Oldest children tend to be anal types. I know because I am one. A parent or a teacher holds up a hoop and says “jump,” and we are already in crouched position ready to spring. We follow the rules, we do as we are told, we strive for success, and by and large we don’t do too badly at all. Although it is a lifelong business I am afraid, with editors of university presses taking over the role of parent or teacher. Three years ago, my very nice editor at Cambridge University Press bought me lunch and told me that she wanted an encyclopedia on Darwin, and here I have spent the summer and now into the fall searching everywhere for over three hundred images on which I can get copyright permission.

Children lower down the birth order have different characteristics, generally making them not inclined to obey or fit in. According to the historian Frank Sulloway, the lower-birth-order types, like Charles Darwin, are more creative. No prizes for guessing where Frank comes in his family! I am not sure about all of the implications that he wants to draw, including the somewhat surprising claim that the Protestant Reformation is all a matter of who was born first. I would have thought that distance from Rome might have something to do with it, not to mention the corruption of the medieval church.

But there is no question that down the birth order you do find more rebellion. A point being illustrated at the moment by the Behe family. The paterfamilias, for those who have spent the last 20 years on Mars, is Michael Behe, biochemist at Lehigh University and leader of the Intelligent Design Movement. His Darwin’s Black Box did for the movement what Richard Dawkins’s Selfish Gene did for sociobiology. Attractively written, with striking examples, it argues that blind law is inadequate to explain the living world and its origins, and we must therefore suppose that intelligence was at work (and probably still is).

Interestingly, given that the Creationist movement—and I refer to Intelligent Design Theory as “Creationism Lite”—tends to be strongly evangelical Protestant, Behe is a Roman Catholic. But what he might lose in doctrinal orthodoxy he makes up for in spiritual fervor—I remember once asking him how many kids he had and he replied “so far only eight,” and he wasn’t joking. Family rosary every night and all that sort of thing.

And now a thunderbolt has struck. One of the middle-range kids, Leo, got hold of a copy of The God Delusion and now declares himself, in an interview with the Humanist no less, an atheist! There are all sorts of reactions that one might have to this news, so let me say straight off that—somewhat to my surprise—even though I have spent the last thirty-plus years fighting Creationists, including Behe, I don’t find myself much inclined to do victory laps. I don’t think that this is because I have gone soft on the ideas because I want to say unambiguously that I am glad that the lad has seen the light, and gone from something I regard to be an insult to both science and religion to a position that I hold myself because I think it right. So let there be no argument about that.

Three immediate reactions I do have. First, Leo Behe admits that his new thinking has caused a lot of family stress and unhappiness. “I have, for the most part, stopped talking to my parents, and I am not allowed to speak to my little brothers at all.” I ask, why is it that religion seems always to do this? Jesus Christ preached love and sympathy and caring, and yet religion seems so often to divide families, and groups, and nations. I wonder, is this something in human nature that would happen whatever we thought, or does religion actually play an active role? Or could one make an argument that these things are inevitable, and that they would be worse without religion? The Nazis did dreadful things to the Jews without the need to invoke the name of Jesus.

Second, I note that it was the God Delusion that converted—if that is the right word—Behe Junior. I still think that judged as scholarship the God Delusion is appalling, and not just because it is sneeringly rude about me. It is a rotten book. But it is clearly a powerful book—Dawkins is a brilliant polemicist—and perhaps that is what is really needed in these sorts of debates. Or does a reasoned work, like David Hume on natural theology, really count for much more in the long run?

Third, Leo Behe argues with clarity and a certain style. He was homeschooled. Frankly, homeschooling seems to me to be the equivalent of bashing your head against a brick wall from nine on Monday until five on Friday. I cannot think of anything as parent or child that I would want less. But in the case of young Behe, it seems to have worked. He does come across as a very well-educated young man. I am not surprised. Although I disagree down the line with the conclusions of Darwin’s Black Box, with his gift for analogy and example, Michael Behe always struck me as a brilliant teacher.

Perhaps in the end that is what it is all about. Good teachers pass on ideas and skills. They are repaid a thousand times when their pupils take these up and use them to move on in directions they themselves could never take.