Alice Roberts Left Faith After Reading Dawkins
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- Alice Roberts credits Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene with making evolution suddenly make sense during her teenage years, sending her on to devour Stephen Jay Gould's evolutionary biology essays.
- Roberts says finishing Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker was the moment she knew she had left behind the Anglican faith she was raised in, concluding that biological diversity required no divine creator — though she didn't have the word 'humanist' for it yet.
- Roberts wrote her first book as a handout to accompany her BBC Two series Don't Die Young, having never set out to be a writer, and credits Gould as her model for communicating complex ideas without 'dumbing down.'
- Andrew Copson, chief executive of Humanists UK, persuaded Roberts to read George Eliot's Middlemarch about five years ago; she had previously dismissed Eliot as 'boring and banal' alongside the Brontës and Austen, but now calls it a masterpiece.
- Roberts describes Darwin's On the Origin of Species as the book she keeps coming back to, and names The Little Book of Humanism — which she helped compile — as her comfort read.
- Currently, Roberts is dipping into Fritz Graf's Roman Festivals in the Greek East for work, while reading Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem aloud to her teenage son as a bedtime story.
Why it matters: Roberts is one of Britain's most prominent science communicators, so her personal account of Dawkins-catalyzed deconversion is culturally significant: it humanizes the scientist-believer divide by showing how a single book can be the hinge point in a thoughtful person's loss of faith.
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