Religious education is crucial in schools for British children to understand their history and culture, Richard Dawkins has said. Richard Dawkins – author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and The God Delusion – is one of science’s greatest communicators.

The evolutionary biologist and confirmed atheist has always been against religion. He claims: “We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

He implies that religion prevents us from understanding the world deeper. “I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” So he supports science at the expense of religion. As such he is one of the most colourful and prominent atheist scientists of today.

Such a convinced atheist speaking for religious education is interesting. While speaking at the prestigious Cheltenham Science Festival, UK, he was asked whether religious studies should be abolished in schools, over fears that schoolchildren were being brainwashed.

“I think that it is an important part of our culture to know about the Bible after all so much of English literature has allusions to the Bible, if you look up the Oxford English Dictionary you find something like the same number of quotations from the Bible as from Shakespeare.” He warned that it was virtually impossible to study English literature without knowing the background of Christianity.

“It’s an important part of our history. So much of European history is dominated by disputes against rival religions and you can’t understand history unless you know about the history of the Christian religion and the Crusades and so on.” He added: “I would not abolish religions education, I think I would substitute it for comparative religion and Biblical history and religious history.”

His reasons are insightful. “Comparative religion is very valuable partly because the child learns that there are lots of different religions not just the one they were brought up with. They learn they are all different and they can’t all be right, so maybe none of them are right. Critical thinking is what we need.” However, he said that ‘deeply wicked’ and ‘evil’ to use religion to scare children, by warning them they could send up in ‘hell fire.’

This famous atheist promotes religious education for cultural, literary and historical reasons. While agreeing with him, can we promote religious education also for religious and spiritual reasons. Given our turbulent religious situation, we need religious education that includes also the sympathetic study of other religions and sciences. Today, for many people science tends to be substitute for religion.