Davies won the prize on the basis of a series of books...

Davies won the prize on the basis of a series of books including ‘God and the New Physics’ which ends with the proposition that ‘science is a surer path to God than religion.’ This ought to be considered remarkable, at the very least prompting the reflection that religion must be rather unsure of itself to reward such a statement with such a prestigious prize (other recipients include Mother Teresa of Calcutta and the Rev. Dr. Billy Graham).

It is also part of the irony previously raised when one considers that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for his views on science and religion - these views, when compared to Davies’s statement, now look mild indeed. (Many consider Bruno to have been condemned to death for his Copernicanism, but it now looks more likely that it was merely his heterodoxy and quarrelsomeness.

However he could never have conceived of anything as radical as the above statement by Davies.) We might sum up the religious trajectory of the last four centuries in the West as follows: in the middle of the 17th century thinkers were all theists with a few deists appearing; in the middle of the 18th century thinkers were mostly deists with a few agnostics appearing; in the middle of the 19th century thinkers were mostly agnostic with a few atheists appearing, and in the middle of the 20th century atheism dominated Western thought.

This atheism ranged from casual, as in Marxism, to vituperative, as in writers like Richard Dawkins and Gore Vidal. Indeed it is often surprising how vehement the rejection of religion can still be today, when our secular freedoms have been so long guaranteed in the West. What the postsecular begins to question is the assumption that the spiritual impulse itself has to inevitably create the presecular religious hierarchies that we so rightly reject as inimical to freedom and democracy.

It is an accident of history that religion is associated with feudalism, and a Western accident in particular that it is associated with spiritual intolerance and persecution. Neither is a rejection of the spiritual a necessary outcome of the scientific worldview but rather an accident of a parallel historical process that had falsely identified religion as a repository of knowledge .

We begin to see the Western prejudice against the spiritual as arising out of a series of accidents, and not as an inevitable process. This opening up of thought is what we are characterising as postsecular.