An item in The Times this week appeared to suggest that somebody has finally taken notice of my warnings about declining educational standards.

“Cretinism in schools row” ran a headline on Monday, and I fair whooped for joy. “Yes, exactly,” I cried. “Cretinism, moronacy, dimness... call it what you will. But the bare fact is that in my day an O level was a...”

“It says 'creationism',” said my girlfriend.

“Eh?”

“The row is about creationism in schools, not cretinism.”

“Oh. I must have misread it.”

“You must have. I dare say that in your day reading was not a big thing in schools. No doubt you had bigger fish to fry. Ancient Greek, Large Hadron Collider construction...”

“Yes, yes, OK. Whatever.”

So then, creationism in schools. Much less interesting. At my school, we were indeed taught that God made the world in six days.

Except it was in a scripture lesson. I still remember my friend Nicky Diamond posing what remains, for me, the single most perplexing question in the whole debate: “So, um, what day did He make the dinosaurs?” The answer, according to our scripture teacher, Mr Earl, was, obviously, that He made them on the sixth day, when He made the beasts of the Earth.

“Okayyyy,” said a doubtful Diamond. “That's fine, but, er, stop me if I've got the wrong end of the stick here, sir, but a lot of the dinosaurs were aquatic - I'm thinking of the ichthyosaurus, the keichosaurus, the nothosaurus - wouldn't they have probably been more likely made on the fifth day? You know, when He was doing the animals that ‘fill the waters in the seas'?”

“I suppose that is possible, boy.”

“OK, good. Because Mr Cutcliffe, from science, says the water dinosaurs evolved gradually into land ones. And you're saying that by the sixth day brontosauruses and velociraptors were already in evidence.”

“Yes, it was on the sixth day that the Lord made the beasts of the Earth after His own kind.”

“Seems awfully quick.”

“Quick?”

“Well, we've been given the impression by Mr Cutcliffe that this move from the water to the land took place over a very long space of time. Now, his theory rather stretches the bounds of likelihood as it is, but you're asking us to believe that this evolution took place in a single night?”

“Dear boy, I think you are perhaps confusing two very different things. I am not here to teach you how the world was made. I am here to teach you what is in the Bible. Perhaps, if you are ultimately persuaded by Mr Cutcliffe's theory of evolution, it will be instructive for you to know how people used to think the world was made - the people in the history you will be studying, and the authors of the early literature. For a long time, they were very much persuaded that the Bible had it down right.”

“And so what does the Bible have to say about pterodactyls?” said Nicky, folding his arms across his chest and squinting up at Mr Earl.

“Pterodactyls?”

“It says here that on the fifth day the Lord also created the ‘fowl of the air'. Now, for a long time, the pterodactyl was envisaged as a kind of giant reptilian bird, which would place its creation firmly on the fifth day - am I right or am I right? - but it is now widely thought to have been more just a land animal with wings that could float down from cliffs and trees and stuff when it wanted to. Basically a big lizard crossed with a hang-glider. And what I'm asking myself - throw me a bone here, sir, if you can - is when He'd have been creating that? Sort of overnight between the fifth and the sixth? Because I've been assuming up to now that He went to sleep at night...”

Nicky Diamond and his mother, funnily enough, emigrated not long afterwards to America, where I have no doubt Nicky's academic diligence served him well. I only wonder what sort of school, in what sort of state, he ended up in. And which side of the debate he was encouraged to come down on. Is he, in short, a Republican or a Democrat?

For my part, I was very taken with Mr Earl's explanation that “I am not here to teach you how the world was made. I am here to teach you what is in the Bible.”

It was then that I saw the light, and decided that when it came to a timetable choice between biology and divinity, I would go for the latter on the ground that, either way, I would inevitably be asked in an exam how the world was made, and that the biblical answer was just so much quicker to scribble down. Meaning that one could be out of there in no time and down the corner shop scoffing half-pee cola chews while the biologists were still in the assembly hall, scratching their heads and doing diagrams of amoebae.

If you really want to know who made the world, it would probably be best to ask Noel Edmonds. Although there is a danger that he will shout: “Me!” For I fear Noel Edmonds is well on the way to declaring that he is God. Certainly if the example of David Icke is anything to go by.

It's a classic progression. First you declare your refusal to acknowledge earthly laws of which you do not approve - which Noel has done by refusing to pay his licence fee. Then you publicly declare your specialness in terms of a relationship with invisible powers, to wit: Edmonds's assertion that he is accompanied through life by two “orbs” or “little bundles of positive energy” which, he says, are invisible to the naked eye but appear in digital photographs.

Hitler followed this patter, for example, refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Weimar Government and then positioning himself as the spokesman for the immortal, invisible soul of Germany.

And Icke did it, too, except that he went for lizards rather than orbs or Teutonic racial purity as his special interest group.

And, of course, Jesus did it. Although with the proviso that one should “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's” (which suggests that He would have rendered His fee unto the BBC even if He only ever watched repeats of Top Gear on Dave).

The rejection of worldly authority (combined with scary conspiracy theories) followed by the identification of personal angels is a familiar route towards the self-declaration of deity, and the descent into total madness. So come on, Noel, pull yourself together.

If you don't, you're going to have Nicky Diamond on the phone any day now, asking: “So on what day, exactly, did you create Mr Blobby?”

Just out of interest: if you are a creationist, and believe the theory of evolution to be bunk, then where are you supposed to stand on the Cruft's debate? Presumably, a creationist dog-breeder is a blameless dog-breeder, because if the theory of evolution is a Satanist lie, then your misshapen bulldog that can't give birth must have been made by God.

Has Sarah Palin, for example, ever bred a dog? And if so, does it eat gynaecologists?

Times Recommends

• Darling won't pay for Brown give-away
• Believe it or not, Big Brother is your friend
• E-mails were quoted out of context