² Blake, William ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ [1818]: Complete Works, ed. Keynes, Geoffrey (Oxford University Press: Oxford 1966)Google Scholar, 748.

³ Russell, Bertrand ‘The Free Man's Worship’ (1903), Mysticism and Logic (Allen & Unwin: London 1918), 46–57Google Scholar, taken from http://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/fmw.html (accessed 9^th December 2007).

⁴ Monod, Jacques Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, tr. Wainhouse, Austryn (Collins: London 1971)Google Scholar; see Midgley, Mary Science and Poetry (Routledge: London 2001), 34–5Google Scholar.

⁵ Darwin, Charles, in Darwin, F., ed., The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (Murray: London 1887)Google Scholar, vol.1, 315–6). See Plantinga, Alvin Warrant and Proper function (Oxford University Press: New York 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶ Lucian, of Samosata Selected Dialogues, tr. Costa, C.D.N. (New York: Oxford University Press 2006)Google Scholar, 94. The reference is to the story that the Delphic Oracle identified Socrates as the wisest, in answer to Chaerephon's question.

⁷ Buchan, John ‘Stocks and Stones’, in The Moon Endureth (Thomas Nelson: Edinburgh 1923Google Scholar; 1^st published 1912), 160–2.

⁸ ‘Or what's a heaven for?’: Robert Browning ‘Andrea del Sarto’ (1855).

⁹ 22B16DK: Waterfield, Robin, Robin, ed., The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists (Oxford University Press: New York 2000)Google Scholar, 42.

¹⁰ The notion that we can't escape the sky is also mentioned in Xenophon's Anabasis, as a reason not to forget our oaths (2.5.6).

¹¹ Isaiah 44.15–16; see also Wisdom of Solomon 13.11–14.10; 15.7–13

¹² Augustine, City of God, tr. Dyson, R.W. (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press 1998)Google Scholar, 347 [8.23].

¹³ Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio 2.13.35: The Teacher, The Free Choice of the Will & Grace and Free Will, tr. Russell, R.P. (Catholic University of America Press: Washington 1968)Google Scholar, 144. See Anscombe, G.E.M. ‘Paganism, Superstition and Philosophy’ (1985): Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics, eds Geach, Mary & Gormally, Luke (Imprint Academic: Exeter 2008), 49–60Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1.1096a16, after Plato Republic 10.595c.

¹⁵ Chesterton, G.K. The Club of Queer Trades (London: Darwen Finlayson Ltd 1960Google Scholar [1905], 82.

¹⁶ Lewis, C.S. Of Other Worlds (Bles: London 1966), 59–60Google Scholar.

¹⁷ See Pinker, Stephen The Better Angels of our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity (Allen Lane: London 2011)Google Scholar, 741: ‘The fact that a hypothesis is politically uncomfortable does not mean that it is false, but it does mean that we should consider the evidence very carefully before concluding that it is true.’

¹⁸ See C.S.Lewis ‘Cliché came out of its cage’: retrieved from http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/cliche-came-out-of-its-cage/ (31^st March 2012): ‘The weary gods, Scarred with old wounds, the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand, Will limp to their stations for the Last defence. Make it your hope To be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them; For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die His second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong Unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last, And every man of decent blood is on the losing side.’

¹⁹ Aurelius Meditations 6.13, as cited by Liebeschuetz, J.W.W.G. Continuity and Change in Roman Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1979)Google Scholar, 213. (See Mary Midgley Science and Poetry op.cit., 49–55 on John Keats' ‘Lamia’.)

²⁰ Ecclesiastes 3.9.

²¹ Ecclesiastes 12.8.

²² Durkheim, Emile The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology, tr. Swain, J.W. (London: Allen & Unwin 1915)Google Scholar, 428.

²³ Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War 6.27–61.

²⁴ See my ‘Religion and Law’: Religion in the Public Sphere, eds, Brusnveld, Nick & Trigg, Roger (Ars Disputandi: Utrecht 2011)Google Scholar, Supplementary Volume 5, 57–71.

²⁵ Burke, Edmund Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. O'Brien, Conor Cruise (Penguin: Harmondsworth 1968)Google Scholar, 172; see also 129ff

²⁶ http://www.religionnews.com/faith/doctrine-and-practice/atheists-rally-on-national-mall-in-show-of-political-force (accessed 26^th March 2012).

²⁷ A term initially invented by Daniel C.Dennett in New York Times, July 12^th, 2003, and gladly embraced by others: see http://www.the-brights.net/ (accessed 6^th December 2007).

