It’s been a damned good week for God, all things considered. Not only have those scientists been trying to find His very own particle in a large bicycle inner tube near Geneva, but the traditional view of Him forming the Earth in a week, resting only to take out a cable subscription to Setanta on the last day, has received a sort of official endorsement from the most unlikely of places – the Royal Society. Normally when you mention God to scientists they blush and start surreptitiously sniggering. Not any more. At last, He has tenure.

The biologist Michael Reiss, from the Institute of Education, has told the Royal Society that creationism should not be written off by scientists as a fantastically stupid notion, at odds with everything we know about the Earth and the universe, but allowed in the classroom as an “alternative world view”. Reiss is worried that some 10% of pupils might be put off science at an early age if they are told that creationism is a belief system which can be adhered to only if you have a vat of tomato soup between the ears or very thick parents, or both. Instead, he argued, it should coexist alongside the accepted scientific discoveries – Darwinism, natural selection and so on.

Creationists believe that the world was conjured into existence in 4004BC, something which would come as a grave shock to the Sumerians, for example. They – the creationists, not the Sumerians – think that dinosaurs roamed the Earth at the same time as mankind; there was no big bang, no amoeba turning into fish, then turning into apes, then turning into Jade Goody. Instead it’s Adam and Eve; snake, apple, quick shag, bob’s your uncle. They believe this because a book they like – way too much – has told them it is true. Insofar as we can be certain of anything, it is very much not true; indeed, it is a ludicrous suggestion, believable only by the blank-minded and terminally credulous.

Michael Reiss, who is – not coincidentally – an ordained Church of England minister, thinks creationism is rubbish as well, so far as I can gather. Two years ago he argued against the consideration of creationism in school science classes but he has since changed his mind. Perhaps he has received a Visitation, or something. Or his bishop has been on the phone. Who knows?

These two things – creationism and science – cannot coexist in the schoolroom. Education should still be about the imparting of knowledge and the expunging of crass ignorance, even if it is crass ignorance which has been around for quite a while. The world is not precisely how we might want it to be – reality sometimes intervenes. If a child balked at the suggestion of his maths teacher that five plus five equals 10 and argued, instead, that it was 342, because his parents thought that to be the case and therefore it was, for him, an article of faith, he would not be entertained in his delusion. He would be told that he was wrong and that his parents were idiots.

Reiss will have caused some consternation with his address, some of it mitigated by the fact that his chosen discipline is biology. For the physicist, biology is virtually a branch of the arts, a half-science at best.

However, some people have found succour in Reiss’s consensual, if not Panglossian, approach. Science, they argue, should not be too dogmatic, and they refer slightingly to Richard Dawkins’s silly and dangerous suggestion that parents who bring their kids up with a Christian or Muslim doctrine are “child abusers”. We could all do without such certainty and arrogance. Well yes, indeed.

But equally, it is iniquitous to shoehorn science into the present zeitgeist where things can be exactly what you want them to be, and that one view is as correct as any other. Where teachers explain natural selection to their classroom and add, as a horrible 21st-century postscript, “Unless you think otherwise, in which case that’s okay.”

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Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, has said there is no “magic bullet” to sort out the housing crisis. I believe he means “the supposed crisis of house prices falling a bit”. Until last summer we were all greatly exercised about another housing crisis – the one in which houses were far too expensive. Therewasa magic bullet for that one, as it turned out – but now that house prices are actually dipping, it seems it wasn’t what we wanted after all. Even if prices fall by 25% over the next year, homes will still be overvalued, I believe.

Meanwhile, we were told this week that 4m people were in “negative equity”, talked about by newsreaders as if it were a new form of sexually transmitted disease. Of course, for an estimated 3,950,000 of those – the ones who want to stay living where they are – negative equity is about as much of a real concern as finding a Higgs boson at the back of the fridge. The rise in food prices is certainly painful, as the glum procession of middle-class people dragging themselves around Lidl looking in vain for mung beans and Sancerre will attest. But for most people this “housing crisis” isn’t a crisis at all.

Hadron con: A billion-dollar illusion

Spink! goes a little white dot on a Swiss computer screen and a very excited Andrew Marr announces to the world that it’s happening, while a bunch of shifty-looking scientists in white coats break open the champagne. Thousands of journalists peer at the screen to see if they can spot the entirely fictional Higgs boson – look, is that one, there? Come on, Marr’s a fine man but he wouldn’t know a charmed quark if it bit his ears. The Large Hadron Collider is almost certainly a gigantic con job, a long metal pipe with a vacuum cleaner at one end to make a convincing whirring noise, hitched up to a couple of PCs bought from Argos. We’ll know where the rest of that 5 billion quid went when the scientists disappear to their newly bought villas in the Bahamas . . .

Guardian's new US election clanger

Uh-oh, it’s happening again. Four years ago The Guardian plunged the world into chaos by winning, for George W Bush, what looked like an unwinnable election. The paper got liberal luvvies such as Lady Antonia Fraser to write to electors in the crucial swing state of Ohio telling them come on, you ignorant little redneck oiks, vote for John Kerry.

This caused some anger stateside and the Americans reacted much as you and I would have done and voted for Bush out of spite. I suspect even Kerry voted for Bush, so arrogant were these letters from the “pansy, tea-drinking” British liberal elite.

Now The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland has warned the Americans that “the world’s verdict will be harsh” if they dare to vote Republican again. Well, that should do the trick, Johnny. Freedland confesses to a “sinking feeling in the stomach” – yep, me too, mate.

* * *

They’re taking bets on which will be the next airline company to go bust; apparently Alitalia is the 6-4 favourite. But I suspect it will be whichever company you booked with, having torn up your Eurostar ticket at the sight of smoke billowing out of the tunnel.

The rain keeps pouring down, you need a mortgage to buy a tank of fuel or a joint of beef, your house is worth nothing, the pound has now sunk to the level of the Cambodian riel and Brown’s still clinging on. And the worst of it is, you can’t even get the hell out.

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