Comment (April 2009)

Bishop’s Letter

with Bishop Paul Richardson

This year looks set to be the Year of Darwin. We celebrated the 200th anniversary of his birth in February and are due to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the publication of his great work, The Origin of Species in November.

Darwin has become the pin-up of the New Atheists, a group of vigorous polemicists led by Richard Dawkins who are convinced that there is a clash between religion and science and that all forms of religious belief are irrational and lead to conflict.

As Nick Spencer shows in his short study, Darwin and God, Darwin himself was far from being a crusading anti-Christian. He began life as a conventional ‘broad church’ Anglican whose family had been influenced by Unitarianism. He was not especially devout and his faith rested more on vague philosophical speculation than any strong spiritual feeling. What seems to have particularly challenged his belief in God was the death of three of his children, particularly his favourite daughter. He went through no great crisis of faith and at the end it is better to describe him as an agnostic leaning towards atheism than as a straight-forward atheist.

Some Christians rejected evolution; others, like Charles Kingsley, welcomed it enthusiastically. There were scientists who accepted evolution who were also religious sceptics but one of Darwin’s strongest supporters, Asa Grey of Harvard, was a convinced Christian.

In our own time evolution has become a matter of controversy, particularly in the US, for a number of reasons that are not always widely appreciated outside America. Opponents of evolution have been able to tap into the widespread American suspicion of elites, particularly intellectual elites based in East Coast universities. In the 1960s the Supreme Court banned prayer and bible reading from the public (ie government ) schools on the grounds of the separation of church and state. Banning evolution or introducing the teaching of Intelligent Design is a way for Christian parents to fight back.

In other words, the teaching of science has fallen victim to America’s culture wars.

Unfortunately there are signs that hostility to evolution is beginning to catch on in this country. Many Moslems and a number of Christian groups are opposed to it. Believers should think carefully before they choose to adopt this approach. There is always danger in letting opponents of religious belief decide the terms of the debate. Intelligent Design falls into this trap when it tries to find gaps in the evolutionary process that only God can fill. Many biologists, who are themselves Christians like Professor Denis Alexander, deny that these gaps exist. But even if there are gaps at present, it is likely that scientists will be able to explain them in due course.

Theologians are suspicious of the ‘God of the gaps’ approach, not only because they know that such gaps disappear as scientific knowledge increases, but also because they want to emphasise that God is at work through the whole process of evolution and not just in gaps that are still a puzzle. Scientists are always the best placed people to answer the ‘how’ questions, but when these are have been addressed there are still the ‘why’ questions that scientists as scientists are not equipped to answer.

Why, for example, are we able to make sense of the world around us and trust our cognitive faculties? If thinking is no more than a series of chemical reactions in the brain, why should we rely on it? Or, if the human brain has evolved only to enable us to survive, why should we assume this means it can also enable us to solve complex mathematical problems? Darwin once wrote that he could not put much faith in the intuitions of the human mind, and yet there seems ample evidence that intuitions as well as careful examination of the evidence have played their part in the advancement of science.