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Celebrating Darwin
Thursday 5 March 2009
Here is a copy of a piece I wrote for our village magazine here in mid-Devon:
I don’t expect it has escaped your notice that this year marks Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book the Origin of Species. The Methodist Church has welcomed the celebrations surrounding his achievements. Church leaders have praised Darwin´s ground-breaking work on common descent and evolution by natural selection which sparked a revolution in the biological sciences that has continued to this day.
You have probably seen Richard Dawkins on television proclaiming the message that Darwinism equals atheism. Actually Charles Darwin was always as reticent about pronouncing on ultimate questions about the existence of God as he was about the origins of life. Even in late editions of his book, Darwin said that he could ‘see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone’.
Charles Kingsley, the novelist and clergyman who went on to become Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, was delighted with the Origin of Species and told his friend Darwin that the theory of natural selection provided ‘just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that he created primal forms capable of self-development… as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which He Himself had made’. Darwin gladly reproduced Kingsley’s words in successive editions of his book.
We don’t have to choose between the Bible and contemporary biology, cosmology or astrophysics. The Bible was never intended by God to be a scientific textbook. I think that Genesis 1 is a highly stylised and beautiful piece of writing more like poetry than a text book. Both accounts of creation (scientific and poetic) are true, but they are given from different perspectives and are complementary one to another.
What God has created he sustains. He is immanent in his world, continuously upholding, animating and ordering all things. The breath of living creatures is in his hand. He causes the sun to shine and the rain to fall. He feeds the birds and clothes the flowers. It is poetry but it is true. That should give us cause to rejoice.
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