Thursday's headline in the Times, "Hawking: God did not create the Universe", reached new depths of absurdity. It provoked an immediate outbreak of hostilities between atheists and believers, raising again the question of the status of religion in an age of scientific advance that has been accelerating since the Enlightenment. Hawking appears to believe (and so far I can judge only from the extracts in the Times magazine, Eureka) that he has proved the nonexistence of God. But the trouble with his proof, as with so much religious discussion, is that he takes the name "God" to be used to refer to an object that exists (or does not exist) in the world as other natural objects exist.

And most people who are religious believers fall into the same confusion. They assume that God the Creator is a being, albeit supernatural, to whom can be ascribed other praiseworthy attributes, who can be identified with God the Loving Father, or God the Founder of all Morality, who literally, at one and the same time laid down both natural laws and moral principles.

It would be as well if people could take time off from the battle to read Section XI of David Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. It isn't very long. But it contains the argument that even if we could infer from the nature of the world that God must have created it (a fashionable form of theology in the 18th century), this would be a useless inference, since we would have no grounds for ascribing any other characteristics to this creator. All the characteristics usually attributed to the deity – that he is morally perfect, that he loves his creatures, that his human creations are images of himself – all these are quite gratuitous additions to the inferred creative function. We would be landed with a God about whom nothing could be said except that he made the world.

The antagonists in the present engagement might prefer to read Kant, who denied that God's existence could be either proved or disproved, but held that all our language about God must be metaphorical. To think otherwise, he wrote, would be grossly anthropomorphic. Whence could we get the idea of perfect goodness or infinite forgiveness except from our knowledge of human goodness and human forgiveness?

The great monotheistic religions are powerful works of the human imagination that have woven themselves deeply into our culture. To some people, their imagery still appeals most strongly; their narratives convey truths and insights not elsewhere available. To others, they no longer have any but historical significance. The mischief done to science and religion by the current battle lies in the belief that all truth must be literal truth. One thing is certain. Just as, if Hawking is right, we do not need the idea of God to teach us the origin of the universes around us, so we do not need the idea of God to teach us what is good and what is bad. We can learn this from society itself, not from tablets of stone handed down from Mount Sinai.

Whatever the continuing role of religion today, in philanthropy, in education, in ceremonial, in music, in personal comfort and hope, there is no obligation to believe. We can value things without God to tell us what is valuable. We know, without faith, that love is better than war.

Mary Warnock's Dishonest to God, on keeping religion out of politics, will be published by Continuum, £16.99