RICHARD DAWKINS suffered a rare skewering at the hands of the clergy after taking to the airwaves to argue that people who call themselves Christians are often lying.
And at one point the high priest of atheism even appeared to call for divine intervention as he struggled to remember the title of Charles Darwin’s bible of evolution.
Dawkins made much of the fact that 64 per cent of people who said they were Christians in the census were not able to identify Matthew as the first book of the New Testament.
The second time Dawkins mentioned the finding, the interviewer asked him if he could tell him the full title of On the Origin of Species, the book by Charles Darwin considered to be the ‘Bible’ of evolutionary biology.
Dawkins stated emphatically: “Yes I could.”
“Go on then.”
Dawkins’s halting reply, complete with an improbable appeal to a higher authority, went thus: “On the Origin of Species, er, with… oh God… On the Origin of Species, um… There is a subtitle… er, um, with respect to the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.”
The correct answer is, of course, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
A triumphant interviewer said: “You are the High Pope of Darwinism. If you asked people who believe in evolution that question and only two per cent got it right it would be terribly easy for me to say they don’t really believe it after all.
“It’s just not fair to ask people these questions.”
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