RICHARD DAWKINS sold himself very short indeed in Dublin recently. For he was mainly concerned with securing the claim that “if science can’t get at the truth, nothing else can”; and then with securing not just the equality but the superiority of science over religions and their theologies.

So he insisted, first, that science entertains “much mystery and magic of its own”; and, second, that the queen of science on the contemporary scene, quantum physics, reveals mysteries that would be “well beyond the impoverished imaginings of any theologian”.