By JASON STEGER - THEAGE.COM.AU
Added: Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:00:00 UTC

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WHEN is a writers festival about writing and when is it about issues and ideas? If we're talking Adelaide Writers Week, the focus is very much on creative writing rather than, say, the more prosaic topics such as the future of journalism or how to get published that seem to crop up at almost any other writers festival in the country.

Adelaide prides itself on the clarity of its vision and on the guests it attracts. All this was brought into focus last week with South Australian Premier Mike Rann's proposal to turn the biennial Adelaide Festival, of which writers week is a part, into an annual cultural jamboree from 2012.
. . . But that doesn't mean there isn't a hunger for big ideas. Witness the appearance yesterday afternoon of Richard Dawkins, who attracted a crowd of about 2000 that writers week director Rose Wight said matched the record set in 2008 by Ian McEwan.
The author of The God Delusion, the great atheist tract of our time, said - with a twinkle in his eye - the occasion reminded him of the Sermon on the Mount or a meeting in ''a kind of revivalist tent''.
He was there to champion his hero, Charles Darwin, and his theory of evolution, the subject of Dawkins' most recent book, The Greatest Show on Earth. And he laid into creationists, accusing them of taking every absence of fossil evidence in evolutionary progression as evidence a supernatural creative power exists.
Darwinians, he told the audience of his kind of true believers, faced the absurdity of people thinking the Earth was 6000 years old rather than its actual 4.5 billion years. ''It is the equivalent of believing the width of North America is about eight yards.''
Dawkins has become something of a 68-year-old pin-up boy for the rational and the faithless, and after his talk, he got the handshakes and backslaps appropriate to a very contemporary idol."
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TAGGED: ATHEISM, CONFERENCES