Dawkins: Forty per cent of Americans believe that the world is less than 6,000 years old

Nothing is going to change the mind of somebody who is so doggedly certain ... I think you have to make a real distinction between people who are religious in the sense that your vicar or bishop is religious but accept that evolution as scientific and people like Wendy Wright, who think the world is 6,000 years old, which is flat contradictory to every scrap of evidence we’ve got. That does drive me to despair because nothing’s going to shift those people.” Nevertheless, he’s optimistic that, “many people just don’t know what the facts are. They are simply uneducated. And that’s a fault of us as scientists for not going out there and communicating with them.”

SHOOT: I came to my views by a surfeit of reading. Thus I am often frustrated in my debates by people who do, in most cases, almost no reading at all, other than perhaps newspapers. Thus the answer is to be informed and to be informed one has to read, simply, a large volume of books on a particular subject. Over time, the truth emerges as a vein of wisdom expressed in various ways, but holding to a common substance, a common theme, and a near absolute truth, or as near as you're going to get.

clipped from www.timesonline.co.uk Wasn’t it faintly depressing for a scientist in the 21st century to find himself arguing the case for evolution? “There’s an aspect of that,” he says. “But I don’t want to put that in a too depressing, negative way. It’s a challenge — a cheerful sort of challenge because it’s so thrilling and exciting.” When he wrote The God Delusion his stated aim was to convert everybody who read it to atheism. With the new book it is to shake some sense into creationists: “I suppose anybody who reads it should no longer be capable of thinking evolution isn’t a fact,” he says, perhaps rather optimistically, I think. “I’d like to think there’s got to be something wrong with people who finish the book and don’t think that.” I’m afraid he’s destined to be disappointed, as down deep he himself knows. There’s an hilarious transcript in Chapter 7 of a televised conversation he once had with someone called Wendy Wright It’s hopeless.