Twenty years ago this month, Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion, a book which helped make an atheist of me. I was a Catholic schoolboy at the time, and like many of my generation I soon found my way to atheist debates on YouTube. Wherever you looked, clever, articulate men were explaining why Christianity was nonsense, and the Christians themselves never seemed able to answer them.
Dawkins was not alone. Together with Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, he belonged to the group popularly known as “the Four Horsemen of New Atheism”. They were joined by a supporting cast of public intellectuals, among whom Stephen Fry was perhaps the most entertaining. All were witty, confident and often contemptuous of religion, and to a teenager who had never encountered a serious defence of the Faith they were hard to resist.
