Poor Richard’s just turned into a frog ... how statistically improbable was that!

CHILDREN, you keep asking me whether ‘Richard Dawkins really exists’ and in answer I have a story for you. No, it’s not by J.K. Rowling but if you’re sitting comfortably, then I’ll begin: ‘Once upon a time there was a clever little boy called Richard. Even when he was a toddler, all his elders were enthralled by his exceptional capacity for lucid discernment and cold logic (or so he writes in his book about himself).

‘Indeed, his mother wrote down in her own little notebook all the clever things he said and did – like the time he went to a Christmas party aged just 21 months and rumbled the man, called Sam, who had dressed up as Santa. When Santa left, Richard piped up, saying, “Sam’s gone,” to general dismay.

‘As a grown-up, he carried on ruining everything for everybody. He became rich and famous after he wrote a book called The Selfish Gene [no, darling, not the Selfie Gene] that was more important than any other book ever, including the Bible.

‘In it Dawkins said that human beings were not God’s creation but merely vehicles for genes to be passed down through generations [yes, darling, just like grandaddy’s ancient Subaru, how clever you are].

HE REFUSED to believe i n the magic of anything unless it was underpinned by extensive peer-reviewed evidence. So he proved there was no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, no God, no Tooth Fairy, even!

‘If people contradicted him, and said they believed in these things, or their versions of these things, he challenged them to noisy fights in studios and on public platforms.

‘He didn’t mind if they cried with disappointment when he stole their childhoods and dreams as by then he was no longer a clever little boy but the Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, and the most important and clever person in the history of the world since Charles Darwin.

‘Years passed, but it wasn’t until he had a book called An Appetite For Wonder to promote and hadn’t been in the news for a bit that the curse his Fairy Godmother had laid on him when he was a babe in the cradle finally came true. This curse was that one day, as a sort of reverse Rumpelstiltskin, he would turn beautifully spun gold into straw for what might be the last time, and that lots of people would laugh and point and accuse him of losing the plot and being a grumpy old bore.

‘And this happened just as predicted last week, when Richard, who was by now an old man, went to Cheltenham Science Festival and got into trouble.

‘He said it wasn’t a good thing to “go along” with the “magical fantasies” of childhood. He said that a child’s view of the world shouldn’t include the supernatural. He said mummies and daddies shouldn’t read fairy tales to children at bedtime, because the supernatural was “pernicious”. He even claimed that a prince could not turn into a frog because such a metamorphosis was “statistically too improbable”.

‘All hell then broke loose and Dawkins trended on Twitter and there was such a fuss that he had to do yet another radio interview in which he said that the goblins who write make-believe stories in the press had misrepresented him. He told everyone what he had meant to say was that, far from being pernicious, fairy tales were actually beneficial as they helped children distinguish between fact and fiction at a young age.

AS THE row went on, he tweeted that he was right and everyone else was wrong, for the nth time. He said not for the first time that the real problem was that adults come clean in the end to their children about Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny, but they never come clean about God.

‘And no, I don’t think he’s a bad man for saying this, or for other things he says, such as that the stars aren’t God’s daisy chain and that evolution is a fact and there is no life after death.

‘In fact, though I don’t know how to break this to you, I’m afraid that not only is Richard Dawkins real, I think he IS right, about everything.

‘Or that it’s statistically probable that he is, anyway.’

Oh. Sorry, you thought it was such a boring story, darling, about a silly man. Don’t cry.

We can always have Harry Potter tomorrow.