Excuse me, Mr D, could you just run that past me again?

I don't know if the controversy has hit Britain yet, but here a battle is raging between the Creationists and the Evolutionists. The catalyst for this seems to be the new multimillion-dollar Museum of Creation in Kentucky, which shows, with a great deal of pezazz, that Genesis had it right, and Darwin and his followers are a bunch of deluded atheists, poisoning the minds of our youth, etc.

In an earlier blog, I wrote about some gorgeous moths, and said: "I don't care how they got here, I am just glad they did." I know at least one loyal reader who then crossed me off their ("their", what a useful ambiguity!) Christmas card list, and I am really sorry that I should have provoked such a reaction (Contempt? Anger? Sorry, H)

The reason I am returning to this theme is because I have just been reading [a] the latest issue of the New Scientist, which lampoons the Creationist Museum and all its cookiness; [b] the Simon & Schuster Guide to Mammals (originally published by Mondadori under the title Mammiferi), which contains a detailed description, complete with polysyllables, of how life evolved from Reptiles to Me, as you might say.

As to the first, it is, for me, like listening to medieval monks arguing about how many angels can stand on a pin. As to the second, I love the idea that everything today was derived from everything then, with changes triggered by climate change, the odd galactic catastrophe, a butterfly beating its wings in the Amazon, and so on.

As you are probably nodding off at this point, let me bring this to a pithy conclusion. I like the idea of God, and I hope God likes the idea of me. I also find the whole evolutionist theory very intellectually satisfying: like my life, one thing should always lead to another, not always for the better, of course.

So, maybe God and Evolution are facets of the same thing. How should I know? All I know is that when I see something as glorious as a Monarch Butterfly (another nearly landed in my coffee this morning), I am just glad it exists, and I really, honestly, truly, don't care how it got here. I am just glad it did (And that it didn't in fact land in my coffee. For both our sakes).