The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins

Perhaps the most thrilling thing Richard Dawkins says in his furious polemic on religion shouldn't really be thrilling at all - it should be almost axiomatic. Religious ideas, he says, should be as open to challenge as, say, Marxist ideas, or Big Bang Theory. As obvious as this point might seem to many, it's one rarely made or championed. And it's about time that changed.

The God Delusion is by no means a perfect book. (You might say only religions claim to have those.) It's sometimes self-indulgent, sometimes simplistic, and Dawkins is too tempted to suggest alternative philosophies that feel a bit thin or naive. But it's passionate, literate, provocative stuff.

One of the most common, and most mistaken, criticisms of Dawkins is that he's as dogmatically immovable as the fundamentalists he despises. But Dawkins deals with this in the book. As a scientist, he would be delighted to be proved wrong. Being proved wrong (rather than just denied) means taking another step forward in our knowledge.

This goes to the heart of the case against religion. Whatever its internal wranglings over the detail, every religion shackles itself to a basic story it can never abandon. It's stuck. Science, on the other hand, is free. It's an ongoing story, constantly being revised, enlarged, renewed, deepened. (Dawkins' final chapter is a wonderful introduction to that story.)

For this atheistic son of the manse (me, not Dawkins), religion has always been a preoccupation. And I've always shared Dawkins' distaste for the indocrination of children. But there has long been a popular sense that religion is beyond argument or intellect. From there, it's a small leap to the idea that we shouldn't think, we should just believe - manna from heaven for fanatics. At heart, all Richard Dawkins wants is for us to think, rationally and maturely, for ourselves. It's a message that's not only timely, but long overdue.

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