Introduction

Abstract

To those who still cling to the belief, held by many nineteenth-century intellectuals, that religion was only a relic in the evolutionary history of humanity, this book may seem to be of merely theoretical interest, perhaps not even that. But their belief, it seems to me, has turned out to be contrary to fact. Writing even before the occurrence of the revolution in Iran ushered in by the late Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, and its aftermath, Trevor Ling had this to say about the ‘persistence of religion’