Just at the moment when it seems that Christian evangelicals are learning to engage with the outside world, the atheist ones are disappearing entirely into their own self-righteousness. Richard Dawkins tweeted last week: "YES, there are many good, kind, humane Muslims. YES, most Muslims are good, kind and humane. But why are they Muslims?"

The fact that this question might have answers he has not grasped seems never to trouble him. The result is purely comic if you don't care about science education, as most people in this country don't. But if you do think scientific literacy is valuable his tweet is depressing because there is increasing evidence that the Dawkins approach is actually cementing creationism as a mark of Muslim identity in the west.

At a conference last week at the Centre for Social Relations at Coventry University, I listened to Salman Hameed, an astronomer who has moved into sociology and conducted large-scale research across five countries on why and how Muslims are creationist. The overwhelming answer is not that they reject the fact of evolution but that they reject the name Darwin, because he is associated in their minds with atheism, racism, and imperialism. None of these associations are strictly justified, of course. But the association with atheism is still popular.

The idea that you cannot be a biologist, or even a proper scientist, and still believe in God is palpably false but energetically believed by Dawkins and his acolytes. On Sunday, for instance, he retweeted a follower's comment: "In a zoology lecture, the lecturer asked those who believe in god to raise their hands, no hand was raised, it made my day."

The effect of this kind of thing on educated Muslims does not have to guessed at. One of Hameed's research projects involves a study of Muslim doctors and medical students, many of whom are entirely comfortable with evolution as an explanation of the physical world, even if some believe that the soul cannot be explained that way (that was of course the position of Alfred Russel Wallace, who discovered the theory independently of Darwin). But one of Hameed's subjects told him a story of being in a lecture where the lecturer started by asking if there were any creationists in the room. She put her hand up, because she believes that God created the universe, and was immediately singled out for humiliation.

Yet this woman had no idea there were "creationists" in the sense of people who deny the fact of evolution, or deny that it can explain the origin of species.

There are such Muslim creationists but they are not found among the educated. However, this is where Dawkins' scorn does some real damage, even among people who have never otherwise heard of him. Because there is a self-consciously oppositional culture among young poor Muslims, who feel themselves stigmatised and disadvantaged, they can tend to embrace creationism simply because they know it's wrong by the lights of the majority. Dawkins' dismissal of Muslim creationism as "alien rubbish" was not only found as a YouTube clip on the EDL website for a while, but also used in the propaganda of Harun Yahya, the Turkish creationist and self-publicist. The emotional logic is clear: if this rich, sneering white man is against it, it must be good for disaffected young Muslims who feel that they are themselves treated as "alien rubbish".

In this context it's irrelevant whether Muslims are stigmatised by society as a whole. Sufficient parts of British society undoubtedly sympathise with Dawkins when he calls Islam "the greatest force for evil in the world today" and Muslims are understandably sensitive to this.

There is a scientific approach possible to the problem of creationism. You ask what people mean by the word, both intellectually and emotionally; then you listen the answers carefully and try to translate them into terms both sides can accept. Only then is it possible to disentangle the social and philosophical uses of the term from its status as a quasi-scientific explanation and to promote, so far as possible, the scientific truth.

But that would require actual contact with real Muslim creationists, and a willingness to engage in dialogue with them, not matter how wrong they are. That is the same sort of process that the Alpha course forces on evangelical Christians. It works only to the extent that they can pretend to take seriously the objections to their own belief. So perhaps what Dawkinsite atheism needs today is its very own Alpha course – if it is ever to be more than increasingly hysterical sermons to the converted.