Richard Dawkins famously held a debate with the previous Archbishop of York in which religion was deemed to have come off rather badly. Considering that your own 'celebrity status' is now beginning to rival his, would you ever consider a re-match? Craig Nelson, by email


'Celebrity' is certainly something I neither crave nor desire. There are other Oxford professors such as Alistair McGrath and Keith Ward who have written or are writing critiques of Professor Dawkins' views, which I would similarly take issue with. However I think there are more serious challenges and threats to religion in the West than Professor Dawkins. Materialism, idolatry, militarism and race-ism are the great evils of our modern society, not Richard Dawkins.

Modern scholars largely accept the Jesus story was a conflation of dozens of pre-existing stories of 'sons of God', born to virgins who turned water to wine and rose from the dead, etc. When will the church stop propagating their invented history as fact and admit they have no right or justification for the moral or religious high ground they try to impose upon society? Craig Green, London


The textual, historical and archaeological evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ is overwhelming. It is not only the Gospel writers who wrote of the life and existence of Jesus Christ. Roman and Jewish historians of the time, such as Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Suetonius and Josephus, write of Jesus's life, crucifixion and of the existence of his followers at the time. Rather than denying Jesus, much modern scholarship rather asserts the historical pedigree of the New Testament documents. It is of course much easier to dismiss all the evidence and put it down as a fairy story, and more difficult to prod, investigate and evaluate all the evidence available if we only choose to look.