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During the last couple of decades there has been a whole succession of loud books on this subject—if you want to read Hitchens or Dawkins you just stroll into the nearest library or bookshop—but Smith’s is less well-known and harder to track down. Which is a shame, because it’s far better and very different in tone.
    There are four parts: first, ‘God� considered in the abstract, purely as a concept; second, two ways of looking at life—reason and faith—compared and contrasted; third, an analysis of historical attempts at using reason to prove the existence of God; and finally, the effects of organised religion on morality and behaviour. This is very much a philosophy book; it’s about ideas (there’s relatively little here about the Bible for example) and also lacks the outright hostility, the polemics, of those more recent works. This one is as detached, observant and analytical as a diagnosis, as meticulous as a dissection, as solemn as a burial. For me, one of its more surprising details was how much it changed my view of the two words ‘agnosticism� and ‘scepticism�, both of which I see in a different light since reading this. Smith only falters near the end, in a short section dealing with ethics; I don’t know what happened there—it’s almost as if someone else stepped in and wrote that part—because it’s suddenly woolly and indecisive. That does, though, only serve to point up the sheer clarity—both of the writing itself and the mind behind it—of the rest.
    In fact, this is the best thing I’ve read on the subject: no duff logic, just clear thinking expressed in such crystal-clear language I wish all philosophy books, on all philosophical subjects, could be like this.