Richard Dawkins: the prophet of reason: ‘”Anyone would think I was the only atheist around,” says Richard Dawkins, in tones of mildly frustrated grievance. He isn’t, of course, but if you happen to be

in the market for an atheist, there’s little doubt that the Charles Simonyi Professor in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University is the market

leader – a Rolls-Royce of anti-clerical argument, whose contradictions and counter-propositions slam shut with a perfectly engineered thunk. “… I have respect for religious people in so far as they are asking important questions. They want to know why we exist and why the world exists, and they

don’t just want to know who’s going to win Wimbledon and what’s for dinner. And to that extent I have great respect. But I get irritated at the way those

deep and fundamental and mysterious questions are hijacked – because I think that science can answer most of them, if not all of them.” ‘

Indeed, Dawkins has some (I hesitate to use the term) spiritual kin. John Diamond ‘died four months ago, around 30,000 words

into Snake Oil, which here shows all the promise of a majestic

polemic against the idiocies, wishful thinking and deception —

self- and otherwise — which make up “alternative” (to what?)

medicine, a.k.a. “complementary” (to what?) medicine… The six extant chapters of Snake Oil are filled with splendid

blasts against homeopaths, aromatherapists, iridologists, crystal

healers, reflexologists and plant-remedialists, who, says

Diamond: “make perfect sense on a sort of

flowers-are-harbingers-of-good level which wouldn’t have

grasped the public imagination quite so forcefully, I imagine, if

(Dr Bach had) used 38 types of spider to produce the Bach

Spider Remedies.”

Yet these attacks are incidental at this stage, the blows of a

fighter knocking aside importunate schnorrers as he climbs into

the ring.

The battle to be fought in that ring is nothing less than the fight

for scientific reason against deluded sentimentality (or, in some

cases, cynical exploitation of the sick, the hopeless and the

desperate). When national newspapers devote whole pages to

alternativists puffing blatant quackery without even printing a

warning at the top of the page (“What follows is of the same

degree of intellectual probity as the fashion pages”); when our

cultural and political infrastructure still stumbles about in a

wilfully benighted scientific illiteracy, the battle is one which

needs to be fought.’ from one of those cranky curmodgeons at The Times of London