After five university years in the biological sciences, I came out as a creationist.

Which is why I got asked to speak on ‘Christianity and Science’ when visiting Bashkir State University in Ufa, Bashkortostan, central Russia, in the aftermath of the Soviet era.

Before I went to Ufa, I decided any discussion would be enhanced by having a living specimen with which to demonstrate. So, I visited the Zoology department in Birmingham University (where I was at the time) and asked for a stick insect. They were very understanding and gave me a good big insect, enough leaves to feed it for a couple of weeks and a sturdy plastic box in which to transport it across the 4000 kilometres, Aeroflot permitting.

I don’t know a more obviously visible case of natural selection. A stick insect can contrive to make itself look like a leaf and will even produce a ‘leaf’ which appears to have a bite taken out of it by the beak of a particular South American bird.

Our specimen was an instant hit and the audience passed it around from one end of each row to the other. I had once asked the Professor of Genetics in Trinity College Dublin how many mutations it would take to produce this creature and he said, ‘Too many’. I passed that on to them.

I presented the insect in all its glory and claimed that somehow God had had a hand in its design – and in our human design too. After all, nobody wants to be told, ‘You’re a nice person but, deep down, you’re just a bag of chemicals.’ Most people in that lecture didn’t want to be told that either.

But one student called Max held out. In the question-and-answer time he declared that he was going to stick with atheism. I asked him, ‘Are you an atheist under all circumstances?’ ‘Yes.’ I proposed a few theoretical circumstances to him, but he was going to be an atheist in all of them.

Then I took a broad guess and asked, ‘Were you ever in the Young Pioneers?’ (a Soviet youth organisation). ‘Yes.’ ‘Did you ever go on a Pioneers summer camp in Siberia?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Did you ever take your sleeping mat out of the tent at night and lie on the ground and watch the stars?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Were you an atheist then?’ ‘No.’ I was so proud of Max’s courage and honesty in front of all his peers. A real man.

My proposal had simply been a scientific version of the song, ‘Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could’ by Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music in 1965.

And the stick insect? I handed him over to the amazed staff of the Bashkir University Zoology department who assured me that they would look after him but I also noticed that they had a display cabinet of interesting dead insects and the zoologists were eyeing the spaces available for new entrants.

When the time came to make a record of all this in a memoir, I was greatly helped by an excellent writing course provided by the Irish Writers Centre. Those on the course critiqued each other’s work. My piece on Bashkir State University was critiqued by Sinéad.

Sinéad specialises in ‘magic realism’ which was a genre new to me. She patiently explained that it’s a type of writing about everyday life where bits of the supernatural begin in creep in. All of us in the group read each other’s pieces. I had submitted the section in my book about Russia.

I recounted that an atheist student I had met in a lecture (the same Max) had later confessed his new belief in Christ in front of those same peers. When Sinéad read this, she said, “I had shivers running down my spine”, because she was reading about something supernatural but not make-believe.

When she then read that I had also said in that lecture (about creation), ‘After all, nobody wants to be told, “You’re a nice person but, deep down, you’re just a bag of chemicals”’, the lovely Sinéad yelped, ‘I’m NOT a bag of chemicals!’.

I rest my case.