Not for a moment have I ever doubted that I am descended from the apes. In fact at moments of acute domestic stress my wife often claims to detect even older antecedents. Viewed in a certain light, she says, I bear an uncanny resemblance to a primordial crustacean. So it has never occurred to me to dispute Darwin’s theory of evolution. On the contrary; it all makes horrible sense.

But as you may have noticed, this view is not universally shared. Christian fundamentalists in America have been moving heaven and earth, as it were, to have Darwin’s 150-year-old theory “balanced” in schools either by the teaching of creationism (a belief that God created the universe in six days, as related in Genesis) or by a recently concocted hypothesis called “intelligent design”. This argues that many organisms are so complex in structure and so perfectly assembled for their task in life that they couldn’t have evolved by chance. So they must have been designed by an “intelligent agent”. Or God, as she likes to be known.

Intelligent design has been scorned in scientific circles. What irks atheist rationalists such as Richard Dawkins, Oxford’s professor for the public understanding of science, is that it adds a patina of pseudo-scientific logic to a primitive belief in divine creation. And it is indeed easy (especially if you mingle with like-minded supercilious sceptics in Oxford colleges or London newspapers) to dismiss this attempt to question Darwinism as something that could happen only in the daftest backwater of Bible-belt Amerca.

Or at least it was. But a fortnight ago the BBC published a MORI survey commissioned for the science programme Horizon. It was startling. The 2,112 people questioned were not Bible-belt Americans. They were a random sample of British adults. But asked to say whether evolution, creationism or intelligent design best described their view of how life originated and developed, just 48 per cent picked evolution. In other words, it seems that more than half the British population is unconvinced by a theory that Dawkins would consider uncontestable. Clearly the professor for the public understanding of science has a bit of work to do. And there’s more bad news for the scientific community. Although 69 per cent of British adults think that evolution should be taught in schools, a huge 44 per cent think that creationism should be taught either instead of evolution or in addition.

What does this mean? First, it reflects the fact that, while white Britain is increasingly secular, the growing ethnic communities are overwhelmingly faith-based. Secondly, it reminds us of the enduring power of myth — something that dry scientific minds will always underestimate if they continue to mistake faith for stupidity. (And at a time when we are struggling to understand the minds of Islamic fundamentalists, that is a dangerous mistake to make.)

And thirdly, I think it shows that people are as uneasy about the ultra-mechanistic view of the universe presented by scientists such as Dawkins as they are about religious fanaticism. For Dawkins isn’t just attacking religious belief. He articulates the classic scientific presumption that everything can be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry, even if it can’t be explained yet. And included in that “ everything” is mankind’s capacity for creative genius, love, self-sacrifice, moral judgment, humour and existential contemplation. In short, our souls.

He may be right. But I don’t think that mankind is ready — not now, and maybe not ever — to accept that the soul is just a chemical trick of the brain. On the contrary; what drives us restlessly forward as a species, and has done from the start, is our quest for the intangible and the undefinable.

You will recall that old saying: “Give enough monkeys enough typewriters and one of them will write the works of Shakespeare”. It’s a tantalising paradox, isn’t it? On the one hand it seems to endorse Darwinian evolution. It invites us to accept that, since there is a one-in-a-zillion chance of a monkey hitting the right succession of keys to write King Lear, so there was also once a one-in-a-zillion evolutionary quirk that produced human creativity from the brain of an ape.

Yet we know that a monkey would never write Lear except by freak accident. Whereas Shakespeare did so by . . . well, by intelligent design. Which is why, risking the derision of Professor Dawkins, I find that it is perfectly possible to believe both in Darwinian evolution and in a mysterious but far from illusory spiritual realm that human beings, uniquely among this planet’s species, can explore at will. And if some people choose to regard that realm as something to do with God, scientists have no business deriding them until they can come up with a few more plausible answers about the puzzle of human consciousness.

But hey, what do I know? A man who looks like a primordial crustacean in certain lights is certainly capable of thinking like one, too.

An Olympian task for Sir Mick

Forget all those crazed Norwegians hurling themselves down mountains. The most amazing physical feat at the Winter Olympics occurred before competition began. I refer to the 70-year-old Luciano Pavarotti’s appearance at the opening ceremony, summoning up heaven knows what reserves of showbiz chutzpah — plus what looked like Italy’s entire supply of greasepaint and hair dye — to crank out Nessun dorma to a global audience for one last time. What a trouper! Does Britain have a similarly iconic veteran who could perform the same function at the London Olympics? After his Super Bowl performance last week — still so explicit, after all these years, that it was censored by American TV — there can be only one answer. Step forward, Sir Michael Jagger! He will be 69 in 2012, but so what? That will just add a new layer of poignancy to Can’t Get No Satisfaction.

Dedicated to love

It’s a sad sign of middle age when, on February 14, a chap’s thoughts turn not to red roses, candlelit dinners and terrible poetry, but to the quirks of ecclesiastical policy in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, might some erudite reader explain to me why, of the 16,000-odd churches in England, not a single one is named in honour of St Valentine? What a missed opportunity! I urge Archbishop Williams to remedy it now. Rededicating a church or, better still, a cathedral to Valentine would send out a timely message — that some religious organisations, at least, are intent on making love, not war.

Times Recommends

• The ghost of Robin Cook haunts Chilcot’s feast
• The truth shouldn’t need oaths
• Violence: let’s separate the men from the boys