There is another reason why I have been driven to investigate the unknowable, which is also related to my new job. The previous incumbent of the chair for the Public Understanding of Science was a certain Richard Dawkins. When I took over the position from Dawkins I braced myself for the onslaught of questions that I would get, not about science, but about religion. The publication of The God Delusion and his feisty debates with creationists resulted in Dawkins spending a lot of the later years of his tenure debating questions of religion and God.

