Do little people go to heaven?

When they showed on television the cave on the island of Flores where the remains of little people had been found, I felt, I admit, a Yeatsian frisson that the world of politics cannot give. It was not delight at a new branch on the hat-stand of anthropoid evolution, but the thought that in the thick Indonesian rainforest there were (or had been, perhaps as recently as the time when dodos lived) creatures with whom we could converse, but which were not men.

The appetite for talking to other creatures is amply exemplified by our often exasperated one-sided conversations: ‘Get off the bloody table, Tigger, there’s a good cat.’ The very existence of pets as a sort of imaginary friend shows how reluctant humans are to be alone among the frightening emptinesses of Paschalian space. The exciting news was that the folk tales of green men, little people, wood-dwellers, might be based on fact.

But don’t these new creatures in Flores, so gratingly christened hobbits, prove that the Bible is rubbish, Darwin is right and everything can be explained by evolution? Well, for so-called fundamentalists, the difficulties of keeping to the sentence-by-sentence literal truth of the biblical account of the Creation should not be much greater than they already are, even if a delegation of Flores hobbits arrived in Downing Street demanding equal rights and bus passes.

For mainstream Christians, Darwin was never much of a problem anyway. He was only thought to be so by those who presumed he had somehow either: 1) proved the Bible wasn’t true, or 2) proved that men had no immortal souls. He had proved neither.

Genesis was chewed over, about 1,800 years ago, by the clever Christian thinker Origen. ‘What reasonable man would think that the first, second and third day — and the evening and the morning — existed without a sun, moon and stars?’ he asked.