I was too hasty. I thought the Royal Society’s comments on creationism in school science lessons (see my 15 September post) would provoke debate. I forgot we are dealing here with the nation’s liberal and scientific establishment.

Openness, diversity, balance, rationality, tolerance and generosity of spirit are the laudable liberal values that the elite would have us think they adhere to. But frequently the mask slips and we’ve seen that for many these are only a veneer that covers underlying prejudice, intolerance and even sheer bigotry.

(Incidentally on the bigotry theme, did you read Richard “Show-Me-The-Evidence-Give-Me-The-Facts” Dawkins’ recent comment about Channel 4’s Big Brother?

“I utterly despise Big Brother,” he told The Times (19 July 2008), apparently not enamoured by the Darwinian survival of the fittest in the Big Brother house. “I have heard indications (sic) that… schoolchildren do copycat bullying because they learn about it from these vile people (sic), the trailer trash (sic) that go on Big Brother.”

How about that for fact-based rationality and evidence-based reasonableness?)

But back to the Royal Society: The only debate provoked was one about how to deal with the unassuming and unturbulent priest, Revd Professor Michael Reiss, who, as the Society’s director of education, had gently suggested that creationist schoolchildren should be given respect and their views considered seriously by science teachers. A good liberal educationalist approach, you’d have thought.

However Lord Rees of Ludlow, Nobel Prize winners Sir Richard Roberts and Sir Harry Kroto, House of Commons Science Committee chairman Phil Willis MP – these and others attacked Reiss in uninformed and thuggish fashion.

Richard “Show-Me-The-Evidence-Give-Me-The-Facts” Dawkins personalised his prejudice with a masterpiece of stand-up stereotyping: “A clergyman in charge of education for the country’s leading scientific organisation? It’s a Monty Python sketch,” he squealed.

The Royal Society initially supported Professor Reiss and then equivocated. Finally it gave in to the paranoia and defensiveness of a scientific community that seems to be losing its confidence in the face of rising creationist belief, and “accepted Professor Reiss’ resignation”.

Winston Churchill’s dictum was that “scientists should be on tap but not on top.” Now there lies real wisdom and understanding…

Before the summer break, this blog was charting the remarkable resurgence of religion in public life. The past week has seen this continue apace.

First, and amazingly, the Royal Society has thrown a cat in amongst the secular and scientific pigeons and argued that creationism should be taught in schools’ science lessons as a legitimate point of view. Yes, that’s the actual Royal Society (the august and ancient body of which Charles Darwin, the first proponent of the theory of evolution, was a Fellow) not Alaska’s Sarah Palin. I’m still rubbing my eyes.

Actually, personally, I’m not so sure. If religion was better valued and science seen in a more modest perspective by the education authorities, there would be no need for creationism to be taught within the science curriculum. It could be taught in RE classes as a valid and life-enhancing world view.

But the mind-set of most top educationalists is completely secular (that is, antagonistic to religion except where there’s a very personal and private expression of faith) and would probably concur with the senior scientist (I missed her name) who seriously claimed last week that the high-profile Large Hadron Collider experiment on the Swiss-French border might discover the purpose of life. Such risible arrogance about role and possibilities of science inevitably excludes religion from the equation and respect for religion from our educational establishments.

So I’m delighted the Royal Society has lobbed in this particular hand-grenade. It should provoke debate. I haven’t looked at his website but I guess Professor Richard Dawkins’ reaction has been nuclear and as shrill as ever. That’s a delightful thought too.

Second, the Pope’s current visit to France has highlighted another surprising development – the increasing promotion of faith by President Sarkosy.

Since the anti-clerical Revolution of 1789, French society has been fiercely secular. The law of ‘laicite’ (the separation of church and state) was formally enacted in 1905 and as recently as 2004, after a French commission called for the prohibition of all religious costumes and signs in state schools, Islamic headscarves were banned to the bemusement of many on this side of the Channel, Muslim and non-Muslim.

But in recent months the President has been speaking out in favour of religion. In major speeches – significantly in Rome and Riyadh – he has been promoting faith. “A country with faith is a happier one,” he says. In contrast to his predecessor Chirac who refused to allow the mention of ‘God’ in the now-failed EU constitution, Sarkosy has been promoting the “essentially Catholic roots” of the French nation and arguing for a “positive secularism” which includes a more assertive church. He’s even been heretical enough to state that in transmitting values, the teacher can never replace the priest.

