Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1995, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a biologist. He is also an atheist. He believes that Darwin's theories

of evolution provide the starting point for everything we need to know about our world.

Religion can provide no answers at all. He was born in Kenya but came to

England when his father inherited the family estate in Oxfordshire. He began to

develop his ideas as a student at Oxford and later published them in popular books such as the

selfish gene and the blind watchmaker.

Happy to be seen as a bridge between academic science and the general public, he's not frightened of controversy

and has frequently found himself in dispute with leading theologians.

He is Richard Dawkins.

It's not surprising really that theologians see you as public enemy number one

when you've put God on a par with Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy. But you don't

draw all those analogies likely, do you? No, I think it's a very serious analogy. I think that Father Christmas and the Tooth

Fairy are childhood props, their aids to children to understand, well, they don't provide very much understanding in that case.

And I think that God is very much like that, except that people very frequently don't give up God when they should,

when they become old enough to give up God, they persist. But is it more than that? Do you see God not just as an

irrelevance like the tooth fairy ultimately, but as positively harmful?

Certainly can be positively harmful in various ways obviously in causing wars which has

happened often enough in history causing fatwas causing people to do ill to one another

because they are so utterly convinced that they know what is right

because they feel it from inside they've been told from within themselves what is

...