He does not know how much he does not know

There’s a wonderful story in this book, told by the biologist Lewis Wolpert, about a vistor to the office of the physicist Niels Bohr. The visitor, a fellow scientist, was astonished to see a horseshoe nailed above the Nobel laureate’s desk. ‘Surely you don’t believe that horseshoe will bring you luck?’ he said. ‘I believe no such thing, my good friend,’ replied Bohr. ‘Not at all. I am scarcely likely to believe in such foolish nonsense. However, I am told that a horseshoe will bring you good luck whether you believe in it or not.’

As John Humphrys says, that’s ‘funny and profound in the same breath’. I wish the same could be said for In God We Doubt, a book that does the Today programme inquisitor we all so admire no favours at all.

Not long ago, Humphrys presented a radio series, Humphrys in Search of God, in which he interviewed a number of senior religious figures and invited them once and for all to persuade him, live on air, of the existence of the Almighty. Oddly enough, they failed. But the programme earned him the biggest post-bag of his career and so In God We Doubt — a book-length shrug of the shoulders — is his follow-up.

He begins with some musings about the Big Questions, enlivened by a personal sketch of his dutiful, church-going childhood. Then he makes the reasonable point that the Enlightenment has failed to kill off religious faith, and that the angry thunderings of Dawkins, Hitchens and Onfray don’t address the enduring human disposition to belief.

He meanders through ethics, ontology and sociology. He reproduces some passages of his interviews with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi, scientists and others, and talks about them. He hands the mike over to the audience a bit, too, with one section that anthologises the best bits of his postbag from the radio show.