Tim Lott's Week: Scientists need to use their imagination

Sharing a tent with the colossal intellects of Martin Rees, Steve Jones and Richard Dawkins - as I did at the Hay Festival on Monday - is enough to make one feel humble. This isn't to say I don't think all three of them are wrong.

The Astronomer Royal, the geneticist and the God-bashing biologist all share what you might call the same pair of spectacles - the view that sees the intelligent world as an accident in which intelligent events, such as the Hay Festival, take place as having come about through a combination of time and chance.

This is pretty much the view that has dominated science since the 18th century, when the God-centred view of the universe was replaced by the mechanistic view of the universe - what you might call the Engineering Vision of Being. Instead of us being ruled by a superior intelligence, the universe was seen as a great, blind purposeless machine being ruled by dumb energy, upon which life and intelligence appeared as a kind of absurdist accident.

Rees has pointed out that there isn't enough time in the universe - and so not enough circumstance for chance to act on - to produce the kind of complexity that exists in the living world. His solution? There must be not just one universe but endless universes to account for this inexplicable appearance of complexity.

I sometimes wonder that science is not as given to prejudice and taboo as any other discipline. After all, to my layman's mind, to posit endless (unproven) universes seems to be no more unlikely than the idea that the forces that produced the universe had, at root, the potential to be intelligent. Apart from which, since all we human intelligences are products of the universe, is it cogent to argue that intelligence really arises from stupidity? Do thorns grow on grapevines? The narrowly rationalist view doesn't seem to add up.

I am as much an anti-theist as Dawkins. Or at least an anti-monotheist. But I also think the universe is stranger than the scientific imagination - which is a much inferior thing to the scientific intellect - can grasp.

The novelist as salesman

It has now been more than 10 years since I had my first book published, and this weekend, my sixth, Fearless, goes into the shops. And my, how things have changed. I no longer fool myself that I am part of a writing "community" - which is actually a collection of insecure egotists jockeying for position, status and money. I've also learned that the books business is now just that - a business, run not by the publishers but by marketing men and chain-store buyers.

I have not done particularly well out of this revolution. Perhaps I am the wrong sort of writer, perhaps not a good enough one. But I regret, purely from a marketing point of view, that I happened to be born male. Since the Orange Prize and the rise of book groups, women have done disproportionately well in breaking into the big time. Also I, unhelpfully, write a different book every time, from memoir to serious contemporary fiction, to comedy, to, on this occasion, children's fantasy. This means I have not developed a "brand". And branding is everything.

Like many "mid-list" writers nowadays, I have had to become as much of a salesman as a writer, pitching my arguable talents to TV, radio, newspapers and film.

It would be nice to retire alone to a garret and write books about things that matter, but that's not the name of the game any more. The game is to be predictable, give people what they want, to entertain and to reassure them. There just isn't much of a market any more for what Arthur Miller called the writer's real job - "to tear away the veils of denial".

Or am I in denial myself in thinking that it was ever any different?

* A few days ago I got chatting with a family lawyer who told me that she thought it was essentially crazy to get married nowadays, especially if you're a man with a higher income, since the dice are loaded so heavily against you if ever you have to divorce.

I agree - which might leave some people puzzled as to why I am getting married (for a second time) on 21 June in my local church to my partner of seven years, Rachael. Quite apart from it being irrational from a self-interested point of view, I am not religious, I have no conventional relatives to please, and I have no belief that getting married makes your relationship more secure or respectable.

I am unabashed in admitting that getting married makes no sense. In fact, it is a kind of anti-sense. And that, to my mind, is exactly why it is beautiful. Its very purposelessness is what makes it valuable - that is to say a gesture of love untainted by self-interest or pursuit of reward.

Marriage is purely romantic and purely hopeful. And it is thus a gesture which some part of me - some non-rational part of me - reaches out towards, without thought or calculation being part of the equation.

I love Rachael. And therefore I am marrying her. And that is all the explanation that I can ever give or that can ever be given.

Richard Ingrams is away

Interesting? Click here to explore further