As he rightly says: ‘One mark of intelligence is an ability to live with as yet unanswered questions.’ True, but one way of avoiding having to do this is to pretend that questions have been answered, when they have not been. While wholly satisfied with his own supposed proofs that God is not necessary for an understanding of the cosmos, he seems unaware that these formulae are as unconvincing to believers as ontological proofs of God’s existence are to atheists.

 
‘Atheism is to theism,’ Anthony Grayling declares, ‘as not collecting stamps is to stamp-collecting’. At this point, we are supposed to enjoy a little sneer, in which the religious are bracketed with bald, lonely men in thick glasses, picking over their collections of ancient stamps in attics, while unbelievers are funky people with busy social lives.

But the comparison is flatly untrue. Non-collectors of stamps do not, for instance, write books devoted to mocking stamp-collectors, nor call for stamp-collecting’s status to be diminished, nor suggest — Richard Dawkins-like — that introducing the young to this hobby is comparable to child abuse. They do not place advertisements on buses proclaiming that stamp-collecting is a waste of time, and suggesting that those who abandon it will enjoy their lives more.

Professor Grayling is too pleased with himself to have realised this. Intoxicated with amusement at his own dud metaphor, he asks: ‘How could someone be a militant non-stamp-collector?’ I rather think he has written the manual for anyone who might like to take up this activity.

This work is full of negative. petti-fogging narrowness, devoid of sympathy for opponents, empty of generosity or modesty, immune to poetry or mystery. Seeking enjoyment in its pages is like trying to quench your thirst with dry biscuits. The rudest thing that I can say about it is that it is pretty much the same as all the other anti-God books. Like Scandinavian crime series on TV, these volumes trundle off the production lines every few months, asserting their authors’ enlightenment and emitting a nasty undertone of spite and intolerance.

It is an odd target and an odder market. Modern Britain throbs with questionable faiths, objectively unproven but powerfully influencing personal behaviour and state policy. A brief list would include man-made global warming, the worthiness of liberal intervention in foreign countries, the existence of dyslexia, ADHD and addiction and the serotonin theory of depression. Honest scepticism about any of these is not welcome in mainstream publishing.

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