Back in 2006, Terry Eagleton began his review of The God Delusion in the London Review of Books: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology."

Eagleton is right. Dawkins is aggressively eloquent, utterly confident and dismissively sweeping in his attacks on God and faith, but he is never profound or genuinely compelling. Bertrand Russell was deeper, H.G. Wells was more populist, even silly old Stephen Fry is funnier. Dawkins insists on the same attacks on the same straw men of religion, and he is extremely selective about whom he will engage in debate: he has refused public arguments with those he considers "unqualified" — a grotesquely snobbish euphemism and excuse. There are several North American Christian apologists who would be delighted to take on Dawkins, if only given the opportunity.

The philosopher and former atheist Edward Feser wrote: "Oddly, the rhetoric of the New Atheist writers — Richard Dawkins among the most prominent — sounds much more like that of a fundamentalist preacher than like anything I read during my atheist days. Like the preacher, they are supremely self-confident in their ability to dispatch their opponents with a sarcastic quip or two. And, like the preacher, they show no evidence whatsoever of knowing what they are talking about."

At the Rally for Reason in 2012, after that terribly brave performer Tim Minchin had repeatedly sung, "Fuck the Motherfucking Pope", Dawkins told the hysterical crowd, "Mock them, ridicule them in public, don't fall for the convention that we're far too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion is not off limits. Religion makes specific claims about the universe, which need to be substantiated. They should be challenged and ridiculed with contempt."

Too polite to talk about religion! Where has Dawkins been, where does he live? It has been open season on Christianity for almost a generation now, and the last acceptable prejudice in so-called polite society is anti-Catholicism. Dawkins's greatest achievement is Dawkins. He has closed rather than opened the debate around faith and reason, and made life far more difficult for informed believers as well as informed sceptics. What will St Peter will say at the Pearly Gates, if indeed he knows who Dawkins is?