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Wednesday 3 December 2008

A man who believes in Darwin as fervently as he hates God

An unlikely bestseller championing atheism will fill many stockings this Christmas. Rod Liddle meets its author, Richard Dawkins, and asks if his opposition to religion is as devout and credulous as the faith he attacks so passionately

Richard himself is a bit of a timelord, if you like. A scientist forever battling an intractable foe — the daleks of religion. He is probably more famous these days for kicking God around than for the hard science of his earlier work (a fact he accepts, with some misgivings); he is our most belligerent and brilliant atheist. Show him a deity — Jehovah, Allah, Sat Guru, whoever — and he will stand up straight and nut it right between the eyes. He rarely yields, as I discovered when I interviewed him for Channel 4.

His latest book does all this and more. It is the (surprise) publishing success of the year and easily outsells those awful football autobiographies (170,660 so far). It is a book of rhetoric rather than science. The God Delusion is, like all the best books, riven with beguiling contradictions, full of interesting holes into which one can clamber and find oneself instantly transported to an alternative universe. It is Dawkins’s broadside against God and those who are stupid enough to believe in him, or her, or it. A book against belief written with the fervour of one who believes utterly in non-belief. A book which insists that science must be a humble undertaking but which — driven by the logic of his argument — contains Dawkins’s own abbrievated version of the Ten Commandments (for which thanks, mate). A book that, for a disinterested non-believer, shows a simple and touching faith in the scientific creed of Darwinism — which theory, only 147 years after its inception, is already looking rather flawed and careworn. And finally, as a neat little irony, a book that will trouser its author an enormous sackload of dosh, not because it is beautifully written and at times exquisitely argued, but because it is about that thing which the author believes must be banished — God.

The author is, as ever, affable, eloquent and charming. He settles into his armchair and immediately tells me, to my surprise, about the religious renewal he experienced when he was 14.

‘I think it was Elvis. I mean, I should have known better because of course practically all Americans of that class are religious maniacs. But when I discovered that Elvis was religious I went back on to religion for a bit.’

It didn’t last long; the man who gave the world ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ was soon replaced, in Richard’s canon, by the man who gave us The Origin of Species. If Elvis rocked, Darwin rocked more. He rocks still, apparently. And thence there devolved along the years an insuperable belief in atheism.

‘There seems to be a tension,’ I venture, ‘between what I suspect you believe — that there is no God — and what science will allow you to say: that it’s extremely improbable that there is a God.’

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