Richard Coles’ review of Outgrowing God [below] is as charmingly engaging as we have come to expect. I have long loved his winsome humour, and I was personally sorry when, at the last minute, he had to pull out of an ITV documentary in which he and I were to have served as joint models for a portrait-painting competition. His understudy was a nice woman priest, whose only fault was that she won the toss to see who should keep the victorious joint portrait. I had to make do with a replica.

Outgrowing God is not God Delusion lite, or God Delusion for the Young. It covers ground nowhere to be seen in the earlier book. It has much more to say about the Bible, including the many additional gospels besides the four canonical ones, notably the Infancy Gospel of Thomas with its bizarre accounts of the mischievous (not to say spiteful) boy Jesus. My new book goes beyond The God Delusion on the subject of morality, and the deeply wrong-headed but lamentably influential idea that the Bible is a good source of moral lessons.

Not only should we refrain from taking our morality from scripture. As a matter of fact we obviously don’t take it from scripture. It is true that occasional verses can be found to accord with decent modern morality, but you have to make an effort to sift them out from the more numerous nasty verses. And the criteria for the sifting of course have to be non-Biblical. Another difference from The God Delusion is – and Richard Coles graciously appreciates it – the second half, which is all about science. Admittedly it is science – and Richard, of course, doesn’t like this – in the service of demonstrating the superfluousness of gods.