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Are pantheistic, not deistic, and certainly not theistic. ’ Einstein was using ‘God’ in a purely metaphorical, poetic sense. So is Stephen Hawking, and so are most of those physicists who occasionally slip into the language of religious metaphor. Paul Davies’s The Mind of God seems to hover somewhere between Einsteinian pantheism and an obscure form of deism – for which he was rewarded with the Templeton Prize (a very large sum of money given annually by the Templeton Foundation, usually to a scientist who is prepared to say something nice about religion).

Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: ‘When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. ’ If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down. What presumptuous optimism! Of course, dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument, their resistance built up over years of childhood indoctrination using methods that took centuries to mature (whether by evolution or design). Among the more effective immunological devices is a dire warning to avoid even opening a book like this, which is surely a work of Satan.

A cynic might put this down to an unimaginative reflex of reviews editors: It has ‘God’ in the title, so send it to a known faith-head. That would be too cynical, however. Several unfavourable reviews began with the phrase, which I long ago learned to treat as ominous, ‘I’m an atheist BUT…’ As Daniel Dennett noted in Breaking the Spell, a bafflingly large number of intellectuals ‘believe in belief’ even though they lack religious belief themselves. ’ ‘I’m an atheist, BUT…’ The sequel is nearly always unhelpful, nihilistic or – worse – suffused with a sort of exultant negativity.