Why should an academic atheist live off the residual income of a poor preacher?
But I knew I had to read it, which is why I completed my reading of The God Delusion over a series of bookshops between Ireland and home. Each chapter left me more depressed than the previous one.
The reason is not that my faith cannot take a knocking.
Jesus taught me a long time ago that to live the Christian life was to live a life of conflict with the world, in which challenge could be expected at all levels, not least at the intellectual and spiritual level.
The reason for the depression was the reminder of the virulence of the opposition; Dawkins' print cartridges had clearly been filled with vitriol.
Reading the book was to discover that in his opinion, Christians are the worst sub-group of humanity. Dawkins would have us believe that Christians are a menace, precisely because of their Christianity.
It's not difficult to read between the lines and imagine what he would like done to them.
How can people like Dawkins be convinced of the opposite?
Most Christians I know are not devils in disguise; they are actually contributing a great deal of good to their communities, and are selflessly giving their time and money to help make the world a better place.
More than that; to read Dawkins is to realize that he is articulating a worldview espoused by others. Many will be rejoicing at his birth, and at the birth of this book.
He has become the prophet of a new atheism, the guru of a secular generation, and the hero of all those who want to trash all manner of fundamentalism.
However, the first time I read David Robertson's manuscript, I gave thanks to God for the discipline of apologetics, and for the gifts God has given to David to argue passionately, coherently and incisively for the Christian faith.
David responded to Dawkins' book with a letter which appeared on Richard Dawkins' website and generated an immediate response.
Most of it was in opposition to David; but when the rest of us would have been overwhelmed and put off by the apparent weight of the secular intellectual guns firing at us on every side, David rose to the challenge and produced, in record time, a series of letters dealing with the chapter by chapter objections to Christianity in Dawkins' book.
David's basic thesis is that the 'arguments' which Dawkins' marshals against Christianity are, in fact, myths – the myths of the Higher Consciousness, of Godless Beauty, of Atheist Rationality and Tolerance, of the Cruel Old Testament God, of the Science/Religion Conflict, of the Created God and the Uncreated Universe, of the Inherent Evil of Religion, of Godless Morality, of an Immoral Bible, of Religious Child Abuse.
It's all heady stuff, and in Dawkins' hands these subjects are woven together as a compelling case against theism, against Christ, against Christians and against the Bible.
But David does a great job of demythologising Dawkins, of showing how empty, how old and how fallacious the atheist rhetoric is.
There are some brilliant moments, such as at the end of letter two, where David says to Dawkins, 'You may aspire to be a religious non-believer. I am delighted to be a non-religious believer', or when he says in letter four, 'You have not, for example, written a book on the Tooth Fairy Delusion. The evidence for God is on a completely different level', or tells him in letter seven that 'your website has more fundamentalist believers than many religious ones I know'.
David is not trying to be clever; he is being clever.
He draws on a wealth of philosophical and cultural insights to show the emptiness of the atheist perspective, and the coherence and reasonableness of the Christian faith.
Read David's book. I'm glad he is on our side. Is it too much to pray that one day Dawkins might be on David's side too?
This is a book I shall buy. And I shall also hope that in a second printing the publishers opt for a different cover!

David Robertson, The Dawkins Letters: Challenging Atheist Myths, Christian Focus Publications, April 2007.