Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg , a Nobel laureate in physics , warned that '' the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief , '' or when a Nobelist in chemistry , Sir Harold Kroto , called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $ 1.5 million prize for '' progress in spiritual discoveries '' to an atheist -- Richard Dawkins , the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book '' The God Delusion '' is a national best-seller .