A row over the teaching of creationism has scientists up in arms.

SCIENTISTS are not happy. Last week it was revealed that 36 of them - including Richard Dawkins, author of the best-selling book The Selfish Gene - had written to the government and to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority expressing their alarm that "creationism" was being taught in schools.

The row first flared up earlier this month when leading scientists asked Ofsted, the English schools inspectorate, to re-inspect a Gateshead faith school secondary after it was accused of teaching the biblical story of the Creation as a literal truth. Their anxiety illustrates in a more benign context the problem of fundamentalism which is also at the root of current international violence.

Fundamentalism may arise from either fear or arrogance or both and is not limited to religions. Within scientific and pluralist cultures it seems principally to arise from fear. Science has been so successful in constructing plausible models of physical process and at describing the regularities that underpin technologies, that it has destroyed many older methods of understanding the universe, and has occupied the commanding heights of philosophy. This pre-eminence has often been seen by religious believers as a threat to their cherished convictions, their sacred traditions and their authority. At the point where such a threat is felt most keenly, the naivety of unquestioning faith can turn into the rigid fundamentalism of faith that has been questioned but finds itself unable to reply.

Take the Church's first responses to Darwin's theory. Initially there was panic and a sense of sacrilege. But within a fairly short time, even in the face of official church denunciations, many Christians had adapted their view of God's creative work to include the processes described by Darwin. Tennyson's great poem In Memoriam functioned as a text for such believers:

And what I am beheld again What is, and no man understands And out of darkness came those hands that reach through nature, moulding men.

At the same time, of course, there were those who absolutised the Biblical tradition, and refused to submit it to any re-examination.

Creationism is a curious hybrid: a fundamentalism that drapes itself in the clothes of science. It is not simply an unquestioning belief in the biblical account of creation: it is also an attempt to support this view by quasi-scientific methods. So even as creationism vilifies the conclusions of most scientists, it pays unwitting tribute to the power of science by seeming to adopt its procedures.

Those who, like me, have had to read creationist texts will have noticed the strange combination of presentational sophistication and philosophical gobbledegook. Creationism misinterprets the book of Genesis (the Bible is theology, not science), undervalues faith (faith can live with uncertainties) and overvalues science (science does not claim absolute truth for all its findings). This last misapprehension leads creationists to point out with glee the gaps in Darwinian theory, imagining that by so doing they have disproved it. Creationism is a rag-bag of bad religion and poor science, a piece of inept spin doctoring in the face of close scrutiny. I am not surprised that our own master of pious ineptitude, Tony Blair, has leapt to the defence of the school that is teaching it. It is also an import from the United States, where it is the preferred religious option of right-wing politicians because its literal adherence to the Old Testament upholds the values of intolerance, homophobia, ethnic cleansing and the blessings of wealth. It should not be taught in our schools except as an example of mental parochialism and paranoia.

The problem is that, like many cults, creationism gains a teensy- weensy bit of credibility from the arrogant fundamentalism of those scientists who believe that their discoveries are absolute truths. Richard Dawkins, who will discuss his ideas and theories at the Edinburgh International Science Festival next week, seems to be in this camp. Others take the position that even if many theories require revision, the scientific method is the only way to truth. Lewis Wolpert, who has also protested about the teaching of creationism, is in this camp. Dawkins's position is too ridiculous to attack; clearly many scientific theories have been falsified, and many more will be. Those whose scientific fundamentalism is of the latter sort seem to have a better case.

But one can value the results of scientific inquiry without demanding that all truth should be of this type. The account given by lovers of falling in love, and that given by geneticists, are surely complementary rather than mutually exclusive; both contribute to human wisdom. Fundamentalist scientists not only distort their own discipline but also provide justification for religious fundamentalists.

But if religious believers don't adopt fundamentalism, how can they retain their faith? If once they admit some of the criticisms of science, how can they avoid going down the slippery slope into the territory of Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh, where religious reality is so thin as to be virtually invisible.

In Holloway's latest book, Doubts And Loves (Canongate), even Jesus is looking pretty washed out, and God is no longer discernible.

In a pluralist culture, where there is no dominant system of thought, there is a real opportunity for people of conviction to recognise the conditional validity of other modes of thought. This is not a surrender of one's own convictions; merely a recognition that beliefs are the fruit of human effort, and not uniquely given by God or reason. Nor does this tolerance imply that anything goes. If we grant conditional validity to other convictions, we still have the task of examining them rigorously and deciding on their value. And even if we decide that they have value, we need not abandon our own.

The Dalai Lama is as convinced and convincing a Buddhist as I can imagine, yet he cheerfully advises that Christianity may be a better religion for some people than his, and is clearly not seeking to convert those who listen to him. He is unsparing towards the imperfections of all religions, including his own, but remains committed to the path of Buddhism as a way of enlightenment. He does not claim to possess the truth: he is on the way towards it.

That looks like a good way forward for the competing modes of thought and belief in an open society: to make a virtue of necessity, recognise the provisional nature of all ways of understanding, and accept, even celebrate this limitation as the nature and mystery of truth.

Religious believers like myself have had to learn respect for scientific method and its results. The discipline, beauty and sheer intelligence of Darwin's thinking have been an inspiration to me, and I have gladly attempted to see it not only as a monument of intellect but also as an insight into the ways of God in creation. That God should proceed by trial and error is a challenge to my Christian faith, which may deepen it rather than destroy it.

For if the history of creation includes wastage and suffering as well as an advance in the complexity of beings, then any God worth worshipping must be one who takes responsibility for the whole process. Such a God would have to be intimately involved in the sufferings of her creatures to the extent of abdicating separateness and accepting vulnerability. But she would also have to have means of redeeming the process from natural death and human evil so that the lives of all sentient beings could find fulfilment, or, in the human language of the Bible, so that all tears could be wiped away.

This is something like the God whom Christians worship this weekend in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The Rev Michael Mair is a minister in Dundee and the presenter of Morning Worship, 8am, today, Radio Scotland

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