Commonsense lets us down, because commonsense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large; the mundane world of the familiar.

No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth.

My untidy habits drive me to follow the slash-and-burn principle. Work on a virgin table until the mess becomes unbearable, then move on to a clean table in a clean room - or, on a beautiful summer day like this, one of the five tables dotted around the garden. Trash that table and move on again.

There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity.