It is a happy paradox that the geographical strongholds of people who believe in something called intelligent design are the very places most clearly bereft of such a quality. Creationism, as intelligent design was once more accurately described, flourishes in the dust and snakebowl bible belts of the US and in the more impoverished and violent pits of Africa. Recently it has established a toehold here — in Middlesbrough. God, surely, cannot have had anything to do with these places, unless he has a perverse sense of humour.

Richard Dawkins, the neo-Darwinian, has been hammering away at the creationists again for insisting that their supposedly scientific theory be taught in schools alongside the more recent orthodoxies of Darwinian evolution. There is history here. Dawkins and God do not get along: they have issues, to the extent that Dawkins has gone so far as to suggest that God doesn’t exist. God has never ventured to suggest the same of Dawkins. It would be a difficult line for him to pursue: we see evidence of God only when we are drunk, or when England wins a Test match. We see evidence of Dawkins pretty much every day.

Dawkins is supposedly a supremely rational human being. But there is another paradox here, because in his defence of theories to which he has affixed his flag and from which he has made his name, he betrays the distinctly irrational and human characteristic of possessing something called faith. “I believe but I cannot prove that all life, all intelligence and all design . . . is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection,” he has said. Faith is indeed a touching thing.

I suspect — note that word, suspect — that he is right, though. And I am about 99.99% convinced that intelligent design or creationism is an incorrect explanation for the development of life on earth. But that 0.01% of doubt is not allowed to intrude into Dawkins’s philosophy, for he has total faith. He is 100% certain that creationism is both wrong and indeed cretinous. It is, he says, a “time-wasting distraction” and belongs not in a science class but “in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies”.

And I dare say he will continue to hold to this unequivocal view until either God descends in a flash of light, chuckling and muttering “suck on this, Dawkins”, or until his own theories on the evolution of life are superseded by ones that revise or utterly contradict them. The only certainty is that at some point — maybe five years from now, maybe 500 — Dawkins will be proved wrong.

It is the ultimate fate of all scientists and it is what makes science so glorious, so perpetually compelling; but it sits uneasily with the unequivocal dismissal and attempted silencing of competing theories, even if the theorists are apparently deadbeats from the Ozark mountains who call their strangely shaped children Bubba and eat grits for breakfast.

In his polemic Dawkins suggests that Darwinian evolution is “as much a fact as the heliocentric solar system”. Again, I suspect he is right. But the notion of a heliocentric solar system would have come as a bit of a blow to the stakeholders of an early scientific paradigm — most notably, Aristotle and Ptolemy. Science must always allow itself doubt in order to advance: it is not simply a case of complying with Karl Popper’s strictures on the need for theories to be vulnerable to disproof. It is also a need to allow room for doubt when apparently, scientifically, the need for doubt has been obliterated. Science needs to rid itself of this strange, quasi-religious fixation with certitude. The only certainty is that there is no such thing.

I cannot think of many writers who have given me more to think about in the past 10 or 15 years than Dawkins. Almost every book that has held me captive over that period has come from one of the scientific disciplines, be it evolutionary psychology or the new physics that threatens every one of those previously imperturbable classical laws laid down by Newton and the like.

And Dawkins is right, too, that those who propound creationism are loathe to submit their theories to rigorous testing; as he says, there are few peer-reviewed articles in the science journals presenting evidence for the theory that the earth was created by a divine being about 4,000 years ago.

As Dawkins implies, the creationists are guided less by scientific rigour than by pure faith. But it is a view that has been popularly believed for at least 2,000 years: why not allow it to be analysed scientifically within the classroom? For an afternoon, at least.

There is another point Dawkins makes that contains a fatal flaw — and one that should be obvious to anyone except, maybe, a scientist. Of the battle between creationism and Darwinism he says: “When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong.”

Indeed it is. But it is even more likely, if not a cast-iron certainty, that one side is more right than the other — and that nonetheless, both sides are wrong.

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