Our sport during lessons was to sidetrack him away from scripture and towards stirring tales of Fighter Command and the Few. Had he been, he would certainly have identified with it and, instead of the priesthood, might have been led to Darwin's view that all was 'produced by laws acting around us': In his boyhood at least, my chaplain was presumably not aware (nor was I) of the closing lines of The Origin of Species - the famous 'entangled bank' passage, 'with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth'. It has no connection with supernatural belief.

A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists. Why the same emotion should have led my chaplain in one direction and me in the other is not an easy question to answer. In another time and place, that boy could have been me under the stars, dazzled by Orion, Cassiopeia and Ursa Major, tearful with the unheard music of the Milky Way, heady with the night scents of frangipani and trumpet flowers in an African garden. It is thanks to decent liberal clergymen like him that nobody could ever claim that I had religion forced down my throat.

He was ordained an Anglican priest and became a chaplain at my school, a teacher of whom I was fond. He interpreted the experience in religious terms and it led him eventually to the priesthood. Suddenly the micro-forest of the turf seemed to swell and become one with the universe, and with the rapt mind of the boy contemplating it. He suddenly found himself overwhelmed by a heightened awareness of the tangled stems and roots, a forest in microcosm, a transfigured world of ants and beetles and even - though he wouldn't have known the details at the time - of soil bacteria by the billions, silently and invisibly shoring up the economy of the micro-world. The boy lay prone in the grass, his chin resting on his hands.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins