These are two book reviews which I originally posted on my old blog back when the New Atheists were news. The first is a review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion; the second is a review of Christopher Hitchens’ God is not Great.

The God Delusion

The editorial line of this blog is unsympathetic to Dawkinsian atheism (as it is to religious fundamentalism), but it has to be said that this is far from being a bad book.

Dawkins is a good writer – a man with an obvious gift for communication.  His prose is lucid, readable and even urbane, albeit with occasional intervals of Pooterish lameness.  He is less pompous and more interesting than his fellow antitheist Christopher Hitchens.  He mostly keeps his invective within bounds, though he does not hide his contempt for the supernatural view of the world and those who espouse it.  In all, an admirer will find his approach clear-headed, rigorous and incisive.  An opponent is more likely to find it rigid, simplistic and suffused with its own brand of fundamentalism.  Dawkins even feels obliged to protest at one point that he is “not advocating some sort of narrowly scientistic way of thinking”.  It says a lot that he thinks that such a caveat is necessary.

When he deals with scientific matters, Dawkins is sure-footed and informative, as befits a leading expert in the field.  On the other hand, the book as a whole suffers from something of a lack of intellectual fibre.  No-one questions Dawkins’ calibre as a scientist, but for much of the book he is playing away from his home turf, and it shows.  He seems to have done an awful lot of his research by surfing the internet (and, in one case, reading Playboy, which he presumably buys for the articles).  He is also a little too fond of quoting random anecdotes and media reports.  As other reviewers have noted, there is more than a hint of laziness in all this.  A popular book by an academic writer should do two things: it should assimilate thoroughly the body of specialist knowledge in the relevant field, and it should weave it together and package it in a way that the general book-buying public can understand.  In this case, Dawkins appears to have attempted to go straight to the second stage without properly tackling the first.  I will have more to say about his grasp of his chosen subject of God and religion later.

Dawkins is given to a degree of exaggeration.  For example, he compares the status of atheists in America today to that of gay people 50 years ago.  It is not clear how this comparison would go down with the countless thousands of gay Americans who profess religious beliefs, and Dawkins appears to be unaware that gay men were at risk of criminal prosecution and imprisonment in some states as recently as 2003 – something that has never been true of atheists in any period of US history.  Even in Britain, it is reported that 1 in 5 gay people suffer homophobic attacks, a statistic which I highly doubt corresponds with the equivalent figure for American atheists.  It is also worth noting that atheists did not spend most of the 1980s and 90s desperately battling widespread indifference and prejudice while a deadly virus killed hundreds of thousands of them.  As in other cases, one wonders if Dawkins has really thought through what he is saying before putting pen to paper.

II

In many ways, the first chapter of the book is the most interesting one.  This is not Dawkins’ intention: he intends it as a means of disposing of an awkward distraction before moving on to the main business of the book.  Basically, he acknowledges that scientists who otherwise have no supernatural beliefs frequently express a quasi-religious awe and wonder at nature and the cosmos, and sometimes express themselves in sacramental terms.  One famous example is Stephen Hawking, with his talk of breathing fire into the equations and knowing the mind of God.  Another is Albert Einstein, who seems to have been a sort of naturalistic pantheist in the mould of Spinoza.

Dawkins himself makes no secret of the numinous fascination that the natural world holds for him.  The book’s closing chapter is essentially a paean to the wonders of science as a viable substitute for the mysteries of religious faith.  Dawkins is more than capable of misty-eyed passages on the “poetry of science”, speaking of himself as being “tearful with the unheard music of the Milky Way” and so forth.  He maintains, however, that none of this has anything to do with belief in a supernatural realm: the object of awe and wonder is the real world, and when God is mentioned by scientists in this sort of context he is simply to be equated with the workings of the universe.  Allowing this kind of thing to get confused with religion is, says Dawkins, “an act of intellectual high treason”.

This bluster is not entirely convincing – not only because it relies on a culturally specific Western dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural, but also because the sentiment that Dawkins is describing is so transparently proximate to the religious impulse.  There really isn’t a vast distance between the naturalistic pantheism of Einstein and the religious pantheism espoused by Matthew Fox and a large number of Unitarian Universalists and neopagans.  Nor, for that matter, is there all that much distance between Dawkins’ scientific atheism and ideas found on the left wing of traditional religion as represented by Don Cupitt, Richard Holloway, John Shelby Spong and Reconstructionist Judaism (Dawkins himself refers to Holloway and Spong with apparent sympathy).  I won’t insult Dawkins by calling him a religious man, but his position does seem to represent a point on a continuum rather than one side of a deep ravine.

If Dawkins is a little too sure that Einstein’s God is not the God of religion, he is less sure about other distinctions.  His confusion is particularly evident in a series of passages near the beginning of the book in which he succeeds in conflating polytheism with monotheism before going on to collapse both into “anything and everything supernatural”.  At the same time as he is doing this, he declares that he will be concentrating on the Abrahamic faiths – three rather specific and somewhat atypical religions – before casually mentioning that he is going to ignore “other religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism”.

This kind of conceptual sloppiness is not on.  Refuting the existence of an Abrahamic deity is not the same thing as refuting monotheism in general, which is in turn a significantly different enterprise from refuting polytheism.  More seriously, refuting theism of whatever stripe is by no means the same thing as refuting the broader notion that there is a spiritual or supernatural aspect of existence – a notion which Dawkins has seemingly already identified in the Einstein chapter as the fundamental division between religion and rationality.  These distinctions matter.  Dawkins is too eager to start blasting away at concepts which he has not troubled to unpack properly or even to understand.  His attitude of it’s-all-bollocks-anyway-so-who-cares might pass muster in an argument in a pub, but not in an authoritative 400-page book by an Oxford professor, even one written for a popular audience.

In fact, notwithstanding some references to the God of deism, the deity that Dawkins is concerned with has a definite Abrahamic feel to him.  It clearly annoys Dawkins that people accuse him of viewing God as an old man with a white beard, but it is nonetheless clear that his deity approximates to being an organism of some sort – a larger, angrier version of the specimens that his colleagues at Oxford prod at in their laboratories.  It turns out that Dawkins’ God is a very large, very complex entity which can create worlds, keep subatomic particles in order, read billions of people’s thoughts and engage in an occasional spot of smiting.  Dawkins’ knock-down argument against this behemoth is that it is inconceivably unlikely that such a thing could possibly have popped into existence out of nothing before the beginning of time – after all, we know that complex life-forms only appear at the end of a long process of evolution.

This is a vision that is as crudely anthropomorphic as anything in the older books of the Old Testament, and it should not need to be pointed out that this deity is not one that religious people in general (and not just the more intellectual ones) believe in or worship.  A less crude and caricatured depiction of God might be something like this:

There the eye goes not, nor words, nor mind.  We know not, we cannot understand, how he can be explained:  He is above the known and he is above the unknown….

What cannot be spoken with words, but that whereby words are spoken….

What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think….

What cannot be seen with the eye, but that whereby the eye can see….

What cannot be heard with the ear, but that whereby the ear can hear….

What cannot be indrawn with breath, but that whereby breath is indrawn:  Know that alone to be Brahman, the Spirit; and not what people here adore.

That was from a Hindu text, but this way of looking at the divine has equivalents in the Abrahamic religions too, such as the long and venerable Christian tradition of apophatic theology.  Dawkins has responded by deriding this sort of thing as “apophatuousness”.  Likewise, though he does touch briefly in the book on the related concept of divine simplicity, it is clear that he doesn’t have any real interest in getting his head around it.  One begins to have some sympathy for Terry Eagleton’s well-known (if somewhat condescending) critique of Dawkins’ deep ignorance of theology.  No-one has much hope of him believing this stuff, but he might at least take the trouble to understand what he is attacking rather than just relying on a mixture of straw men and disdain.  If you are attacking an idea – any idea – you need to be thoroughly familiar with what its proponents actually believe, and you need to direct your arguments squarely towards the appropriate targets (and not just the easy ones).  This Dawkins refuses to do.  He claims that most theology simply assumes that God or gods exist and goes on from there, so he only needs to bother reading explicitly apologetical writings – but he is letting himself off too lightly here.  Snide comments about “apophatuousness” won’t cut it.

Speaking of apologetics, Dawkins gives short shrift to the traditional arguments for the existence of God.  I’m actually with him on this: the arguments don’t tend to change anyone’s mind, and the debates over them appear to have been fought more or less to a stalemate.  Dawkins, however, seems a little too eager to get them out of the way.  The big one – the cosmological argument – is subsumed into a brief discussion of Aquinas’ ‘Five Ways’, the entirety of which covers barely three pages.  He goes on to misunderstand the argument from aesthetics and to describe the ontological argument (which even Bertrand Russell took seriously) as “infantile”.  Outside the realms of philosophical argumentation, he brushes aside personal experiences of divinity as the products of mental illness, hallucinations and optical illusions.

III

Dawkins has no time for the notion that the order and compexity of the material world imply the existence of a God.  As far as life on earth is concerned, he explains that evolution is able to account for the observed intricacies of nature.  This is not an unreasonable line of argument – albeit most religious believers in the West have no problem with the theory of evolution – but he is less convincing on the origins of life itself, and indeed on the origins of the cosmos.  We can’t explain how or why the universe exists, he concedes, but positing God as the solution is a poor answer, and the theory of evolution as applied to life on earth should “raise our consciousness” to the possibility that some comparable scientific theory explains the origins of the cosmos (presumably including the why as well as the how).  Dawkins is sympathetic towards the idea that the universe is itself part of a larger “multiverse”, and he is receptive to the American physicist Lee Smolin’s eccentric idea that our universe emerged from a process of evolution from a larger number of universes.  He is perhaps too quick to disavow the obvious response that, if theories like these are the alternatives, one really might as well believe in God.

Dawkins sees religion as a by-product of human evolutionary instincts.  Specifically, he suggests that its roots are to be found in the valuable propensity of young children to trust what adults tell them, leading them to absorb improbable stories about gods and miracles at the same time as useful information about not swimming in the river with the crocodiles in it.  He does not embrace the intuitively more plausible argument that religion has some sort of inherent evolutionary function that has ensured its survival and prevalence – promoting social cohesion, for example, or encouraging individuals to sacrifice themselves for the tribe.

Dawkins notes that religion is a perennial source of conflict and suffering (he even provides a not wholly accurate summary of the Mortara case).  Few well-informed people would disagree with this.  But if we go down the route of saying “religion is bad”, the question arises, “compared to what?”.  Dawkins honestly appears to believe that the appropriate comparison, and the broader choice facing the world, is between religion and liberal rationalism – and yet he is surprised that people accuse him of having a nineteenth-century mindset.

The real source of conflict is not so much religion as ideology, of which religion is a subspecies, combined with the human inclinations to tribalism and aggression.  Dawkins recognises this to an extent, but, as in his other writings, he has no real response other than to argue rather unconvincingly that religion is just worse than other such phenomena.  The historical record belies this – and this is the true significance of the “what about Hitler and Stalin?” argument that believers often throw at atheists.  Dawkins thinks it sufficient to note that Hitler and Stalin (the former of whom seems to have had some sort of belief in God anyway) didn’t commit their crimes in the name of atheism as such.  Well, no – but no-one is suggesting that they did.  The point is rather that taking religion out of human culture neither blunts our potential for murderous aggression nor eliminates the ideologies that provoke and justify it.

IV

This is not a polemical work in the strict sense, but Darwin’s Rottweiler will not disappoint his fans.  Dawkins writes of the “anti-factual, counter-productive fantasies of religion”, and of “self-indulgent, thought-denying skyhookery”.  He informs his readers that “[f]aith is an evil”, that religious people worship a “psychotic delinquent” and an “evil monster”, and that they suffer from a condition which is comparable to drug addiction and mental illness.  He is sympathetic to the genuinely disturbing idea that parents should be legally restricted by the state from giving their children a religious upbringing.  He unaccountably describes John Lennon’s vacuous dirge Imagine the Former Soviet Union as “magnificent”.  He even has a go at agnostics and (as we shall see) at more moderate atheists, whom he accuses of cowardice and betrayal.

Dawkins is unapologetic about his abrasive style.  It irritates him that religious beliefs are widely regarded as being automatically entitled to respect.  But, given the deep-rooted and emotionally committed nature of religious belief, it is not easy in practice to show disrespect for X’s faith without showing a fair amount of disrespect for X herself, which is hardly good humanist behaviour.  As a non-religious acquaintance of mine once said in reference to Dawkins, “having the facts on your side doesn’t entitle you to be a c*nt about it”.  It also seems clear that most people respond better to a tactful, sober approach when their cherished beliefs are being challenged than to a full-frontal assault, which often merely invites a defensive counter-reaction.  Dawkins’ respose is to point out that strident rhetoric seems to be considered acceptable in other areas of life, such as political speeches and newspaper restaurant reviews.  Even if one accepts these slightly surprising analogies, however, Dawkins seems to be forgetting that plenty of people despise juvenile political invective as well – and, as for restaurant reviews, being the A. A. Gill of scientific rationalism is hardly something to be proud of.

Dawkins is on even dodgier ground when he tries to argue that the “passion” of the atheist is different from the rage of the closed-minded fundamentalist because it is based on evidence which could in principle be refuted.  This evinces a decidedly generous view of the atheist community, much of which is demonstrably not composed of bloodless Socrateses.  It is a bit like Dawkins’ claim that being an atheist “nearly always indicates a healthy independence of mind and, indeed, a healthy mind”.  He also puts foward the idea, without quoting any evidence, that there are disproportionately few atheists in prison, suggesting that this is because atheism correlates with such attributes as “higher education, intelligence or reflectiveness, which might counteract criminal impulses”.

It is difficult to take this stuff very seriously.  No doubt many atheists, particularly in majority-religious societies like the United States, are clever men and women who have come to acquire their views through a process of independent-minded thought and research.  For that matter, there are probably many jailbirds who call themselves Christians, Muslims or whatever because that was the religion of their parents.  But all this proves a lot less than Dawkins thinks.  In this country, as he must surely be well aware, there are plenty of non-religious and anti-religious people who have embraced their position in an unreflective manner or who invest in it with the currency of their emotional prejudices.  Of course, plenty of religious people do exactly the same thing, but atheists shouldn’t be sinking to their level, remember?  The sad fact is that not many human communities are composed of principled intellectuals who would be more than happy to alter their views in a heartbeat if only they were shown evidence supporting a different conclusion.  Taken in its entirety, the atheist community is no exception to this, despite its self-congratulatory protestations to the contrary.  (Nor, for that matter, is the notoriously bitchy and egotistical academic world from whence Dawkins emerged.)

It speaks volumes that most other atheists, with the exception of the usual suspects like Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett, appear to think that Dawkins is a bit much.  The introduction to the paperback edition of the book acknowledges that a number of reviewers who are themselves non-believers took issue with the style and substance of Dawkins’ writing.  This might have given a lesser man pause for thought, but Dawkins is made of sterner stuff.  He roundly rejects the criticisms and makes it clear that he dislikes people who say “I’m an atheist, but…” almost as much as he dislikes “faith-heads”.

Dawkins, then, is not a man who is afraid to make enemies on his own side.  He scorns the idea promoted by other non-believing scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Martin Rees that faith and science are concerned with different questions and inhabit different arenas – an idea that many of us would regard as almost self-evident.  He blasts scientists of the “Neville Chamberlain school” who make common cause with moderate religious people against swivel-eyed creationists.  The true battle, he says, is not creation v evolution but reason v superstition, and no quarter can be given to the enemy.  He keeps bringing up the Templeton Foundation, a Christian organisation in the US which tries to build bridges with believers and moderate atheists in the academic world, in a vaguely similar way to how some people go on about the Freemasons.  He acknowledges that he has been criticised by some commentators – and, indeed, taunted by his opponents – for damaging his own cause and giving ammunition to the fundamentalists through his inflexible and dogmatic attitude.  This, he assures us with apparent sincerity, is just reverse psychology – his enemies are in fact secretly terrified of him, and are trying to manipulate him into stopping his attacks.

There is nothing particularly original, or indeed attractive, about this mindset.  Whether Dawkins’ views are right or wrong is in many ways less interesting than the manner in which he holds them.  The black-and-white simplicity, the absolute confidence in a particular worldview, the refusal to compromise in the struggle of light against darkness, the preoccupation with principle over pragmatism, the conviction that people who are laughing at you secretly know in their hearts that you’re right….  Somehow, it all seems oddly familiar.

—–

God is not Great

This book has become one of the leading texts of modern atheism – second only, perhaps, to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.  I’m afraid that this is not going to be a sympathetic review.  Reading this book can be regarded as an upmarket version of listening to one’s slightly tipsy brother-in-law – the one who’s got a way with words but likes the sound of his own voice a bit too much – holding forth at a dinner party about what a load of dangerous nonsense religion is, while dropping the names from time to time of books that he’s read.  The other guests maintain a slightly uncomfortable silence and hope that the dessert is going to arrive soon.

Hitchens doesn’t just stand for a generic atheism – his is very clearly a middle-class liberal English atheism (even as an American citizen, he retains a broad streak that is as English as Orwell or Greene).  It is the secularism of J. S. Mill and Bertrand Russell, a decent, cultured non-creed which seeks to exchange the parish church for the art gallery, Cramner for Shakespeare and holy communion for an agreeable lunch.  He explicitly wants the book to persuade religious readers to embrace nonbelief, but yet much of his florid prose is directed against targets outside his very specific cultural constituency, and it is far from clear who he is going to convince.

The book doesn’t seem apt to persuade the sort of educated, semi-agnostic Church of England types who would be the natural candidates to join Hitch in the Tate Modern instead of attending Sunday service.  They would probably have heard most of his arguments before anyway, and would agree with many of them.  Hitchens seems more interested in attacking the follies of past and present-day fundamentalists, biblical literalists and other assorted bigots – but I doubt that many creationists, Wahhabis or Hasidim have read the book and gone on to join him in his genteel Putney of the mind (or even read the book, full stop).  Conversely, the serious-minded and well-informed reader who espouses a more subtle variety of religiosity is likely to find that Hitch is not very interested in getting to grips with her kind of faith.

If Dawkins the scientist is an atheist in the nineteenth-century Darwinian tradition, Hitchens the man of letters is more of an Enlightenment chap.  The book at times has a distinctly eighteenth-century air, and it actually concludes with a call for a new Enlightenment.  The overarching narrative that underlies its polemics is one that would be immediately recognisable to Edward Gibbon, Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine.  Religion belongs to the childhood of the human race.  Long ago, it helped us to explain otherwise baffling and frightening phenomena, but this function has now been supplanted by the more reliable disciplines of physics and medicine.  Religious bigotry and delusion have inflicted enormous physical and mental suffering on humankind.  Fortunately, although we may never succeed in eradicating religious belief, it is no longer intellectually credible, and we have ready antidotes to hand in the forms of reason and science.

One might answer this well-worn narrative with the equally well-worn observations that the past century has been the bloodiest and most chaotic in human history and that this is largely attributable to the horrors that resulted from followers of various non-religious and anti-religious credos making use of modern scientific technology.  The Enlightenment narrative cannot easily accommodate the rise of these genocidal tyrannies, which sought by turns to stamp out traditional religion, to reduce it to a position of useful subservience, and to replace it with secular objects of belief and devotion: the state and the nation in the case of fascism and nationalism, pseudoscientific racism and the leader-cult in the case of Nazism, and a pseudoscientific and profoundly atheistic theory of historical progress in the case of Marxism.

Hitch, being a clever guy, is well aware of this critique, but his reponse is unconvincing.  He tries to link the fascist and Nazi regimes to Christianity, and to Catholicism in particular, but as historical analysis this is thoroughly inadequate (for proper treatments of this subject by historians, see Michael Burleigh’s Sacred Causes and the relevant chapters of Richard Evans’ The Third Reich in Power).  He further attempts to redefine totalitarian regimes, particularly communist ones, as merely new forms of religion – but this manoeuvre is transparently circular.  It would be more honest to conclude that it is ideology in general that is dangerous, not religion specifically – an insight that Hitch actually comes quite close to but disappointingly fails to develop.  One might add that the discourse of enlightened scientific progress challenging primitive and dangerous delusions, while no doubt tenable in Tom Paine’s day, is grimly laughable in the year 2010.  Again, Hitchens shows some awareness of this, but not enough.

Hitchens’ discussion of the intellectual objections to the existence of God is fairly competently executed and quite unoriginal.  The sections on evolution and the cosmos will contain little that is new for the well-informed reader, and anyone wanting stronger scientific fibre would be better advised to go to Richard Dawkins.  It may be noted that Hitchens shares Dawkins’ awe and wonder at the majesty of the universe, though he is perhaps a little more ready than his fellow antitheist to entertain the occasional rather dark and nihilistic thought about a world without God.

Hitchens devotes special attention to the Bible and the Qur’an.  He is predictably scathing about the Old Testament.  Of the Ten Commandments, he says that “[i]t would be harder to find an easier proof that religion is man-made”.  As a biblical critic, though, he is something less than an amateur.  He makes some reference to archaeology in the Holy Land, but beyond this he seems largely ignorant of the vast scholarship (from Jewish, Christian and secular perspectives) on the literary and historical aspects of the Hebrew Bible.  He thinks it sufficient to quote his old friend Thomas Paine on the Torah while ignoring the likes of D. N. Freedman and Jacob Milgrom.  He rather ostentatiously claims to believe that the New Testament is even worse than the Old.  He knows a little bit more about the relevant scholarship here: he has read one of Bart Ehrman’s books.  It does not reflect well on his judgement that he flirts heavily with the notion that no such person as Jesus even existed, a wholly frivolous idea that goes against the consensus even of non-religious scholars.

Hitchens is on his strongest form when he is discursing on the crimes and follies that he attributes to religion.  He has a valid point here, but, characteristically, he can’t resist over-egging the pudding to the point of indigestibility.  He chooses, for example, to see conflicts like the break-up of Yugoslavia as essentially religious wars.  Their more mundane political and social drivers are downplayed.  Serbian soldiers stuck images of the Virgin Mary on their rifles, so they must have been true believing Orthodox Christians.  Ethnic cleansing was actually “religious cleansing”.  Conversely, religious people who involve themselves in humanitarian and relief efforts are actually acting in accordance with the secular ethics of the Enlightenment.  This is another example of Hitchens’ shameless circularity.  In another part of the book, he notes that “Christian” art and architecture and “Islamic” science were created in part by unbelieving individuals, but this provokes no reflection on his part as to whether those Serb soldiers might have been killing and maiming for reason of something other than devotion to the Virgin.

This is audacious stuff.  The degree of selective blindness is genuinely surprising in a journalist of Hitchens’ experience.  The extent to which he is betrayed by his prejudices is clearest in his treatment of Northern Ireland.  People in that unfortunate part of the world did not plant bombs in shopping centres because they were devoutly religious and were aggrieved that the other side was unsound on the doctrines of transubstantiation and sanctifying grace.  The Troubles were a dirty feud over who was to have political and economic power in the north-eastern corner of Ireland.  Participants on both sides identified with their respective religions as part of a broader package of national, ethnic and cultural identities.  Some were sincerely religious, others were sincerely irreligious.  Many seem to have imbibed in a general way their tribe’s religion as part of their cultural heritage without taking it especially seriously on a doctrinal or spiritual level.

Leaving aside the horrors of conflict zones, Hitch is convinced in more general terms that religion does not make us better people.  But he doesn’t go anywhere near the bona fide scholarship on this – instead, he contents himself with a few individual examples.  Martin Luther King was a good guy, but not because he was a Christian; Mohandas Gandhi (who, he reveals, is “sometimes known” as Mahatma) was an overrated religious reactionary.  A. J. Ayer was a better egg than Evelyn Waugh.

Hitchens’ prose style is sometimes gratifyingly elegant, sometimes genuinely witty, and at other times self-indulgent and overdone.  His fluency is not in doubt, but he can be a little too rich for the blood, a bit like Stephen Fry on an off day.  He is not above the odd cheap trick, like overusing scare quotes and insisting on spelling God with a small g.  From time to time, he shows signs of a tin ear.  He describes child abuse by Catholic priests with the phrase “no child’s behind left”.  Of pigs, he observes that “their tendency to random and loose gallantry is often painful to the more fastidious eye”.  Hitchens the mature stylist is sometimes less in evidence than Hitchens the pompous bore.  Not that his prose is dull, I hasten to add.  It is rarely lacking in vigour, and there are a number of intresting anecdotes, including a darkly amusing story of an episode in which he was mistaken in Sri Lanka for an incarnation of the guru Sai Baba.

Admirers of Hitchens’ work will know that he is not a man afflicted by self-doubt or false modesty.  He feels able to patronise world-class thinkers with whom he disagrees, including Thomas Aquinas and Isaac Newton.  He has a disturbing willingness to repeat with misplaced confidence old anti-Christian myths: scholastic theologians used to debate how many angels could dance on the head of a pin; the early Christians repudiated classical Greek learning (and the Arabs, thank goodness, kept it safe); the Catholic Church opposed the introduction of zero into mathematics.  There are other small errors of fact.  T. S. Eliot was an Anglican, not a Catholic.  De Valera was the prime minister of Ireland in 1945, not the president.  It would be pedantic to make a fuss about such things, though.

The book’s biggest problem is a lack of real meat.  Other popular atheist writers bring something particular, something substantive, to their work.  Richard Dawkins brings a deep knowledge of evolutionary biology.  Dan Dennett brings a specialist knowledge of philosophy, as do A. C. Grayling and Julian Baggini.  Hitch is little more than an interested amateur with an idiosyncratic literary style.  He has no particular USP beyond his anecdotal experiences of religion as a journalist.  The book is little more than a collection of sometimes elegantly expressed but generally unoriginal arguments and observations penned by someone with no very obvious qualifications for writing it.  If you want to read a serious book about atheism, this unfortunately isn’t it.