UPDATE: The video of this event is here

UPDATE: Photos from this event are here

David Cowan's introduction speech at Keplers' bookshop in Menlo Park.

Good evening everyone. I'm your neighbor David Cowan, and I have the great pleasure of introducing tonight's author, Oxford University Professor Richard Dawkins. His contributions to evolutionary biology have earned him the Faraday Award, the Kistler Prize, and the Kelvin Medal.

In the spirit of his late friend Douglas Adams, Professor Dawkins has launched a campaign, along with allies Michael Shermer, Daniel Dennett and Penn Jillette, to change the course of history. To understand how, please permit me 2 minutes to explain how he has already changed the course of my life.

Here in Silicon Valley we're acutely aware of the many hackers who marshal other people's resources on the internet to suit their own means. We understand how malicious programmers employ various technologies to embed viruses in our computers, turning them into zombies that quietly do the evil programmer's bidding in the background or late at night. If you've ever scanned your PC for spyware you know how common and resilient these infections are. Indeed, without our knowledge, many of our computers at home are so compromised, inciting them to snoop, steal, spam, phish and infect. Criminals regularly rent entire networks of zombies-often 50,000 PC's strong. For example, they might instruct their rented zombies to simultaneously overwhelm the servers of a particular web site until such time as the owner of the web site wires a ransom payment to the extorters' Cayman Islands bank account.

Like their organic cousins, computer viruses MUTATE, ATTACK, RESIST and TRANSMIT. Since there really is an intelligent designer behind computer viruses, their MUTATIONS are not random-they come in the form of new instructions downloaded as the viruses regularly re-connect with the virus Creator.

The ATTACK involves execution of some program that serves the interests of the Creator, not the PC owner.

The viruses RESIST your anti-virus software sometimes by disabling it, and also by embedding themselves into your computer in so many different ways that only one of them needs to survive your anti-virus defenses for the Creator to re-establish control.

And finally, the virus TRANSMITS to new hosts through email, instant messages, shared multimedia documents, or so-called worms that burrow through buggy software.

Obviously you don't want a zombie in your home-it exposes you to identity theft, wreaks havoc on others, clogs up your internet connection, and eventually cripples your computer. Now that's bad enough, but we're here today to hear about a much more dangerous kind of zombie network...

50,000 computers are a useful resource to steal, but what if instead one could recruit a zombie army a thousand times larger, and comprised of human hosts? That would be a formidable resource-one that commands high rents from businesses, politicians, criminals and military aggressors.

Of course, people aren't as pliable as computers-we have our own needs and desires. To compel us to follow someone else's ATTACK plan, the virus Creator would have to fool us into thinking that HIS interests were actually OUR interests. And to effect MUTATIONS, the Creator must compel us to return periodically-say, every Sunday-to download new instructions.

But human beings are smart enough to recognize our own interests, right? After all, each of us has eyes, ears and a brain at our disposal. So the virus Creator, borrowing from the 4-step recipe, would have to somehow RESIST our defenses. He might disable our powers of observation and our logical faculties by making us feel good about believing things without evidence, and convincing us that it's somehow incorrect, dangerous, a-social or unhealthy to question such leaps of faith.

Finally, the zombies must feel compelled to TRANSMIT their zombie status to other hosts. The easiest hosts to infect, of course, are the people most receptive to new inputs, most gullible, and easiest to control. And so children are most vulnerable to infection by zombie viruses.

I wish this were simply science fiction, but it's not.

I know because I was a child zombie. I was convinced that following Halachah (literally, the Path), would lead me to Heaven, where all my needs and desires would be satisfied. I refreshed my programming for hours every day in synagogue and Talmud class, and aspired to the loftiest status in my community-a man of faith.

Fortunately, my virus Creator didn't send me on suicide missions-just a few protests at the U.N. now and then-but I prepared myself for an adulthood in which I would serve the Creator, breeding new zombies along the way.

Luckily, my particular strain of the zombie virus allows for university education, and it was there that I learned enough history, sociology, science and comparative religion to diagnose my condition. As I engaged my powers of observation and logic, I dismissed the fantasies foisted upon me, and turned my attention instead to scholarship, sports and girls. But like a child who has learned the truth about Santa Claus, I went along with the story, afraid to disappoint my parents. After all, what's the harm?

As you know, removing most of the spyware in your PC just isn't good enough--all it takes is one program to restore allegiance to the Creator. The same is true in human zombies, and so when I read Professor Dawkins' book Devil's Chaplain-particularly the chapter titled Viruses of the Mind--I scanned my own programming and found the zombie virus lying dormant inside me. Approaching fatherhood at the time, I confronted the reality that if I simply entertain the possibility of Jehova's dominion, or even humor those who do, I will strain my children's logical faculties, exposing them to the zombie virus.

So, together with my wife Nathalie, we came out of the closet.

My parents were stunned, but they have accepted me as an Atheist. We can now raise our children to be critical thinkers, scientists, independent minds who must do what their parents tell them to do, but are free to believe only what makes sense to them. When my six-year-old asked me if the tooth fairy's real, I challenged him to figure it out himself. So when his next tooth fell out he stowed it under his pillow without telling anyone, and in the morning he had his answer. And even without religion, our children treat people kindly-not for divine compensation-but to satisfy their natural caring instincts.

I've shared my own story about the impact of our guest's earlier book, because in his newest one, The God Delusion, the professor explicitly challenges his allegedly agnostic readers to stop hiding in the closet. It's really okay to come out. Jehova, Jesus and Allah deserve no more respect than the tooth fairy, Zeus, Santa Claus, or Pooh Bear, and voicing your honest assessment of ancient fairy tales doesn't make you a Communist, an enemy of the state, or even a bad child.

So why does he do this anyway? Why does a great scientist descend from the higher realm of truth to muck around in human irrationality?

At first Professor Dawkins had simply dismissed and ignored the zombie viruses that thwart popular support for evolution despite the overwhelming evidence. But he came to observe that humanity has even more than science at stake. Religion is a powerful zombie virus that not only retards science, but also promotes terrorism, precludes peace, distorts democracy, undermines educators, prohibits stem cell research, suppresses women's rights and impoverishes the gullible.

The professor decided it was time to stand up and say out loud not just that the Emperor has no clothes, but there is no Emperor at all.

Now please join me with gratitude and jubilance in welcoming to our community the man they call Darwin's rottweiler. Friends, let's bring down the house for that Shameless Infidel, the Trinity of the Anti-Christ, Dajil, and Apikores all wrapped up into the Great Satan himself, Dr. Richard Dawkins!