I remember being hit by Euclid’s proof that there is no largest prime number. I was eleven. Some years later it was girls with their sweet eyes, the cadences of Keats and Johnson, nearly being struck by lightning on Mount Olympus, skidding out of control on a wet road and having nowhere to go.

In his book, ‘The Grand Design’, Stephen Hawking says that ‘philosophy is dead’, and that ‘we have no need of a God […]