RC: I do go to Church a lot to try and find out why people believe in God. I go to Mass regularly.

NM: That's wonderful. Well then, of course you believe in God. What else does it mean?

RC: One wants to try and understand the personality of people who believe in God when to me it's inconceivable that anybody can believe in God. My friends are very odd. I've still got a few atheist friends, but the vast majority of my friends are either pious Catholics like Paul Johnson or fundamentalist Catholics like Piers Paul Read. Piers and I have had several conversations about God. He believes in Hell, and I say to him "Shall I go to Hell?" "Possibly," he says, "you might be going to go to Hell."

DJ: Does all this talk about Hell worry you, Raymond? Do you think there's a possibility that they might be right?

RC: Doesn't worry me in the slightest. Never remotely. My most intimate friends are Catholics, and you see I dislike Richard Dawkins. For him, believers are either fools or hypocrites. This is absurd.

NM: I looked up the difference between deists and theists in the dictionary the other day. A theist is someone who believes in God and thinks they know what they believe. Deists are people who believe in God and haven't got the faintest idea what it is that they believe. I'm a deist.

RC: Yes, I absolutely agree. We can't ever agree though because it can't be settled one way or the other. I believe there isn't a providential God, or I don't believe he created the universe.

DJ: Do you think, Nick, that God is necessarily good — the problem of evil and all that? Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that God occasionally seems to be rather arbitrary. We rail at Him, and say, "Why do you let these things happen?", but why shouldn't He? 

NM: When I was about 12, I asked my father, how does God allow suffering children? No grown-up could make any sense of it. The only person who made sense of this to me was my father, who answered me very seriously. 

He said, "God wanted humans to have their own responsibilities. He wanted to make them not equal to God, but on a higher level than animals, and therefore He gave the animal world, the plant world, the natural world freedom." So what Darwin says about evolution is all absolutely true. So I became terribly interested in this. In the Bible, Satan is hardly ever mentioned. The only time Satan is ever mentioned in the Old Testament he's working in cahoots with God. In Genesis, the snake is one of God's animals, is His creation. God hasn't told the snake not to come down. God wants to see what will happen.

RC: He's a bit of a joker, God?

NM: Well, yes. One of the last things I've written is: why does no one see that God has a sense of humour? But then one can't say this in the era of the Holocaust.

RC: What was Diana's attitude to the Holocaust?

NM: She was once asked by A. N. Wilson or Robert Skidelsky, "Who do you really think are the most evil people in history?" And she said, "Jesus Christ and Winston Churchill." She was obsessed by it, you see.