Paris pundits and Left Bank opinion-formers are up in arms. But Sarkosy is catching the tide. Religion is continuing its rise in public life

Back in February (http://www.meetalancraig.com/?m=200802) and perhaps tongue-in-cheek, I noted how my own party, the Christian Peoples Alliance, has provoked the local Labour Party here in Newham, east London, to start quoting from the Bible.

On Tuesday a friend drew my attention to another Labour Party Biblicist in Newham, albeit a reluctant one. The references are in the blog (http://grayee.blogspot.com/) of local Labour and trade union activist John Gray.

Moulded by the politics of the Jack Jones and Arthur Scargill era of the 70s and 80s, Gray’s views haven’t moved on and as you will see from his blog, politically he’s been stranded squatting in what Nick Cohen calls the “political rubble left by the crumbling values of the old Left”. Gray has his own brand of Cohen’s “rootless rage” – a sort of knee-jerk vitriol that is all heat and absolutely no light – of which occasionally I have been the subject. (Amongst Gray’s choice selection of epithets you will read that I am apparently a “squalid, grubby, tin-pot politician” and a “super-egotist”. So now you know.)

A year ago, as a witness in court and together with my Christian Peoples Alliance colleague Cllr Simeon Ademolake (a “thoughtless thug” and a “bigot” according to Gray), I declined to swear on the Bible. I simply affirmed that I would tell the truth, as is my right. Amazingly, Gray smelt a rat. According to him this was headline news. He reckoned that as a Christian I ought to swear on the Holy Book. “Something stinks,” he opined.

Don’t just talk about the Bible, John, open it. When teaching about oath-taking, Jesus said “Do not swear at all… Let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’ and your ‘No’ be ‘No’” (Matt 5:33-37). There were no rats. Nothing stank. In court that day Simeon and I were simply following Christ’s commands.

And now in a recent (8 September) post, Gray has indeed opened the Bible – metaphorically at least. Like an untaught Christian fundamentalist (and prompted unwittingly by Catholic radio commentator Clifford Longley) he cherry-picks a Bible verse (Matt 22:21) to back up his view that I ought to keep my opinions to the pulpit.

No chance.

Back from a family holiday in blistering sunny Spain last night to find that the UK has just completed the most sunless August since records began.

But also to find that the world has changed significantly while I’ve been away: Team GB has won an unimaginable 19 golds in Beijing, and a little Russian escapade in Georgia has finally nailed the post-Berlin Wall nonsense that we live in a unipolar world of a single super-power, the USA, that can unilaterally police the globe – supposedly on behalf of all of us.

A camp-site in Catalonia is not the best place for a ringside seat at such seismic events, as the occasional international version of The Guardian together with irregular access to the TV set in the poolside bar hardly sufficed to keep us abreast of world developments. But I did manage to see some of the Olympic action and – along with others – my jaw dropped as we won medal after medal (47 in all) and came 4th in the table. I mean, Brits simply don’t do sporting success. Ever since left-wing local authorities sold off schools’ sports facilities in the 70s/80s, we’ve flunked it on the international sporting scene. Our single gold in Atlanta in 1996 (Steve Redgrave of course) said it all.

But there’s a more serious point to be made about China and their impressive Olympic Games. With its human rights abuses, one-child policy and crackdown in Tibet, the Beijing government leaves a lot to be desired. But it has self-consciously announced its emergence onto the world stage as a 21st century superpower with an entertaining peaceful event that has amazed us all, and leaves London (and my own east London Olympic Host borough, Newham) a mountain to climb to match it in 2012.

Not so the pirate Putin, who paraded Moscow’s new-found oil-fuelled virility by sending his tanks into little Georgia who wants to join NATO and the West. “Russia is back,” was Putin’s blunt message, “and the world and the West had better take notice.” The parallels with Cold War Moscow and the Russian military occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 are striking.

Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of Moscow’s current case, the contrast between the Russian and Chinese approaches could hardly be greater. Suddenly there are two new kids on the block; in fact one of them is simply returning to his old haunt with a sore head and a knife.

All of which poses a headache for the incoming US President.  The relative superpower status of the USA has diminished, is diminishing and will continue to diminish, and Bush’s successor will have to adjust American policy to these new realities.

Can we be confident McCain or Obama will do so? The temptation to return to the escapism of my sunny Spanish camp-site cannot be attributed solely to the awful English weather.