The genetic code genius failed to kill faith

On one day last year, when I was in Princeton to give a lecture, I separately bumped into three scientists writing books about God. Lee Silver’s Challenging Nature is about the parallels between Christian fundamentalism in America and eco-fundamentalism in Europe; Dean Hamer’s The God Gene was written (he told me) to pay off a credit-card debt left him by a profligate boyfriend; and Bob Wright’s book on the Almighty is still unpublished. They are not the only ones. The philosopher Dan Dennett has recently published Breaking the Spell while Richard Dawkins’s eagerly awaited (by friends and enemies) The God Delusion is now in the bookshops.

This fascination with God does not imply a mass conversion among the typically agnostic scientific ranks. The physicist Steven Weinberg has put it this way: ‘As you learn more and more about the universe, you find you can understand more and more without any reference to supernatural intervention, so you lose interest in that possibility.’