cowering in their churches, but provided the petrol to burn them alive, took part in the shootings and raped survivors. Rwanda was Africa ’s most devout Catholic nation, and the role the Church played in genocide is as shameful as its collaboration with the Nazis.’

There is a price tag and it is a large one. This is the anthropologist, Canadian Ronald Wright, on the invasion of the Americas by the Europeans in the name of God and of their sovereigns: ‘The demographic collapse that took place within decades of 1492 was proportionally the greatest human death toll in history-removing about nine-tenths of the New World’s people, or close to one-fifth of all mankind-yet this huge fact has still to penetrate general knowledge and standard reference works. As the historian Francis Jennings wrote in 1975: “Europeans did not find a wilderness here… they made one.’”

Those who saw David Puttnam’s film The Mission will recall some of the devious justifications found by the Catholic Church for genocide. America would have been invaded even without belief in a deity, and there is no doubt that disease accounted for millions of those who died, but there is nonetheless a case to answer, a massive one.

The answer offered by those who defend religion is that it is, naturally, changed in character by the society in which it develops. It’s not God’s fault, it’s ours. Religions are contingent. David Martin, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, writes:

Matters are not helped when natural scientists trade on their specific expertise to sound off, like gurus, on matters outside their competence. The offence against norms of social scientific practice is particularly unfortunate when someone simply points to some instance of ethno-religious and/or politico-economic conflict to identify religion as the source of ‘evil’. You might as well simply point to the beautiful design qualities of the Lesser Celandine to infer a Beautiful Designer.

All societies have religions, all societies do bad things great and small; therefore all religions are linked, perforce, with people’s actions. My question is whether religion makes matters worse-whether it is jeopardising our future.

Religion often requires unquestioning acceptance and zeal. It is an immensely powerful motivator of crowds. That’s why it works.

Science also produces unfortunate results. There are bombs, Zyklon B gas, land mines, mutants, narcotics, lobotomies, 4WDs, Chernobyl, Minamata disease, experiments on heads separated from bodies and stolen organ transplants. Is science itself to blame for such infamy, in the same way as Dawkins blames religion? Not quite. Science does not offer a way of living. It has no ‘thou shalts’ or ‘thou shalt nots’. Scientists who have offered life plans, such as B.F. Skinner, William Shockley or Trofim Lysenko, have stepped well outside their fields and debased the science they gave reference to. This is not the same as a scientist having a political viewpoint (most of us do); it is a question of whether the science itself is the essence of the ideology. Though Richard Dawkins is often accused of being a social Darwinist he is, by his own insistence, absolutely not one.

(B.F. Skinner was a charming Cambridge, Massachusetts, based psychologist who saw human beings as glorified automata who specifically did not have ‘wants’ or ‘will’ but were conditioned by reflexes, like rats in a box. He planned societies based on this ‘benign’ conditioning and even brought up his own daughter that way. Shockley was an IT genius who kicked off the transistor and semiconductor revolution and ultimately Silicon Valley. His views on racial purity and ‘degeneration’ were worthy of the Brownshirts. Lysenko was Stalin’s geneticist and made evolutionary principles malleable to suit the Soviet five-year plans. He ruined both Russian agriculture and the careers of his colleagues.)

So is religion like everything else we do-good, bad or indifferent? Is it wrong to single it out, as Dawkins does, as the villain in the piece? A new book by Keith Ward tackles this question by asking, bluntly, ‘is religion dangerous?’ He puts it on a par with other social institutions. In fact, the evidence (ah, you saw this coming) is mixed. Scientific American published a summary of surveys at the end of 2006. They quote a study by Gregory S. Paul, who found for the negative: ‘In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD [sexually transmitted disease] infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies. Indeed, the US scores the highest (by far) in homicides, STDs, abortions and teen pregnancies.’

Believers are, on the other hand more generous donors to charity (+14 per cent) and produce more good works (+57 per cent) than non-believers. So religion, on these statistics, makes you more likely to kill and have the clap but also to be a good Samaritan.

The political split is also stark. Professors Pippa Norris (Harvard) and Ronald Inglehart (Michigan), in a study of ‘37 presidential and parliamentary elections in 32 nations in the past decade’, found that 70 per cent of the devout vote on the right while only 45 per cent of the secular do so. In terms of political parties, 60 per cent of Republicans in America are creationists, with only 11 per cent accepting evolution (I find this an extraordinary figure); on the Democrat side, 29 per cent are creationists and 44 per cent are for Darwin. As for a link between right-wing regimes and dangerousness- I could not possibly comment.

What does all this say about the future of God? The first thing is that he is distinct from the religions that claim to represent him. These religions often demand rigid adherence to dogmas, can be used as rallying points for bullies (whether the zealots really believe the pieties they shout is immaterial), and should be condemned as such. Religions that enclose the mind and inhibit free thinking are dangerous.

Proof of the existence or non-existence of God is also a long way off. Richard Dawkins can remain serenely godless. Even Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, admits there is no ‘proof, rather a state ‘of silent waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark,’ as he puts it. Well, no danger in that!

But there are no scientific absolutes either. Science may be tested with far more rigour than almost anything else we do (try doing brain surgery, flying a 747 or designing modern electronics on the basis of faith alone) but it can never be 100 per cent certain of anything. Michael Frayn’s book The Human Touch reminds us that even the most famous laws of physics and maths, from those of Euclid to Newton, still contain fudge. Science in all its glory is nonetheless a succession of approved approximations and agreed assumptions. Modern maths is so demanding that some proofs would need to be run through very fast computers for twenty years and still give us only 98-99 per cent assurance they are secure. At least, though, science demands and has inbuilt scepticism to keep it honest, in the long term anyway. Religion also has sceptical dialogues, but their intention is not to overthrow the entire system of belief.