Science: Richard Dawkins dons an entirely new set of author's clothes in A Devil's Chaplain. In previous works, he identified a major theme into which he could weave his trenchantly held views on religion, evolutionary biology and the meaning of humanity, writes Dick Ahlstrom.
Here, he turns the approach inside out, with a disparate collection of very fine essays expounding his controversial ideas clustered around a number of themes, each of which is introduced by a short preamble.
The book's title serves him well on a range of levels. The words are taken from Dawkins's great hero - the father of evolution, Charles Darwin - and the collection opens with an essay that sets the scene. "What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature," Darwin penned to a friend in 1856, as Dawkins recounts.
Dawkins picks up the twin themes imposed by the title - evolution and religion - and runs with them right through the collection. They become point and counterpoint as he argues powerfully in favour of evidence, reason and logic over revelation, tradition and authoritarian imposition.
That he is a committed Darwinist is in no doubt. He hammers home evolution and its ultimate meaning - that we have descended from ape-like ancestors and before that from more primitive forms even back to single-celled organisms.
If an understanding of this be fully grasped, he argues, how can one then accept the "daft" concepts of transubstantiation, Mary's ascension into heaven and the cluster of beliefs that form the basis of the three great monotheistic religions?
And here, his chief targets - creationists, those wielding crystals and making false claims of health benefits, and postmodernists spouting mumbo jumbo - must also see the logic of the title.
Dawkins himself is surely their Devil's Chaplain, an apologist for atheism who does the devil's own work in questioning the foundations of religious belief. Dawkins accepts that these believers are lost to the truth, and so he appeals directly to the public at large, even as do those whom Dawkins opposes. And if eloquence is any measure of success, then Dawkins' arguments shine through impressively.
These essays are a revelation. While Dawkins has a proven track record in being able to make the most mentally indigestible technical concept understandable, these essays deliver something new to the mix. We get a much clearer view of the author himself when he wages war on "charlatans and mountebanks", as he does in 'Crystalline Truth and Crystal Balls'. Or of the father concerned about what his young daughter absorbs as supposed truth in 'A Prayer for My Daughter, Good and Bad Reasons for Believing'.
He melds the twin themes of religion and science in an essay, 'The Great Convergence', where he rejects the notion that somehow scientific findings can successfully be merged with religious belief.
This is also a collection shot through with humour. While past works were intent on making the reader understand, the essay approach allows Dawkins to be much more playful, allowing a hidden wit to emerge not seen as readily in earlier books.
These essays give us explanations of science, but in much greater measure, they display the author's wide range of interests and his undoubted ability to write. Dawkins is very much at home composing in a style that is much more akin to literature, or perhaps poetry, than technical writing.
This literary-scientific overlap was seen clearly in his last book, Unweaving the Rainbow, where he made remarkable use of 19th-century Romantic poets as a way to buttress his technical explanations. An author that can achieve that transformation is doing stunning things with words indeed.
This means, of course, that this collection of essays should not be confined to those who might typically find themselves thumbing through the local bookseller's science section.
It should be read by anyone interested in fine writing and big ideas. They don't get much bigger than an attempt to dismantle a monotheistic system of belief that goes back to before the time of Moses.
Dick Ahlstrom is Science Editor of The Irish Times
A Devil's Chaplain, Selected Essays. By Richard Dawkins, edited by Latha Menon. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 264pp, £16 .99