Professor Dawkins' latest diatribe against religion in general and Christianity in particular raises one or two serious issues, where there is certainly a case to answer - the attitude of the Catholic church to the use of condoms in connection with the AIDS crisis in Africa and elsewhere; the anti-scientific attitude of some right-wing American churches; the facility with which religion can be invoked to motivate violence and division.

None of these, however, is remotely sufficient to justify his general thesis, that religious belief in any form is irrational because it is hostile to the use of reason as exemplified in the sciences.

First, Dawkins is remarkably vague about what exactly scientific rationality amounts to.  He repeatedly emphasises the importance of 'evidence'; but he gives the impression that there is no problem at all about what is to count as evidence for some theory, nor that there is a process of assessing evidence which is vastly more complex than simply looking and seeing.

One might think of the complexities of deciding whether the evidence in a trial justifies a conclusion beyond reasonable doubt.  One could record all the statements of the witnesses, listen to the forensic scientists; and still have to assess what can reasonably be said.  Or think of the debates among scientists about the possibility of producing a general theory of everything, which will integrate all our piecemeal theories in physics into one coherent whole.  Must the universe have exactly eleven dimensions, then?

So too in religion.  Aquinas, for instance, insisted that to establish the existence of God one needs empirical evidence; but he was more alive than Dawkins seems to be to the issues involved in rationally assessing evidence.  If one asks whether the starry heavens or the beauty of Earth constitute evidence that there is a God, and even if they do, how strongly such evidence might support the conclusion, one needs a much more sophisticated view of rational assessment than Dawkins showed any signs of appreciating.