John Henry Newman wrote the greatest spiritual autobiography in English, his Apologia. In it, he recalls that, when young, he lived under the ''detestable doctrine’’ of predestination. He believed he was saved, which made him ignore everyone else and ''rest in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’’.
The great atheist Richard Dawkins seems, as a boy, to have had a similar cast of mind. Unlike Newman, however, he quickly discarded the idea of God. Which left only one absolute and luminously self-evident being – Richard Dawkins.
