Attending a secondary school run by fundamentalist, evangelical Christians, I remember times when as an ignorant teenager I felt I had to stand up for science. I remember being taken to task by a teacher for telling younger boys that I believed in evolution.

Things have swung so much now that I wonder if it was worth struggling to argue for science when people like Richard Dawkins were waiting in the wings to tell me and others like me that our faith in God was naïve nonsense.

Dawkins has become as much a fundamentalist in one direction as my teachers were in the other.

Here’s how he answered the question “What do you believe to be true even though you cannot prove it?”

“It is an established fact that all of life on this planet is shaped by Darwinian natural selection, which also endows it with an over­-whelming illusion of ‘design’. I believe, but cannot prove, that the same is true all over the universe, wherever life may exist. I believe that all intelligence, all creativity, and all design, any­where in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of a cumulative process equivalent to what we here call Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the uni­verse, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe”.

The teachers would have given the same answer, just substituting their own words.

“It is an established fact that all of life on this planet is created by God, who also endows it with an over­-whelming illusion of ‘evolution’. I believe, but cannot prove, that the same is true all over the universe, wherever life may exist. I believe that all intelligence, all creativity, and all design, any­where in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of a cumulative process equivalent to what we here call Creation. It follows that evolution comes late in the uni­verse, after a period of Creation. Evolution cannot precede Creation and therefore cannot underlie the universe”.

A plague on all their houses!