Dawkins goes much further: if there’s an atheist equivalent to C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, this is it. From the outset, Dawkins makes it clear that he’s engaged on a crusade. ‘If this book works as I intend,’ he writes, ‘religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.’15 However, Dawkins is inclined to think that religious people are so obstinately wedded to their ridiculous beliefs that they’ll hang on to them, no matter how rational the opposing case presented. In his