²⁸ See Black, Edwin War against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (Four Walls Eight Windows: New York, 2003)Google Scholar for a detailed account of ‘scientific experts’, who imprisoned, sterilized and castrated people they deemed ‘unfit’, in defiance of law, the American Constitution and ordinary decency. It is also worth remembering what exactly the book at the centre of ‘the Scopes Trial’ actually said. Hunter's, George William A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (American Book Co: New York, 1914)Google Scholar contains such passages as this: ‘Parasitism and its Cost to Society. — Hundreds of families such as those described above exist today, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites. The Remedy. — If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with some success in this country’ (taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civic_Biology, accessed 18^th June 2007). This was not an isolated or eccentric suggestion.

²⁹ For an empathetic account of Olympian religion see Otto, W.F. The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion, tr. Hadas, M. (Thames & Hudson: London 1954Google Scholar; 1^st published as Die Götter Griechenlands in 1929).

³⁰ Midgley Science and Poetry op.cit., 31.

³¹ Lash, Nicholas The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’ (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 200.

³² Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy (Stratus: Thirsk 2001Google Scholar; 1^st published 1908), 21: ‘There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped. That is the ultimate evil against which all religious authority was aimed’. See also Midgley Science and Poetry op.cit., 108: ‘it is not helpful to repeat a doctrine that one cannot actually believe in’ (not because it is ‘incredible’ in the mere sense of ‘surprising’, but, literally, because it makes belief impossible).

³³ Steven Jones ‘Islam, Charles Darwin and the denial of science’: Daily Telegraph 3^rd December 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8931518/Islam-Charles-Darwin-and-the-denial-of-science.html (accessed 27^th May 2014).

³⁴ See Lovejoy, A.O. The Revolt against Dualism (La Salle, Illinois 1930)Google Scholar, 14.

³⁵ Rorty, R.M. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell 1980)Google Scholar, 52n.

³⁶ Haldane, J.B.S. Possible Worlds and Other Essays (Chatto & Windus: London 1927)Google Scholar, 286; see http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_our_queer_universe.html.

³⁷ Chesterton, G.K. ‘The Blue Cross’ in The Innocence of Father Brown: reprinted in The Father Brown Stories (Cassell: London 1929)Google Scholar, 21, 27.

³⁸ Benedict XVI to Archbishop Rino Fisichella, on the occasion of the international congress ‘From Galileo's Telescope to Evolutionary Cosmology’ (30^th November – 2^nd December 2009), http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/pont-messages/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20091126_fisichella-telescopio_en.html).

³⁹ Chambers, Robert Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844: reissued by Leicester University Press: Leicester, and by Humanities Press: New York, in 1969)Google Scholar, after Babbage, Charles Ninth Bridgewater Treatise Fragment (Frank Cass: London 1967Google Scholar; 1^st published 1837), 34ff. Chambers' pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory was mocked – by T.H. Huxley amongst others – as rejecting proper scientific, inductive, method. The same charge was later made against Darwin.

⁴⁰ C.Koons, Robert ‘Science and Theism: concord not conflict’ in Copan, Paul & Moser, Paul, eds, The Rationality of Theism (Taylor & Francis: London 2003)Google Scholar, 82.

⁴¹ Paul the Apostle, in Acts 17.28, after Epimenides' Cretica.

⁴² The notion first appears in the record in that form in the twelfth century Book of 24 Philosophers and in Alain de Lille (c. 1128–1202). It quickly became a Platonic commonplace, and was variously attributed to Augustine and Empedocles.

⁴³ Adams, Will W. ‘Bashō’s Therapy for Narcissus: Nature as Intimate Other and Transpersonal Self': Journal of Humanistic PsychologyStephanie Kaza, Kenneth Kraft 2010. 50, 38–64Google Scholar: 54, citing Suzuki, S. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (New York: Weatherhill 1970)Google Scholar, 31. See also Psalm 139.7–12.

⁴⁴ [Midrash] Genesis R.68: Maccoby, Hyam The Philosophy of the Talmud (London: Routledge 2002)Google Scholar, 24; see also E. Urbach, Ephraim The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, tr. Abrahams, Israel (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press 1979)Google Scholar, 49, 68. Midgley says the same of Consciousness, that it is ‘the scene of all phenomena, the place where appearances appear’: Science and Poetry op.cit., 83; see also The Essential Mary Midgley, ed., Midgley, David (Routledge: London 2005)Google Scholar, 332.

⁴⁵ MacIntyre, Alasdair God, Philosophy, Universities: a history of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (London: Rowman & Littlefield 2009)Google Scholar, 47.

⁴⁶ Plato Republic 6.509; see also Plotinus Enneads I.3 [2] 5, 8.

