This book could also be titled Six Irritating Things Before Breakfast, as it seems to have arisen out of Lewis Wolpert's irritation at the things his fellow human beings persist in believing.

It is all very well to write a book out of irritation, but does it become just a whinge about other people, or does it become an attractive commendation of a better way to look at the world?

Wolpert's irritation is on show from the start. He is motivated by others' distrust of science and belief in "what I regard as the unbelievable, from angels to aliens to levitation and telepathy" (p ix). "How could people believe in things for which there seemed to be no reliable evidence? It really irritated me. And then there was religion, which affected me personally" (p ix: his son joined the London Church of Christ).

So, laying his cards on the table as a reductionist materialist atheist, committed to the necessity of evidence and to science as the best way to understand the world, Wolpert tells the reader that he intends to use evolutionary biology, or actually evolutionary psychology ("quite a controversial field" p xi) to generate insights into the nature of belief.

Strangely, having criticised some for believing things "for which there seemed to be no reliable evidence" (ix), he goes on to admit that, "Alas, much of the evolutionary biology that I will use is similar to Kipling's "Just So' stories, like how the camel got its hump. It is very difficult to get reliable evidence to show whether one is right or wrong" (xi).

At this point the reader may wonder whether Wolpert thinks his own beliefs about belief are any better supported by evidence than the beliefs he snipes at throughout the book. And if they aren't, why doesn't he apply his own rule about science and evidence and keep quiet until he has something which is up to his own standards?

As it turned out, Wolpert decided to go ahead and publish his thoughts, hoping that they would at least be "interesting and entertaining" (xi). In 13 chapters he moves through a series of topics, beginning with two confused introductory chapters and moving on to causal beliefs in children and animals (crucially, an idea of force " physical causation) and then outlining his basic theses. In summary Wolpert argues that:

1. Human beings form causal beliefs to a degree and with a naturalness and sophistication far beyond any other animal.

2. It was rudimentary tool use that required some slight ability to form causal beliefs and that made the ability to form such beliefs lead to differential reproductive success, hence becoming the object of natural selection and, because of that, in time growing from being a slight ability to form causal beliefs to the kind of ability to form causal beliefs that allows us to develop the full gamut of modern technology.

3. Having developed brain circuits that naturally look for causes, human beings began to seek causes for a whole range of phenomena, including dreams and life and death. Unfortunately, often the ways we form beliefs are irrational, illogical and ill founded.   

4. More than that, there are clear examples of brain pathology arising from illness, injury or drugs, in which a person's mind may form false beliefs (eg delusions), or have experiences akin to the religious experiences claimed by mystics and others. Perhaps religious and paranormal experiences and the resulting beliefs are related to such brain pathologies.

Wolpert then gets some stuff off his chest in chapters on religion, paranormal beliefs and health. Finally there is a short, strange chapter on morality, a dewy-eyed account of virtuous Science and an afterward.

Never send an embryologist to do a philosopher's job, I say. Like some other science popularisers, Wolpert can be woefully ill-informed about areas such as philosophy and theology. You would hope someone writing a book about belief would exhibit a far better grasp of the mountain of thinking about belief that these disciplines have done.

Like some other science popularisers, one suspects Wolpert's lack of interaction with philosophy and theology arises from a suspicion about their merits. Take this frank warning for example: "One should treat with caution anything the philosophers of science have to say about scientific belief" (204). Sir Wolpert here draws his sword to protect the beautiful virgin identical twins, Science and Truth, against the envious cads who would dishonour them and their sacred kinship. The trouble with this kind of "science good, the rest bad' mentality is that it leaves Wolpert trumpeting an unacknowledged and naïve philosophy of science and knowledge. Yet in my experience, the philosophy of science is worth the trouble of engaging with seriously. 

And never send Lewis Wolpert to do a prose stylist's job, it seems. Unlike some other science popularisers, Wolpert's prose style is excruciating. It was a hard slog to get through the book. Many of his paragraphs seemed like the kind of thing you expect in a primary school child's project. "There is this. And there is that. But there is also this other thing', was the jerky format of many paragraphs. How the beginnings and the ends of paragraphs related to one another, let alone to the surrounding paragraphs or the argument buried somewhere in the chapter, was a recurring mystery to me.

If he hoped to be "interesting and entertaining" (xi) he failed miserably, in my judgment.

And finally, don't write a book to complain about how you find it barely tolerable that other human beings believe things you find unbelievable. This book is not a work of science. It is another shot in the culture wars. If the shot is going to count in the war effort, it has to help win some territory in the minds of your fellow human beings. Now if you already share Wolpert's views, you might read it and think "Hurrah!". But if you don't, then I'm not sure whether you would be won over to the materialist atheist reductionist cause by Wolpert's sniping at and trivialising the beliefs of anyone who doesn't agree with him.

Wolpert seems half aware that he may have done that, but absolves himself on the grounds that he has not intended any offence. I wasn't offended, just surprised at his lack of focus on actually persuading anyone to believe something different to what they already believe. This lends the book a kind of pessimism, fatalism, even. Those who believe atheism to be a dead end can be strangely heartened to perceive such a lack of direction in atheism's soldier.

Ben Underwood is the assistant minister at St Mark’s, Darling Point and holds degrees in Science: B.Sc (Hons, Pure Maths) and Theology: B. Div (Hons).