“Christians believe that God created the world. Charles Darwin gave the first successful scientific account of one important part of God’s creation: how life developed from the simplest of forms into the extraordinary variety that we see around us,” said the Rev Dr Philip Luscombe, Principal of Wesley House, Cambridge, and President of the Cambridge Theological Federation.
“In doing so, Darwin ruled out some of the ways in which many had assumed that God worked. But as he himself was clear, nothing that he wrote affected the majesty of God in creation.”
The Rev Jenny Ellis, Spirituality and Discipleship Officer at the Methodist Church, said that Darwin’s scientific theory of the mechanics of creation allowed people to appreciate the “faith truth” of the biblical stories and the “precious value and giftedness of God-inspired creation”.
“The stories convey the sense of the wonder and goodness of creation; of the creative, divine Spirit who brings it into being and sustains it; of creation’s deep inter-connectedness, its rhythm and balance,” she said.
Dr Luscombe said that Darwin’s work revealed the power of the theory of evolution through natural selection and paved the way for modern science.
“The human genome project is only the latest example of research which is ultimately inspired by Darwin. All modern biological science relies on the foundation Darwin provided,” he said.
Their comments come as prominent scientists and leading religious figures published a letter in The Daily Telegraph calling for an end to the fight over Darwin's theory.
"Evolution, we believe, has become caught in the crossfire of a religious battle in which Darwin himself had little personal interest," wrote the signatories, which included two Church of England bishops, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain and a member of the Evangelical Alliance.
"We respectfully encourage those who reject evolution to weigh the now overwhelming evidence, hugely strengthened by recent advances in genetics, which testifies to the theory's validity," the letter stated. "At the same time, we respectfully ask those contemporary Darwinians who seem intent on using Darwin's theory as a vehicle for promoting an anti-theistic agenda to desist from doing so as they are, albeit unintentionally, turning people away from the theory."
