Perowne is an archrationalist, taking comfort in his professional capabilities and the ordered certainties offered by science. In particular, he is committed to a Darwinian perspective that offers a more acceptable mythology than creationism’s supernatural explanations. … However, as the delusions of divinity suggest, Perowne’s convictions themselves have something of the quality of religious faith, and his hubris means that, from the outset, in the historical moment of threat he inhabits there is always the sense that he is riding for a fall.

XREF: Perowne echoes the tragic hubris arc common in Ian McEwan's protagonists, and the idea of reason as a form of faith parallels critiques of scientism elsewhere.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 105