Alice Roberts: Dawkins Books Drove Me From Anglican Faith — SkimNews
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- Alice Roberts says reading Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene as a teenager had a 'profound effect,' with the gene's-eye view making evolution 'suddenly make sense,' leading her to also devour Stephen Jay Gould's essays on evolutionary biology
- Roberts credits Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker with finishing her departure from the Anglican faith she was raised in — biological diversity, she says, could be explained through natural processes, with 'no need for – and no evidence of – a divine creator'
- Roberts never set out to be a writer; her first book was a handout to accompany her BBC Two series Don't Die Young, and she credits Gould's example of communicating complex ideas without 'dumbing down'
- Roberts says she keeps returning to Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which she praises for taking readers 'from the known and familiar, to the novel and strange'
- Roberts admits she had filed George Eliot away as 'boring and banal' — until Andrew Copson, chief executive of Humanists UK, persuaded her to read Middlemarch five years ago, prompting her to call it 'a masterpiece'
- Roberts is currently reading Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem to her teenage son, and recently finished Val McDermid's Queen Macbeth and Karen Hao's Empire of AI
- Roberts names The Little Book of Humanism — a book she helped compile — as her comfort read
Why it matters: A leading British scientist-broadcaster publicly crediting Dawkins for her deconversion gives a high-profile, firsthand account of how popular science writing displaces religious belief — a pipeline rarely narrated so directly by a figure of her standing. Her broader reading list, from Darwin back to George Eliot, also positions her as a Gould-style popularizer who insists complex ideas need not be 'dumbed down.'
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