Letter from our Minister, Rev Mike Shrubsole

Dear Friends
February 12th, 2009 was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Ever since then Darwin and his theory of evolution has been a cause of much division between atheistic scientists and fundamentalist Christians. But Darwin himself strove to make his theory something that religious people could accept. He was accused of being an atheist, and of spreading thoughts that which were directly opposed to Christian doctrine, but Darwin did not bother to challenge these statements publicly; he disliked public confrontation, and felt that his writings should speak for themselves.

Darwin was born in 19th century England as a member of a wealthy Anglican family, and his wife Emma was an extremely religious woman even for that time, when the average person was much more religious than most of us are today. Darwin was constantly nervous about offending her religious sensibilities with his scientific work.

Darwin was not regarded as being very serious in his religious faith. He attended church sporadically, but was very charitable in his giving. He had several close personal friends who were members of the clergy, His own personal religious odyssey is a story of someone who was a biblical literalist when he began, and had what we would call a serious crisis of faith following the childhood death of his favourite daughter, despite several valiant attempts to save her from illness. Darwin always wondered how a benevolent God could have allowed that death to occur. None of this, however, changes the fact that, in his written work, Darwin took great pains to be sure that his theory of evolution by means of natural selection could be acceptable to those who believe in a Supreme Being.

When Darwin was a young man, he was religious in an orthodox sense. In his autobiography, he writes “Whilst on board the Beagle … I remember being laughed at by several of the officers … for quoting the Bible as unanswerable authority in some point of morality.” He gradually changed to a more open-minded position, but he never gave up a belief in some sort of Supreme Being. He writes in a letter from late in his life that, “In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.” He held a position that was somewhat unusual for his era, but it would not be regarded as such today.

Finally, here are the words that Darwin uses to close ‘The Origin’: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Having heard his own words, it seems hard to understand why extremists on both sides of the debate, both atheistic scientists and religious fundamentalists, are fighting so virulently, when the author of the theory himself did not see the need to clash – his theory makes room for all. I wonder - are you joining in the celebrations, or are you joining in the condemnation?


Mike

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