Richard Dawkins, the atheist author of The God Delusion, believes that children should grow up reading the Bible and says that he has a “soft spot” for the Church of England.

In an interview with Times2, Professor Dawkins, a Darwinian biologist, said: “You’d be rightly written off as uncultivated if you knew nothing of the Bible. You need the Bible to understand literary allusions.”

And, although he resisted calling it God, he said that he believed in the possibility of a transcendent “gigantic intelligence” existing beyond the range of human experience. He added that his main target in The God Delusion was fundamentalists.

His comments were welcomed by fellow scientists.

Professor Richard Nichols, Professor of Biology at Queen Mary’s, London and editor of the journal Heredity, said: “Many scientists share a reverence for the universe and life in ways that resemble the feelings that more conventionally religious people channel into organised religion. However, most are reticent about expressing these convictions, not least because we acknowledge that we are doing our thinking with an imperfect instrument: our brain, which has been shaped by evolution and which consequently makes consistent mistakes. An analogy is our tendency to see shapes and patterns in randomly scattered dots.”

The Reverend Richard Cunningham, director of the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship, said: “Of course Dawkins is not part of God’s creation – he is a self-made man who worships his creator. Such an intelligent man will realise the universe is not big enough for both him and God.”