Know Your Enemy

"[Scientology is] purely made-up. It just taps into some ‘gullibiligy’. They find some film star or somebody like Tom Cruise or whatever his name is who’s thick as two short planks and he becomes a sort of advertisement".

"To have astrologers demeaning astronomy by tapping into the spine-tingling wonder of the universe is . . . sacrilegious".

"I say to doctors who use homeopathy: if you can identify this you’d have discovered a whole new force in physics. Either there is no effect, in which case you shouldn’t be charging people money, or there is an effect, in which case you should prove it and win the Nobel prize".

Richard Dawkins talking to Peter Millar in the Sunday Times in advance of his new Channel 4 series 'The Enemies Of Reason', which starts next Monday.

Judging by the content of the interview piece, the series looks set to assault similar targets to Francis Wheen's scattershot polemic 'How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World' - astrology, homeopathy, Deepak Chopra. Indeed, Dawkins' philosophical viewpoint is identical to that which underpins Wheen's book: "I regard the current backlash against science as a betrayal of the Enlightenment".

Dawkins, like Wheen, may be inclined to being abrasive and to overstating the case occasionally, but that doesn't detract from the value of debunking the sort of nonsense that leads people to believe they understand your personality by virtue of the star sign you happen to have been born under.