It is my role as a columnist to stimulate debate on matters of current importance. I do not expect everybody to agree with what I write.

But I try hard to make my position on issues clear by writing as dispassionately and objectively as possible.

I have never been as nonplussed by a response to one of my articles as that by Christopher Caruana (‘Human embryos and reason’, November 20), a “tutor in philosophy at King’s College, London”.

I quote at random from his article: “For religion to ‘stay out of society’,… which other asocial ghettos, camps or culturally alienated territory for such dull conservatives might, perhaps, be offered by our liberal state, might I ask?”; “The worrying shadows cast by the sins of the ‘all too human’ institution that it is also paradoxically, coexist with the bright light of the heroic love that it is called to represent and continue to serve”; “Now that is very different from trying to impose a supernatural or theistic claim on the rest of the social community.

Nevertheless, arbitrarily cordoning off the inexhaustible conceptual richness it continues to offer to law, ethics and education would transform our society into an amputated ghost desperately clutching at its incongruent desires.” And so on for some 700 words.

Perhaps, this is how philosophers at King’s College, London, speak but I doubt it. If Caruana wrote this gibberish in a London newspaper he would be a laughing stock.

I have never before read such self-indulgent bombast and gobbledygook.

I am sure there must have been an argument buried somewhere in his article but it was too well hidden in the verbiage. I could not understand what he said, so, sadly, cannot reply.