In the background, as we speak, are the carved wooden fairground figures collected by his wife, Lalla (Ward), daughter

of the seventh Viscount Bangor and known to Doctor Who fans as Romana. What does seem fantastic is to find myself, as a daughter of the cloth, a nongraduate and a traditionalist Anglican, quizzing this rather awe-inspiring Oxford don and author of The God Delusion (GD ) about the existence of the Almighty. Or not. Dawkins in the flesh bears no resemblance to the angry, hate-filled antireligionist he is portrayed as. In fact, he even believes that children should know their Bible. Youd be rightly written off as uncultivated if you knew nothing of the Bible. You need the Bible to understand literary allusions, he says at the end of our chat. By then Ive concluded that, by many Anglican standards, and certainly by most Einsteinian ones, Dawkins is quite religious. He would get on famously, I feel, with the Archbishop of Canterbury. I ask him how he is getting on with his friend Lord Winston, the fertility pioneer, who last last month condemned Dawkins for his patronising and insulting attitude to religion, which he said was in danger of damaging the publics trust in science. Hes a dear friend and I have enormous regard for him. He either is religious, as he claims, or he believes in beliefs. He claims to be an observant Jew and Im sure he does go to synagogue. I sometimes wonder whether he really believes it. He is offended by strong criticism of religion. I believe that what appears to be strong criticism of religion is not as strong as people think. Criticism that in any other field theatre, book or restaurants would be comparatively mild. It sounds outspoken and strident because we are not used to religion being criticised. I put it to him that negative criticism can finish off a book or a play, especially intelligently argued criticism, and that one of the ambivalences I feel about interviewing him is that his mission in life seems to be to destroy something thats my livelihood. I think itll see you out. I think therell be plenty to write about. And under the banner of religion you can write about what I call Einsteinian religion, which I subscribe to and so do many scientists as a sort of reverence for the Universe and life, which has nothing to do with anything supernatural. In GD , Dawkins quotes Einstein as saying that he prefers not to call himself religious, because that implies supernatural. But Einstein acknowledged that behind everything there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly. Dawkins admits: If thats what you call religion then Im religious. But when I suggest that, in this case, he is in touch with the transcendent, he accuses me of playing with words. He says: If by transcendent you mean what Einstein believed then yes, but what I think, to come back on your statement that more intelligent and sophisticated religious people believe something close to what Einstein and I believe, that may be true, but they are a tiny minority of religious people in the world. Its the majority of religious people in the world that we have to worry about. He is really talking about the US here, where hundreds of thousands of people believe that the Universe is less than 10,000 years old. Apart from that, even the sophisticated intelligent socalled religious people that you mentioned, even bishops, do actually believe in something supernatural, they believe in the Resurrection. I suggest that not all of them believe in the physical Resurrection. So I accept that there are a few wearing clerical collars who are not theists at all. I dont think you can say that nowadays religion is the same as what Einstein said because if that were true we wouldnt have a problem. His main beef is in fact with fundamental-ism. I suggest that the people most likely to take his arguments on board are the intelligent, enlightened people in the middle ground. If he takes them out of the equation by virtue of intellectual supremacy, he leaves the space vacant for

fundamentalists to take over the centre. This has to be one of the arguments for continued establishment, so the Church of England can act as a kind of buffer against extremism, a buffer lacking in the US. What you mean is that institutions like the Church of England would be taken over by fundamentalists because all the intelligent people would have left. Or the institutions would cease to exist and the fundamentalists would become the centre. I can see that and I think its certainly a sensible and arguable position that, short of vaccination, a weakened strain of the virus should protect against the virulent strain. For a moment, I had forgotten I was talking to a biologist. Being among those who have criticised Dawkins for an atheistic version of the fundamentalism he so detests, critics have accused me of mistaking his passion for fundamentalism. A more intelligent assault on his lack of beliefs came in sermons earlier this year at Westminster Abbey. The Rev Dr Nicholas Sagovsky, its Canon Theologian, accused him of lacking an ethic of love. Given that passion and love are so related, I tried to smuggle God in there too. It didnt quite work. Love is not a rational process and Im as susceptible to love as anybody else, he says. To say God is love, if that is an actual definition, then I believe in God because I believe in love. But God isnt love, God is something supernatural, and in certain religions, love is supernatural. When you say love is not rational, there are two ways of interpreting that. You could say that love is not intelligible by rational means, and Im not sure I believe that. As a scientist I believe that love is intelligible on rational grounds. That doesnt mean that a particular person who is in love can learn anything, gain anything, or understand their own emotions in rational terms. But I do believe that love, like any other manifestation of brain stuff, is intelligible in rational terms, although maybe not in practice. So love is merely a biological phenomenon? Anything to do with life is biological. So, in a way, you havent asked me a very big question and I havent answered it. He does suggest in GD , however, that some of the irrationality of religion may stem from the same place as the irrationality of love. I think its right to say anthropologists would tell us that all human cultures have some form of religion. Which might make it hard to get rid of. It certainly doesnt make it true. His passion and anger do stem from love, however, a love of the truth. I am a scientist. It is my business to understand and help others to understand the nature of life in my case, or generally, as a scientist, the nature of the Universe. At the beginning of the 21st century, humanity is approaching a staggeringly impressively near-to-complete understanding. Its hugely exciting to be a member of this elite species at this time when our understanding of physics, biology and cosmology are so exciting and near complete. Its tragic that people are deprived of this not by misfortunes or lack of education, but by deliberate distortion, by organised of misinformation.