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On the evidence of this incoherent, overlong and frequently rebarbative book, atheists and humanists could do with a new spokesperson. Richard Dawkins believes that atheism is, by definition, anti-religious; he doesn’t think you can maintain that religion is false without at the same time disdaining all of its works. Which means, as the philosopher Mary Midgley has pointed out, that for Dawkins there is no real difference between Rowan Williams and Osama Bin Laden.

Dawkins’ absurd claim that Martin Luther King’s egalitarian politics had nothing to do with his faith shows just how sublimely ignorant he is of the way in which religious concepts can sometimes serve to articulate a moral vision in which all human beings are of equal worth. With his customary indifference to the hardness of hard questions, Dawkins takes it for granted that we can make secular sense of the idea that all individual human lives are equally precious. Tell that to the philosophers.

Worse still, Dawkins doesn’t even seem to understand the force or scope of his own arguments against the ‘God hypothesis’. This is why he frequently attracts the charge, which he tries unsuccessfully to rebut here, that he is a Darwinian ‘fundamentalist’ and his atheism just another form of dogmatic certainty. It’s possible to be an atheist on the grounds that you’ve yet to be presented with compelling evidence for the existence of a supernatural being, but that’s not the same as being certain that God doesn’t exist; rather, it is to leave open the possibility that you may turn out to be wrong.