Hatcher said that though many subsequent philosophers like Thomas Aquinas and Moses Maimonedes built on Avicenna's proof, they continued to fall back on the infinite regression principle. Hatcher argued that this principle is not sufficient to prove the necessity of God's existence. Modern mathematics demonstrates the logical possibility of infinite regression; negative integers, for instance, do not have a minimal element or something that can be labeled a "first cause."

Thus, Hatcher has attempted to wed modern mathematics and ancient philosophy in a proof of God's existence, drawing on Avicenna's concept of relational logic. "In relational logic, we want to know how the object relates to other objects. It turns out that the relational approach often yields more useful information [than Aristotlean attributional logic]."

Tales of his Hebridean childhood in a remote island near Skye and caps for representing his country at shinty and cricket merely cemented his position at the heart of Scotland's cultural establishment.

As a result, his exposure three years ago as a fantasist who fabricated a tissue of lies to disguise his upbringing in a south London council estate came as something of a shock.

The technique, called "brain fingerprinting", has already been tested by the FBI and has now become part of the key evidence to overturn the murder conviction of Jimmy Ray Slaughter who is facing execution in Oklahoma.

NASA has heaped on the folksiness. It treats the vehicles like plucky characters, and when the Spirit eventually reached one of its targets - a triangular football-size rock - NASA gave the rock a name, Adirondack, and photographed it from every point of view: at a distance, up close, from the side, from above. But from my point of view, the most intriguing picture, taken in black and white by the microscopic imager, was the strangest, a close-up that showed only one facet of the rock, half in brilliant sun, half in the shadow of the rover. Why? Because it didn't look like an Earth rock.