The future of religion? Well, we have heard about the falling away of church attendance, how those who do go are mostly old, though we are told that the church is growing in Russia, a reaction after the years of enforced dialectical materialism, and evangelical and pentecostal groups are increasing their roles in many parts of the world. Islam is resurgent, perhaps as the expression of resurgent cultures. Will there be a religious revival in the next century? Somehow, somewhere. There is a hunger in human beings to be part of something larger, and this is not likely to end unless the electronic addictions replace the outside world with a simulacrum, perhaps not even then.

As things are, materialism and atheism-the fundamentalism of science-remain powerful. Many contemporary philosophers are convinced that a material explanation of consciousness is both possible and necessary. Biologists affirm that Darwin's doctrine of natural selection is a mechanism which can explain the development of every living form and even perhaps every social form. In the face of these arguments, and the increasing sense that nature-at least on this planet-is dying under the assault of human numbers and technology, we find ever more wishful sets of beliefs arising-aliens, angels, Elvis sightings, channelling to other levels of being, a spirituality that appears to be characterized by a lack of any sort of rigour, intellectual or moral. The person who has leafed through The Celestine Prophecy is accepted as having insights as important as the scholar who has spent a lifetime contemplating the Talmud or the New Testament. Religion has always been the contemplation of the inexplicable, the acts of Yahweh, the sayings of Jesus, but traditionally such contemplation was hard and dangerous work; one prepared by frugality, austerity, and silence. Modern individualism suggests there is no need to discipline belief or desire. What matters is what you feel, or think you feel. There is an idea abroad that we can all pursue some kind of personal and individual spirituality; it's all as easy as a trip to the mall. Questionable, since religion is presumably the confrontation, at the highest possible level, with something beyond the self, the abandonment, that is, of the personal. Yet the self is all we have to work with. Science will not set us free from paradox.

In the coming century, there is every chance the world will grow darker, and if so, ever more whimsical fantasies of escape are likely to pop up; still, prophecy is a mug's game, especially if you expect your forecasts to enact themselves in the days of history. Though there may be another conception of prophecy, as a kind of metaphor, a statement about the spiritual future is a statement about the spiritual present. "For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed." Religion, presumably, uses a symbolic vocabulary, being the attempt to speak of states of being, or states of mind, that are not conditioned by time. Words that have been spoken for two thousand years may be merely out of date, or they may be timeless. Not all the past will die, even after the millennium.

Do we need religion? Does it make us better? I am not convinced that we are morally improved by religion or need it for that purpose. Morality-as I wrote somewhere else-is the most secular of endeavours, but a life without a language for mystery is like a life without music.

One thing that is beyond debate is that the universe created us; we did not bring it into being. "It is he that hath made us and not we ourselves." And the universe will go on when there is no human mind to perceive it. Mathematics, astronomy, and physics will offer us creation narratives of increasing complexity, symbolic scriptures, but there will exist, beyond all symbols and observations, what we do not know. There is a metaphor for this in the power and mystery of art, the uncountable loveliness of things. Or perhaps those are only my metaphors; others await the UFOs.

Far out in space, the past is coming toward us; in the deep interior of the cells, the future breeds. So be it, as the fella says.

David Helwig's most recent book is a collection of essays, The Child of Someone (Oberon).