Creationism

A media hullaballoo blew up last week in Britain because a certain Professor Michael Reiss, director of science education at the Royal Society, apparently seemed to suggest that “creationism” be taught in British schools by way of including “religious” pupils in science courses. For the uneducated, “Creationism” is an ism for those lacking the gumption to make sense of the normal evolutionary processes of life going on around them, before their very eyes, each day. When they see a spider eat a fly they flee for refuge to a land of furry goodness where the fly has some mystical point to its existence that transcends the simple needs of its own or the spider’s survival. The fly will just be okay and somehow remain in undigested form and be of intrinsic value and live for ever somewhere sometime in the end, perhaps even getting a Nobel prize for something or other or getting to shake the hand of hectomillionaire Bill Clinton or Great Gore or some other Alpha furry being before turning into a sort of semi invisible state and levitating from view hand in hand with the spider.

But the strange thing is that, after all the hullaballoo about this issue, there was an even bigger hullaballoo after Professor Reiss was sacked, a hullabaloo made by wordy and seriously strange people seeking to defend his support for teaching “creationism” in schools, with headlines like “The Royal Society is sadly unenlightened on creationism”! (Telegraph!) And then it turns out that Professor Reiss does not support any such thing and never said any such thing and the entire issue was nothing but a load of misrepresentation and a pack of lies put about by the newspapers in the first place. Disgraceful!

But then, just when one thinks one has gotten to the bottom of the matter, one reads “Professor Reiss, who is an ordained Church of England Minister . . .” Help!