Creationism, an issue that has triggered furious debates in churches, schools and even courts in the United States, rejects Charles Darwin´s theory of evolution and holds that God created the universe and all that goes with it — most of all, man — in six days.

Darwin was one of the early leading lights in Britain´s august Royal Society of science, among whose most eminent present-day members is the Rev. Michael Reiss, its director of education — and now himself one of its most controversial.

Mr. Reiss has truly stirred the pot — and the fury of his fellow scientists — by proposing that creationism has the right to a place in school ...