Is atheism best served by treating religious believers as bigoted idiots who try to compete with scientists in explaining the universe? Tim Crane is surely right that it is not. Crane wants a genuine debate with religion, which he ­appreciates will not be ­possible until each side recognises itself in the picture of it painted by its opponents. So the short, unfailingly sharp and ever courteous The Meaning of Belief is devoted to understanding religious belief from an external viewpoint, “a philosophical picture of a real phenomenon”, as he puts it.