This is a small book, printed on thick paper with big margins - which sounds like a criticism, but, since it makes its case succintly, stylishly and, for the most part, carefully, really functions as a dig at Richard Dawkins' big book, The God Delusion, which brims with ideas apparently cribbed from stage 1 philosophy notes - the implication being that a more careful and detailed exposition would be lost on the sort of reader who was impressed with Richard Dawkins' original arguments.

Cornwell's book strikes just the right tone - faintly amused and rather derisive of Dawkins' great foray into religious studies: treating a dogmatic zoologist as a serious entrant in the philophy of religion would be to afford him too much respect: a courtesy Dawkins himself wouldn't extend for a moment if confronted with a dogmatic religious fundamentalist wishing to discuss biology (famously, Dawkins refuses to even debate such people).

Cornwell is also wise not to get dragged too far into the merits of the issue (i.e., whether there actually is a God) and instead spends his few pages more profitably remarking that, whatever ones position on that question, Dawkins' arguments simply can't carry the day, unless you really want them to.

That's important because Cornwell can therefore carry along skeptics like me, who don't personally subscribe to religious belief, but still find Dawkins' dogmatic essentialism a crashing bore.

Along the way Cornwell makes some thumping scores and while, as other reviewers have noted, he may misconstrue Dawkins' arguments in a couple of places, they don't really make a difference and, in any case, for a Dawkinite to make that protest really is to call the kettle black. The scores he does make are doozies, and one in particular stood out: Dawkins' support for Martin Rees' rebuttal of the Anthropic Principal by means of the "multiverse" - the suggestion that there are many universes, co-existing like bubbles of foam, in a "multiverse", and only one of these universes needs to have the right "bye-laws" to sustain evolved life. Of course, that's a moronic idea, and Cornwell shows admirable restraint in his derision: "there are no more observable data for this "suggestion" than the positing of [Bertrand Russell's hypothetical] miniature teapot circumnavigating the earth". Quite.

In other words, Richard Dawkins is prepared to resort to unfalsifiable, non-causal explanations when it suits him, along with the best of the theists he decries.

I still think there is room for a book taking an expressly non-religious (and therefore non-defensive) line - that the scientific realism that Dawkins insists on is indefensible; that there is room on the planet for religious, literary, scientific and moral stories to sit alongside each other - that they need not (and given their different applications, cannot) get in each others way: the late Stephen Jay Gould got closest to that with his appeal for religious-scientific detente in "Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life", and the late Richard Rorty, especially in "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" and "Philosophy and Social Hope" had a thing or two to say about it, too.

Stop press: since composing this review I have come across a book written by a (ostensibly non-religious) scientist that completely fits the bill: Jacob Bronowski's wonderful Origins of Knowledge and Imagination which I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone with an interest in the topic.

Nonetheless, this volume (perhaps once in paperback) has much to recommend it. ( )

A gem of a book, generously written without malice or a starting position of defensiveness. The chapter 'Does God Exist?' is probably the best thing I've ever read on the subject. ( )