The teacher you wish you’d had

Sometimes you can become too well known. For years Richard Dawkins was a more than averagely successful media don, an evolutionary biologist, fellow of New College, writer of popular science books and tousle-haired face of rationalism on countless television shows. It was a good living, and kept us all entertained, but for Dawkins it wasn’t enough. So he wrote The God Delusion, an unambiguous attack on religion and the religious. I should probably say at this stage that I am not a believer, but it does seem to me that if people want to believe in a god or gods, that’s very much up to them. In his stridency, Dawkins inadvertently aligned himself with the fundamentalists he hates so much: he became identified as a sort of fundamentalist atheist. Many people, it turned out, felt as he did: 1.5 million of them have bought the book in English, and it has been translated into 30 languages. In this country, though, I suspect that his reputation was harmed by the escapade. We aren’t keen here on such fervent demonstrations of certainty. And we may not be entirely convinced that a scientist’s rigour is the best tool to use against religion, which after all is irrational, and proud of it.

Still, it was the controversy over The God Delusion that led him back to home territory for this book, a restatement and explanation of evolutionary theory from first principles, to counter the bizarre and growing influence of creationism. ‘I shall be using the name “history deniers” for those people who deny evolution,’ he writes in a typically pugnacious introduction,