Here are two recent news stories: we’ve found the genes that make people believe in God and that make women unfaithful. At a stroke, scientists have scuppered religion and taken the moral sting out of infidelity. If you think you have any of these genes, go to your doctor at once and get them removed.

Richard Dawkins groans.

“Pernicious,” he says. “I mean, I don’t want to seem stuffy but I don’t think newspapers should print these stories until the research itself has been published.”

Neither of the stories is true. Genes are one variant among many that make women cheat or people believe in God. All that has been found is that there is a tiny heritable factor in each trait. You can’t even predict what an individual plant will do on the basis of such correlations and, when human reason comes into the picture, you can predict nothing. There will be plenty of nuns who lack the God genes and possess the infidelity genes; this will not make them worse nuns.

Anyway, when he groaned, I felt sorry for Dawkins for the first time. His name is associated with the sort of dumb genocentrism that lay behind the reporting of those two stories. In fact, he’s never said anything of the kind. But, precisely because he keeps wading enthusiastically into public debates, he’s become known as the guy that thinks genes do everything.

So, given that we’ve got him wrong, let’s try to get him right. First, he is one of the strangest men I’ve ever known. We go back a long way. Our relationship started well, descended into hate-hate, recovered somewhat to love-hate and, latterly, has drifted into respectful acceptance.

He is a highly strung, frequently petulant man. I’ve seen him storm out of an amiable dinner because he didn’t like the music and I’ve heard of him muttering to his companion, when a lady cleric entered the room, that dog collars are always a sign of low IQ. But when relaxed, he is charming, deferring politely to opinions with which he disagrees and displaying a conscientious desire to understand.

On these occasions, he has the air of an eager-to-please country vicar, an air enhanced by the discreet serving of tea by his wife Lalla Ward and further emphasised by the large, rectory-like house they now occupy just outside Oxford city centre.

Dapper as ever in jacket, chinos and boat shoes, and looking 20 years younger than he actually is (63), this time he greets me with warm familiarity. Things are looking up. The rectoryness of the house vanishes inside. It is beyond the reach of any vicar I know — beautifully and expensively decorated and furnished with a vast flat-screen television in the living room.

Dawkins has done well for himself. He is endowed by Charles Simonyi, formerly of Microsoft, as Oxford’s professor of the public understanding of science and his books leap off the shelves.

The latest — The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life — is a huge, colourfully illustrated history of life, the narrative running backwards from man to bacteria. “I must confess I regretted taking it on a number of times. The scale seemed overwhelming. I came close to giving up but I’m glad I didn’t and now I’ve got this feeling of having come through,” he says.

But the importance of Dawkins, though based on the brilliance and popularity of his writing, is mostly to do with what he represents. He is Darwin’s enforcer. Darwin discovered evolution through natural selection, but, a quiet man with a religious wife, he did not engage in the ensuing public debates. Dawkins does, combining evolutionary theory with anti-Bush, left-wing politics, expressed through the occasional article but mostly through pithy, angry letters to newspapers.

Dawkins is the supreme meta-establishment thinker, the eloquent defender of the dominant but seldom expressed world view of our time — aggressive atheism and secularity, soft leftism, scientism and faith in progress. To his fans, he is reason incarnate. And so if Dawkins says George W Bush is an idiot, which he frequently does, then Dubya must, rationally, be an idiot. But, in fact, reason has nothing to do with it.