To put it bluntly, Gardner is a simpleminded fideist who sees himself in the tradition of Kant, William James, and Miguel de Unamuno. It is impossible to imagine anyone reading his outrageous confessional (unless the reader is a clone of Gardner) who, however impressed he may be by the author's wide-ranging erudition and rhetorical skill, will not be infuriated by his idiosyncrasies...

How seriously should we take Gardner's fideism? He seems sincere, yet one wonders. After all, the man has a reputation as a hoaxer. His April 1975 column in Scientific American purported to disclose such dramatic breakthroughs as the discovery of a map that required five colors, a fatal flaw in relativity theory, an opening move in chess (pawn to queen's rook four) that is a certain win for white, and a lost parchment proving that Leonardo da Vinci invented the flush toilet. Thousands of readers wrote to tell Gardner where he went wrong, and one irate professor tried to have him expelled from the American Mathematical Society. Happily, the society made him an honorary life member. George Groth, by the way, is one of Gardner's pseudonyms.