Peter Hitchens reviews John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism: “This brief, dry, droll book contains many enjoyable mockeries of various earnest and ridiculous (and failed) attempts to create substitutes for religion, from Auguste Comte to Ayn Rand, who seems to have turned smoking into a sort of sacrament. Even more enjoyably, Gray teases those who try to build a morality on evolution by natural selection, pointing out how that theory has been used in the past to justify what its modern supporters would rightly denounce as appalling racial bigotry and perhaps worse than that. He reminds us of T. H. Huxley’s typically clear-eyed and undeceived warning that evolution ‘is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before’…Well, this sort of thing is what slim volumes are for, an agreeable display of cleverness and deep knowledge lightly worn, ending with a gust of superior laughter at the silliness of mankind. Yet I ended it feeling a little sorry for its ultimate aridity, which seems to say that, while there is in truth some great thing we cannot grasp, it narrows our minds to try too seriously to do so.”

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