The Independent Tuesday 29th May 2007

Many festival stars do much more than turn up and chat about their book. Richard Dawkins clearly welcomes the chance to take on religious-minded folk, listen to their arguments and explain kindly, but with great precision - that they're wrong logically and they're fundamentally imbeciles. His session was full of special pleadings from non-atheists, like doomed martial arts amateurs lining up for a crack at Bruce Lee.

Can science explain exactly why the Earth exists? "No, but that doesn't mean God is the answer." Aren't our feelings of wonder – looking at the Milky Way, say – promptings of religious feeling? "No, they're just wonder and awe. Einstein felt the same, and dragged in the name of God, but he was guilty of a category error." Shouldn't religion be taught in schools as Intelligent Design, a branch of science? "Only if you give equal time in class to the Flying Spaghetti Heroes or the Nigerian theory that the world was created from the dung of ants."

Dawkins was relentless. Without religion, wouldn't we be living in a grim, quasi-Communist amoral non-society? "Nah," said Dawkins, "wherever our notions of morality come from, it's not the Bible, or we'd still be stoning people for picking up sticks on the Sabbath?" Aren't your views a little too cruel to the terminally ill? "No, if I met a terminally ill patient, I'd talk about the weather . . ."

Dawkins is so steely that it's hard to wrong-foot him. But it happened. He'd poured scorn on the Archbishop of Canterbury and all "nice archbishops" for making the world safer for terrorists by saying it was a marvellous thing to believe something in the absence of all evidence. OK, then, asked a lady, do you think the Archbishop is a deluded, foolish man? "You put your question with merciless clarity," said Dawkins, impressed. The answer? "I think he's very bright. And I'm absolutely baffled about why he believes in God." Hah! Chalk up one to the Almighty.