The professor did not take this conundrum well. In fact, he exploded into vituperation on air and later attacked me in print for my impertinence. What he and his apostles (sorry, comrades-in-arms) seem not to recognise is the failure of imagination – the crass philistinism – of a position that fails to appreciate the significance of those kinds of belief that do not rest on empirical evidence but which are still central to human experience. To be so dismissive of, or incurious about, such beliefs – this capacity to envisage, or to long for, a transcendent explanation of our condition, which has been a feature of virtually every civilisation that has survived long enough to be recorded – is a very odd kind of obtuseness in people who clearly see themselves as possessing superior intelligence. Do they really not understand what it is that it is so unsatisfactory about “scientific” accounts which reduce life to the ticking over of sensory apparatus?