It’s not a good time to be Richard Dawkins, for he alone, like the scapegoat of Leviticus, must bear the brunt of everyone’s hatred of atheism. (Sam Harris sometimes serves as a backup goat.) Even though Dawkins has never proclaimed himself as any kind of atheist “leader”—his eminence among nonbelievers is purely a byproduct of his books and talks—he is the poster child for atheism, and everyone who hates atheists, including some other atheists, comes down on him. I can't count all the poorly founded attacks on the man, but one has just appeared that takes the cake.

John Gray is an English writer, philosopher, and an atheist who has it in for New Atheists. (I’ve previously analyzed his missteps here, here, and here.) Gray seems to be one of those atheists who doesn’t like science, claims that its bad effects are as prominent as its good ones, and has a sneaking love of religion. But he's never been as nasty as he is in his latest article in The New Republic, “The Closed Mind of Richard Dawkins.” And it is nastiness with no apparent purpose other than to smear Dawkins, which Gray does by pretending to review Dawkins’s latest book: An Appetite for Wonder, the first volume of his autobiography.

It’s okay to slam a book if the ideas are bad, or its thesis is insupportable. I’m thinking here of the best critical review of a science book I’ve ever seen: Peter Medawar’s crushing review of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, in which Medawar fatally demolishes de Chardin’s gaseous lucubrations. But you won’t find Teilhard’s intellectual weakness in Dawkins’s book. If you’ve read it, as I have, you’ll find it a fairly workmanlike autobiography, dwelling mostly on the details of Dawkins’s life. There are a few bits about atheism (mostly about how Dawkins lost his faith, which appears to be a gradual process involving his exposure to Darwinism), but most of it is of the “I did this and then went here” variety. The best bits, for me, are at the end when Dawkins starts talking about science—it ends when he publishes The Selfish Gene, for a second volume is in the offing—as science is what really gets Dawkins’s juices flowing, and he’s best when writing about that, or about atheism. One senses that he’s unenthusiastically recounting the details of his life as a kind of duty, perhaps goaded by an agent or publisher.

Nevertheless, John Gray uses this lean framework to attack Dawkins's character. Here are his tactics:

1. Interpret innocuous statements about evolution as evidence of Dawkins’s arrogance and smugness.

Gray writes: