THE Archbishop of Canterbury wants school pupils to study Philip Pullman’s anti-religious trilogy His Dark Materials.

Rowan Williams said that the fantasy tales, which culminate in the death of a weak and elderly God, would help to counter the “inadequacies” of some religious education.

Mr Pullman welcomed the Archbishop’s advice yesterday and described him as a “very wise man”.

However, Dr Williams told academics and religious leaders invited to 10 Downing Street by Tony Blair that he opposed recent proposals to teach atheism in schools.

“The attempt to teach atheism as a system is a deeply confused aspiration,” he said. The history of . . . courses in ‘scientific atheism’ in the old Soviet Union should be a warning.”

Dr Williams said that children should be exposed to the “inner tensions of belief” and was encouraged by the Nicholas Hytner production of His Dark Materials being staged at the National Theatre.

Pullman’s stories of two children, Lyra and Will, invert Milton’s epic of the war in heaven and feature witches and wicked priests. They have been called “anti-Christian”. The Catholic Herald branded them “fit for the bonfire”. The Association of Christian Teachers said that Pullman’s “blasphemy is shameless”.

Dr Williams, who is due to take part in a debate at the National with the author before next Monday evening’s production of the tale, said: “To see large school parties in the audience . . . is vastly encouraging. I only hope that teachers are equipped to tease out what in Pullman’s world is and is not reflective of Christian teaching as Christians understand it.”

Dr Williams also advocated the inclusion in the RE syllabus of Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor parable or The Plague by Camus, saying that this would be a “mark of some maturity”. He said “these are the things that make belief difficult” and supported studying such “reflective belief systems” and their sophisticated strategies for living with difficulty. He criticised last month’s call by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a left-ofcentre think tank, to include atheism in RE and to rename it “religious, philosophical and moral education”. Humanism has been drafted for inclusion in RE by a curriculum review due to be completed soon.

Dr Williams said he opposed teaching atheism because “we need to know which gods are being rejected and why”.But critics of religion should be on the syllabus, he said. “After all, St Thomas Aquinas begins with the startling words, ‘It seems as though God does not exist’.”

Pullman said that, although an atheist, he supported the teaching of religion in schools.

HUMANS AND ANGELS UNITE

In The Amber Spyglass, the final part of the His Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman writes:

Balthamos said quietly, “The Authority, God, the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty — those were the names he gave himself. He was never the creator. He was an angel like ourselves — the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed of Dust as we are, and Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself . . . The first angels condensed out of Dust, and the Authority was the first of all. He told those who came after him that he had created them, but it was a lie.”

“Angels are more difficult to understand than any human being. They’re not all one of a kind, to begin with; some have greater powers than others; and there are complicated alliances among them, and ancient enmities, that we know little about.

“The Authority has been suppressing them since he came into being.”

She stopped. She was genuinely shocked . . . “You say that so casually,” she said, “as if it were something I should know too, but . . . How can it be? The Authority created the worlds, didn’t he? He existed before everything. How can he have come into being?”

“This is angelic knowledge,” said Ogunwe. “It shocked some of us too to learn that the Authority is not the creator. There may have been a creator, or there may not: we don’t know. All we know is that at some point the Authority took charge, and since then, angels have rebelled, and human beings have struggled against him too. This is the last rebellion. Never before have humans and angels, and beings from all the worlds, made a common cause. This is the greatest force ever assembled. But it may still not be enough.”

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