⁴⁷ See G.Hunter, Cornelius Science's Blind Spot: the unseen religion of scientific naturalism (Brazos Press: Grand Rapids 2007)Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Sprat, Thomas History of the Royal Society (Elibron: New York 2005Google Scholar [1722; 3^rd ed.]), 340. As Midgley remarks (Science and Poetry op.cit., 49), in the seventeenth century, Bacon and the men of the Royal Society had not the slightest wish to attack orthodox Christianity'.

⁴⁹ Athanasius On the Incarnation (written c.318 AD), ch.8, para.47.

⁵⁰ Clearly, the attempt did not entirely succeed, at least in folk-religion: see Evans-Wentz, W.Y. The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (Henry Frowde: London 1911)Google Scholar for a detailed account of belief in ‘fairies’, mostly equated with spirits of the dead, or sometimes with fallen angels, in ‘Celtic’ countries. The belief was fading when Evans-Wentz investigated but may not be entirely dead even yet.

⁵¹ Dawkins, Richard ‘Gaps in the Mind’: Cavalieri, Paola & Singer, Peter, eds, The Great Ape Project: equality beyond humanity (Fourth Estate: London 1993), 80–87Google Scholar; The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1976), 9–10Google Scholar.

⁵² Oddly, some physicists have suggested that the way things are ‘now’ is settled by how they will be ‘in the end’. The one and only ‘real’ history is the one consolidated and confirmed by the Final Observers. See Hawking, Stephen & Mlodinow, Leonard The Grand Design (Bantam Press: London 2010)Google Scholar, 82–3: ‘the (unobserved) past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities’ until the very last days! This point does not seem, as far as I can tell, to have been picked up by evolutionary theorists.

⁵³ See Whewell's, William – entirely orthodox – rebuttal of Richard Owen's argument that there must be intelligent life on Jupiter so that its moons could have an audience: William Whewell Of the Plurality of Worlds, ed., Ruse, Michael (University of Chicago Press: Chicago 2001Google Scholar; 1^st published by John W. Parker: London, 1853), 183–4.

⁵⁴ http://content.usatoday.com/communities/Religion/post/2012/03/-atheists-richard-dawkins-reason-rally/1#.T29HTWFv8Ro

⁵⁵ Keynes, J. M., ‘My Early Beliefs’ (1938) in Collected Writings, vol. 10: Essays in Biography (London: Macmillan, 1951), 433–50Google Scholar, 438, 440.

⁵⁶ Midgley, Mary Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Strange Fears (Methuen: London 1985)Google Scholar, 34.

⁵⁷ Chesterton, G.K. St.Francis of Assisi (Hodder & Stoughton: London 1923)Google Scholar, 143.

⁵⁸ Leviticus 19.15–18: that is, the demand and experience of such justice is the origin and end of human life. It was not only a Hebraic vision: see also Hesiod Works and Days 1.275ff, tr. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (London: Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann, 1914): ‘the son of Cronos has ordained this law for men, that fishes and beasts and winged fowls should devour one another, for right [dike] is not in them; but to mankind he gave right which proves far the best’.

⁵⁹ Ghiselin, Michael. The Economy of Nature and the Evolution of Sex (University of California Press: Berkeley 1974)Google Scholar, 247; see Stove, David Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution (Encounter Books: New York 1995)Google Scholar, 118.

⁶⁰ Wisdom of Solomon 11.14.

⁶¹ K.Harrington, Hannah Holiness: Rabbinic Judaism and the Graeco-Roman World (London: Routledge 2001)Google Scholar, 25.

⁶² Ephesians 6.12.

⁶³ Julian of Norwich Revelations of Divine Love, tr. Spearing, Elizabeth (Penguin: London 1998)Google Scholar, 22.

⁶⁴ Arnold, Matthew God and the Bible: a sequel to ‘Literature and Dogma’ (Smith, Elder & Co: London 1897)Google Scholar, 7: my use of this expression is not intended to endorse the rest of Arnold's exposition – though it is worth noting that his criticisms of what he took to be Christian errors were more nuanced and courteous than was common in his day.

⁶⁵ Porphyry Life of Plotinus 23.36f, after 22.54ff.

⁶⁶ Isaiah 13.6–13; Zephaniah 1.15; Malachi 4.5; Joel 2.11.

⁶⁷ Chesterton, G.K. Illustrated London News 22^nd Nov 1913, in Complete Works vol.29 (Ignatius Press: San Francisco 1988)Google Scholar, 589, cited by De Silva, A. in Brave New Family, ed. Silva, A.D. (Ignatius Press: San Francisco 1990)Google Scholar, 15.

⁶⁸ Micah 6.8.

⁶⁹ 1 John 4.1.

⁷⁰ 1 John 4.7–8.