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© Rex FeaturesEmbattled professor:Richard Dawkins
The anger last week against the smug anti-religion brigade was quite startling.

Atheism has had a bad week. First there was the contest between the Church and the unbelievers' Vicar on Earth which ended with a score of God 1, Richard Dawkins 0. Then the equality commissar, Trevor Phillips, came along with a stunningly inept analogy between Christian observance and sharia law - and got so resoundingly pilloried that he had to be carried off the field. Make no mistake: it was atheism that was on manoeuvres here. It may have marched under the banner of "secularism" but that was a deliberately misleading and, as it turned out, not very successful tactic. As Professor Dawkins himself said in one of his broadcasting appearances, secularism and atheism are different things.

You bet they are. Secularism as understood, for example, in the United States - the most famously successful secular society in history - is no enemy of religious belief. The separation of church and state enshrined in the American Constitution is designed to guarantee the freedom of worship: to protect the observance of all faiths from oppression or interference by the state. It is the ultimate acknowledgement of the importance - in effect, of the sacrosanct nature - of religious belief and practice, regarding it as one of the "unalienable" human rights.

This principle has been revisited just recently in a spectacular clash between President Obama and the Roman Catholic Church over the matter of whether Church institutions should be obliged by federal statute to provide free contraception. There can be no question of where the Constitution stands on this issue: if a case should ever come to the Supreme Court, it is the Church that will win.

Dawkins, on the other hand, is certainly not a secularist in this pro-religious sense. He is unabashedly hostile to religion, regarding it as positively detrimental to the greater good: a force which should, in the interests of rational progress, be stamped out altogether. Listening to the embattled professor's desperate attempts to sell his brand of modern (which is to say, 18th-century) enlightenment inevitably brought to mind my own on-air clash with him many years ago on the Moral Maze.

The chief premise of the Dawkins case then was that we should never believe in anything (viz the existence of God) for which we do not have factual evidence. So I asked him if he believed that it was wrong to hurt people unnecessarily. And, of course, he replied that he did. I then asked him what his evidence was for that belief: a question to which there can be no answer because beliefs of this kind are not based on "evidence".

The professor did not take this conundrum well. In fact, he exploded into vituperation on air and later attacked me in print for my impertinence. What he and his apostles (sorry, comrades-in-arms) seem not to recognise is the failure of imagination - the crass philistinism - of a position that fails to appreciate the significance of those kinds of belief that do not rest on empirical evidence but which are still central to human experience. To be so dismissive of, or incurious about, such beliefs - this capacity to envisage, or to long for, a transcendent explanation of our condition, which has been a feature of virtually every civilisation that has survived long enough to be recorded - is a very odd kind of obtuseness in people who clearly see themselves as possessing superior intelligence. Do they really not understand what it is that it is so unsatisfactory about "scientific" accounts which reduce life to the ticking over of sensory apparatus?

If the question "why?" (as opposed to "how?") is so nonsensical, how is it that virtually all peoples everywhere have been compelled to ask it, and why is there still so much outrage when it is treated with contempt? Indeed, the anger expressed last week - which cut across ethnic and sectarian lines - against the smug anti-religion brigade was quite startling.

By the time Lord Phillips of Equality came on the scene with his ill-judged condemnation of Catholic adoption agencies and his insistence that Christian observance was morally equivalent to the imposition of sharia law, the defence of religion had well and truly got itself organised. The routing of the Dawkins army had been so unexpectedly successful - and so genuinely multicultural in the true sense of the word - that Mr Phillips's uninformed denunciation was swept away in a confident fusillade of contempt ("deeply illiberal", "intolerant", "a totalitarian view of society"). Most to the point was the comment that he had failed to "understand the nature of faith". It is that incomprehension which is perhaps the weakest element in the scientific rationalist atheist case.

There are hugely difficult questions to be put to religion which are of much more searing importance than flat-footed demands for "factual evidence" of God's existence. To the conscientious believer, the problem of evil is far more disturbing - because it challenges faith from within its own terms. In Dostoevsky's great novel The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan challenges his younger brother Alyosha, who is training to be a monk, to say that had he (Alyosha) been the architect of the universe, he would have designed it in such a way as to involve the torture of children. The kindly and devout Alyosha is struck dumb - unable to accept, as Ivan is not, the paradox of a benevolent deity who permits the suffering of innocents.

That dilemma, so agonisingly described by Ivan Karamazov (who says ironically that he "does not reject God [but rather] God's world"), of having to reconcile the prevalence of evil with a belief in the existence of an omniscient God who loves the world he has created, is at the heart of conscientious doubt . Interestingly, it is a question that is asked more by the believer - or the would-be believer - than by the facile atheist who prefers to talk of religious questions as if they could be settled in the laboratory.

But if Ivan's child torturers constitute an unanswerable obstacle to belief, then his own and his brother's response to them is the most difficult challenge for unbelief. Why do they, and we, feel such unbearable compassion even for those unknown to us - even, indeed, for hypothetical tortured children who have been invented for the purpose of argument? Why is sympathy, and revulsion at the pain of others, such a characteristic feature of our condition that it is actually called "humanity" and its lapses regarded as "inhuman"? Presumably, the Dawkins lobby would say it arose from the need to preserve our collective genes. What an impoverished view of life and its moral complexity, that is.