Now here’s a theological argument you can get your teeth into, as Hitchens reviews Hitchens.

Christopher is an atheist. I am a believer.

He once said in public: “The real difference between Peter and myself is the belief in the supernatural.

“I’m a materialist and he attributes his presence here to a divine plan. I can’t stand anyone who believes in God, who invokes the divinity or who is a person of faith.”

I don’t feel the same way. I like atheists and enjoy their company, because they agree with me that religion is important.

I liked and enjoyed this book, and recommend it to anybody who is interested in the subject. Like everything Christopher writes, it is often elegant, frequently witty and never stupid or boring.

I also think it is wrong, mostly in the way that it blames faith for so many bad things and gives it no credit for any of the good it may have done.

I think it misunderstands religious people and their aims and desires. And I think it asserts a number of things as true and obvious that are nothing of the sort.

At the heart of this book are two extraordinary, bold statements. One is a declaration of absolute faith, faith that religion has got it wrong, a mental thunderbolt of unbelief.

Christopher describes how at the age of nine he concluded that his teacher’s claim that the world must be designed was wrong. “I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong.”

At the time of this revelation, he knew nothing of the vast, unending argument between those who maintain that the shape of the world is evidence of design, and those who say the same world is evidence of random, undirected natural selection.

It’s my view that he still doesn’t know all that much about this interesting dispute. Yet at the age of nine, he “simply knew” who had won one of the oldest debates in the history of mankind.

It is astonishing, in one so set against the idea of design or authority in the universe, how often he appeals to mysterious intuitions and ”innate“ knowledge of this kind, and uses religious language such as “awesome” – in awe of whom or what?

(Hat tip: Allahpundit.)