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So you're not exactly an atheist. Koch: I'm not a conventional atheist who believes it's all just a random formation. I believe there is meaning. But as you said, I don't believe in a personal god or any of the standard things that you're supposed to believe as a Christian. Your book suggests that you're a deist, maybe believing there's some sort of supreme being that created the laws of the universe but does not intervene in it. Koch: I don't know. I grew up with that picture in mind, which is very difficult to get rid of when you acquire it in your formative years. This God I have in mind is very ephemeral. It's much closer to Spinoza's God than to the God of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. The mystic Angelus Silesius, who was a contemporary of Descartes, had this wonderful quote: "God is a lucent nothing, no Now nor Here can touch him." It's totally different from any conventional conception of a god. In fact, it's much closer to Buddhist thought than to any monotheistic religion. I just grew up calling this "God" because that's my tradition, but it's not any god that we in the Western world would recognize. There isn't an old guy with a beard who watches over us.

The US is increasingly portrayed as a hotbed of religious fervour. Yet in the homeland of ostentatiously religious politicians such as Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, agnostics and atheists are actually part of one of the fastest-growing demographics in the US: the godless. Far from being in thrall to its religious leaders, the US is in fact becoming a more secular country, some experts say. "It has never been better to be a free-thinker or an agnostic in America," says Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the FFRF.

guess the reason you think that is that for you, despite what certain secularists might say, religion involves making factual claims about the nature of reality.Yeah - I just think that's indisputable, apart from the fact that you can get many people who claim to be religious, but when you push, they are then loath to make any claims about what they actually believe. So there are many believers who are attached to the culture; they're attached to the buildings; they're attached to the art, they want to meet with that particular group - and yet they spend almost no time at all thinking about what, if anything, is true, in the doctrine. That, I would argue is just not really religion. Every religion contains propositional claims about certain events that happen in history, certain events that will happen in the future.

One reply to that might be to say that that's simply a stipulative definition.Well, there's no other honest reading of the books. Religion may be too broad a category, but if you take what religion means in the West - Judaism, Christianity or Islam - we're talking about some books. The only reason anyone can wake up in the morning thinking that Jesus even existed is because we have the New Testament, right? So you look at the New Testament. It makes a variety of claims that are by definition at odds with what we know to be scientifically plausible. And if you're going to make the move of saying "well, none of these are really claims, this is just a story, this is just literature," then you're reading the New Testament the way we read the Iliad and the Odyssey, and then you have no religion of Christianity; you have, at best, mythology. You have art - which is what I think you should have; this is how we should read these books. And certainly some parts of the Bible should qualify as great literature.