He counts as a point against the scientists the fact that one can ask them what happened before the Big Bang and in the end their answers boil down to not much more than ‘Dunno really . . . Just happened didn’t it.’

Actually, as Stephen Hawking once elegantly dispatched the question, to ask what came before the Big Bang is like asking what’s north of the North Pole.

When Humphrys asks what he calls ‘the really, really Big Question — why?’, he entirely collapses the purposive and causative senses of ‘why’, despite the fact that the gap between the two of them is where more or less the entire debate takes place.

I myself come to the question from a more or less mild version of the Dawkins camp. The idea that there is a personal God taking a benign interest in my affairs strikes me as perfectly absurd, but it’s one among an infinity of hypotheses that strike me as absurd, and one I reject with no more or less firm grounds than the others.

I’m not hostile to Humphrys’s book because I disagree with its conclusions. I’m hostile to it because he does neither the atheist nor the theologian the courtesy of troubling to understand the contours of their arguments. You may believe — indeed, you’re pretty much required to accept — that these towers are built in the air; but they are delicately built by clever and serious people. Humphrys investigates their architecture with a wrecking ball.

It is fine to take a stand for common sense and plain talking. It is fine to hook your thumbs into your braces and announce that you don’t know much about art but you know what you like. But it is not fine to take this as the starting point for a guide to the Uffizi.

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