For decades now, the story of churchgoing in Britain has been one of decline. Yet interest in religion has hardly ever appeared to be higher. Not a week goes by without some faith-related story making the news.

Recently there have been the private member’s bill to allow royalty to marry Roman Catholics (at present such a union bars them from the line of succession), the early retirement of the controversial Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, and a row over the volume of religious broadcasting on the BBC. This aside from the regular (sometimes rather manufactured) bulletins about Muslim extremists insisting that it is only a matter of time before sharia law supplants legislation created in the Palace of Westminster. And then there is the question of whether it is the Pope’s place to make pronouncements on problems that many politicians think fall within the jurisdiction of Caesar, not God.

This is a trend long noted by publishers, who in recent years have produced book after book on religion-related topics, in the process bringing arguments for and against the existence of God to an audience of millions.

Debate about faith and the presence or absence of a deity rages, if anything, even more strongly than when Ronald Knox wrote his limerick about the philosophy of Bishop Berkeley. In that sense, at least, God is most certainly present – and not just in the quad.

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