HIDDEN behind the title, not one that sends my blood racing or my wallet gaping, is a book of sheer pleasure. Beautifully written and epigrammatic, it is full of characters of talent, disputatious skill and wit. The “watch” represents William Paley’s famous argument for the existence of God: if you stumbled on a watch, abandoned on heathland in Paley’s example, and investigated its moving parts and what they did in measuring time and date, you would reasonably conclude that someone must have made it.
Before Darwin, some clerics were also scientists. Darwin himself flirted with the idea of becoming a…
