The long tradition of spirituality, Comte-Sponville realises, is a primary vehicle for preserving this vital sense of the sacred, and the moral imperatives that go with it. And so he describes himself as "faithful" to that tradition. Fidelity, in his sense, is "what remains when faith has been lost". And "renouncing a God who has met his...demise...does not compel us to renounce the moral, cultural and spiritual values that have been formulated in his name." 

But there is a crucial ambiguity here. It is absurd to suggest that becoming an atheist entails abandoning morality. But if the natural process is all there is, and social and moral norms are simply conventions devised by humans as part of that process, then what provides morality with its authority — that sense of an imperative that exerts a call on us whether we like it or not? Again like Johnston, Comte-Sponville frequently helps himself to a vocabulary to which as a naturalist he is no longer entitled — in this case, notions like "absolute", "sacred", "unconditionally imposes itself", etc. Once we probe deeper, we see that, for Comte-Sponville, the "absolutisation of ethics", as he puts it, is in the end "illusory". It is a "projection on to Nature" of "what only exists within ourselves". So for all the fine language about the sacred, we end up slipping down the primrose path to relativism: the call of morality reduces to what I decide to do or to refrain from doing. "Should I rob or rape or murder?" Comte-Sponville asks. And he quotes admiringly from Alain's answer: "No, because it would be unworthy of what I am, and what I wish to be." This is clearly supposed to be a rather splendid answer, but actually its implications seem to me as chilling as Nietzsche's terrifying suggestion that I might justifiably decide to suppress impulses of compassion if they got in the way of some grand project I might choose to adopt. Despite all the good intentions, we end up with a worldview in which people's own self-inflated sense of what is "worthy" of them is all the barrier that stands between us and barbarism. 

For all their obvious sincerity and their impressive philosophical gifts, these neo-naturalists end up, so it seems to me, betraying the legacy of spirituality to which they are, on their own commendably honest admission, so deeply indebted. Both writers mention, en passant, that they were brought up as Catholics. But, like many academics and intellectuals, I suspect they have given insufficient credit to the pervasive subliminal effects of the culture to which they were exposed, day by day and week by week, as they grew up. To be sure, there was much about that culture, especially in its more rigid and fossilised forms, that was no doubt oppressive, if not worse. But the sense, powerfully articulated in both writers, of the sacred, of the mystery and wonder of existence, of the power and resonance of the moral ideals that call us to transcend ourselves, of the supreme value of love and self-sacrifice — how much of this is really independent of the liturgical and scriptural and sacramental culture which nurtured them? And how much of it can be retained once that culture has been dismantled?

What we are witnessing among these religiously sympathetic naturalists, if I am right, is an attempt to have one's spiritual cake and eat it — or rather to continue to be able to eat it once the main ingredients have been discarded as rubbish. Rather like the British socialist politicians of the second half of the 20th century, intent for doctrinal reasons on destroying the very grammar schools to which they themselves owed so much, many naturalists would no doubt argue that the price of the demolition job is worth paying: in the educational case, elitism was the supposed bogey that had to be eradicated, while in the present case it is supernaturalism. Yet if the scientific outlook is supposed to be the reason for scrapping the supernatural, the irony is that there is nothing in science that in fact leads, or could possibly lead, to that result. Science, the study of the natural world, cannot conceivably pronounce on what may or may not transcend that world.