Dawkins exposed

A rotten week for Richard Dawkins in his battle against God. He began it by being kebabed on the Today programme by the former Dean of St Paul’s, Giles Fraser and ended it skewered by Camilla Long in an interview (£) for The Sunday Times. Long cannily exposed his shrillness, his monumental arrogance, his tetchiness.

It is a huge shame in a way, because he is a clever chap who has done an awful lot to popularise science; he has been far more a force of good than ill and it would be nice if we could remember him for his contribution to science. But we won’t. We will remember him less as Charles Darwin, which he would like, than as, ironically, Samuel Wilberforce, which he would not. Someone whom history remembers primarily for a hapless flailing.

Remarkably, Dawkins stipulated that his Sunday Times interview must be carried out by someone who is ‘not religious’. This reinforces the suspicion I’ve always had that he wishes only to preach to the converted and sneer at the rest. There is no real attempt to engage; like so much of the evangelistic, atheistic, liberal left it is simply fashionable attitudinalising and means less than a handful of dust.