The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.

If you are in the camp I am, one place where science and faith could touch each other is in the investigation of supposedly miraculous events.

People will listen to sophisticated physicists, using God as a kind of metaphor for the deep constants, the deep problems, the deep principles of physics, and say that in that sense I believe in God. The reaction is, "Oh, this great physicist believes in God - that means I'm free to believe in the trinity and in the crucifixion and in the reincarnation of Christ" - and all that stuff, which of course has nothing whatever to do with the fundamental constants of physics, which is what these physicists are talking about.

What you cannot have is a gene that sacrifices itself for the benefit of other genes. What you can have is a gene that makes organisms sacrifice themselves for other organisms under the influence of selfish genes.

If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself tortured and executed in payment-thereby, incidentally, condemning remote future generations of Jews to pogroms and persecution as 'Christ-killers': did that hereditary sin pass down in the semen too?

I'm easily persuaded that a really good novelist who gets inside somebody else's head could be serving a valuable purpose. I enjoy satirical novels that take a wry, humorous, ironic look at modern life.

We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.