When I was an undergraduate reading English at Cambridge, I was introduced to Enoch Powell at a dinner. "What do you begin with in English nowadays?" he asked me. "Gawain," I replied, abbreviating the title of the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Enoch's famously piercing eyes flashed. "Darwin? Darwin!" he exclaimed, and I could see his brilliant mind wildly theorising about what he thought I had just told him. In the press of people, I did not have the chance to explain that he had misheard me.

It was a very Cambridge mistake. When he studied at Christ's College, Cambridge, Charles Darwin occupied the rooms that had once belonged to William Paley, the chief exponent of proving the existence of God from biological design. Darwin's voyage of the Beagle to South America furnished him with his physical materials, but much of his voyage of intellectual discovery went up and down the banks of the Cam. There would be a sort of mad logic in making Darwin the starting-point of a Cambridge course.

For many people, Darwin "disproved" the existence of God. On Sunday night on BBC1, Sir David Attenborough, who is our consummate wildlife broadcaster, but no theologian, asserted that Darwin had refuted the creation account of Genesis: man was "not apart from the natural world. We do not have dominion over it." In fact, Genesis does not say that man is apart from the natural world, and the dominion which it describes is expressed as a stewardship, not as a plundering; but Sir David was putting the common and – currently – aggressive view that Darwin killed religious mumbo-jumbo for ever.

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