Always such a thrill to start a new book and find that you’re enjoying it straight off. My new read, begun last night, is Alistair McGrath’s Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life. It’s well written and it’s exactly the kind of book the world needs — someone with a similar intellect and scientific background to Dawkins who can respond meaningfully to some of his, let’s say, more simplistic or downright inaccurate warblings.

I have a huge respect for Dawkins based on the books I’ve read – The Selfish Gene,The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable. His account of the sheer science involved in evolution cannot be bettered, and whenever I’ve devised an alien race in my head I’ve always had one eye mentally on Mr D so that, in my own head, I can account for how this race came to be. But I have always been frustrated by his evident conviction that the leap he makes from these facts to a QED denial of the existence of God has some form of logical basis — mostly because whatever he holds up as “Christianity” bears so little resemblance to the Christianity I know.

I’m sure he’s not making it up — I suspect his notion of Christianity is genuine within his own head and is based on the dead, moribund type taught in his youth by a complacent Church of England. It just seems sad that, having rightly rejected that, he doesn’t bother to look a little further and see what else might be on offer. It’s like rejecting the whole rich field of science fiction because of a particularly bad episode of Trek. But of course, to do that you would have to want to do that, which he clearly doesn’t. My suspicion is that those who want to be atheists will be; those who don’t, won’t. Atheists often have good reason, up to a point, rejecting religion for very Christian reasons — disgust at hypocrisy, rejection of pointless ritual, wanting to live in the present rather than the past. But that only works up to a certain point because for every bad example of Christians there are many more good ones out there. The only really honest reason for being an atheist is to say “I just don’t believe it.”

An example in point. In one of the above mentioned titles — and I have to confess I forget which — Dawkins says that the church condemns Doubting Thomas for, well, doubting, when in fact he was asking perfectly valid questions. Well, maybe, but not any church I’ve been to recently, where questions are positively encouraged on the basis that the truth of God will withstand any kind of scrutiny. Again, perhaps the church of Dawkins’ childhood was like that. It was an unviable meme which lost out against the much more viable meme of honest questioning. Someone should tell him, but I doubt he would listen.

Sadly such memes are still alive and well in other areas of the church, leading to the intellectual anaesthesia of creation science etc etc etc. Rather than just say “I believe …” they have to contrive reasons where none exist for believing. Which is kind of sad.

There comes that moment in your relationship with any new computer when you lose a game of Freecell. No matter how well you do after that, your average will never again be 100%. Damn damn damn damn damn.

Same sort of thing today. Last week, the first postage-paid customer satisfaction postcard to be returned from our latest mailing gave the document in question 5/5. It gets no better than that. But a postcard received today for the same document merely gave it 4/5. One of the 1800 people to whom it was mailed thinks it’s only quite good. The swine.

Silly conversation of the day: a suggestion from a colleague that skyscrapers be built on hydraulic jacks, so that when a rival building beats it in height, yours can simply be jacked up a few further feet. In the same way, if a hijacked aircraft is detected in its vicinity, you let the jacks down and the aircraft misses. Same principle as Marineville, where the entire building was lowered into a bunker whenever battlestations sounded — like all the best Gerry Anderson, a tad over-engineered. It would be a lot easier to just have the headquarters in a bunker — unless (my hypothesis), due to planning restrictions, Marineville had to keep the same skyline as whatever earlier building it replaced, so they had to do it that way.

Sudden flashback by way of subject of terrorism to one of the more annoying times I’ve been badly edited. I used to write a monthly column intended to contrive humour from the content of various websites, usually where no humour was intended. One such website displayed results of a scientific survey showing that with the decline of air travel immediately following 9/11, even for a few days, the amount of vapour in the atmosphere from aircraft exhaust dropped noticeably. Important stuff, but because it was meant to be humorous I finished with what I thought a suitably flippant punchline. See if you can spot the subtle difference between what I wrote:

“Osama Bin Laden isn’t usually credited as an eco-warrior, but maybe the beard should have been a clue.”

– and their edited version:

“You have to wonder who can make scientific capital out of a tragedy like that.”

My but aren’t we righteous?

Guess who’s visiting the canteen this week? Here’s a clue on the right.

All part of Children in Need. Apparently there’ll be a Dalek turning up on Friday which you can pet in return for a donation. I doubt I’ll partake of the offer. I already have a photo of me with a Dalek, and a Cyberman (see top of page), and I have Tom Baker’s autograph. Twice. So I feel no further need to prove my sad fanboy credentials.

CiN is a worthy cause and I will probably donate. But honestly, is it any worthier than … let’s see … cancer research deaf people blind people starving people paraplegic people thalidomide victims forces veterans diseased donkeys? Actually, it is worthier than diseased donkeys but then so are the rest. And where is all the media hoo-hah about them?

What we need is a Charity Channel — non-stop wall to wall 24/7 endless charity broadcasts for those who like this sort of thing. They could still be the slick polished multimedia telethons that we know and love from CiN and Comic Relief — but they wouldn’t forcibly take up an evening’s viewing and no one who didn’t want to would cringe at the sight of worthies like Andrew Marr and Michael Buerk trying to be hip and with it. I mean, Michael Buerk! — the man whose reporting of the Ethiopian famine inspired Band Aid, who was expelled from South Africa for his anti-apartheid reporting … It breaks your heart.

The Charity Channel would be a bit like having a dedicated channel for TV sport — those who want to suffer, I mean watch, can and the rest of us can get on with our lives, giving money where it seems like a good idea. And by the way, does anyone else share my suspicion that a charity which blows its funds on pens and free keyrings may have its priorities wrong?