Time to 'think again' on Darwin, says Church of England

The bicentenary next year of Charles Darwin's birth is a good time for the Church of England to think again about the impact of his natural selection theory on religious thinking, says the Church of England's Director of mission and Public Affairs.

The Rev Dr Malcolm Brown goes as far as to apologise for its reaction to Darwin.

"Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still. We try to practice the old virtues of 'faith seeking understanding' and hope that makes some amends," he writes in an essay published in a new special section on the Church of England's website commemorating 200 years since the naturalist's birth in 1809.

Dr Brown admits that the Church made a mistake in rejecting out of hand Darwin's theory of natural selection.

"The trouble with homo sapiens is that we're only human. People, and institutions, make mistakes and Christian people and churches are no exception," writes Dr Brown.

"When a big new idea emerges which changes the way people look at the world, it's easy to feel that every old idea, every certainty, is under attack and then to do battle against the new insights.

"The church made that mistake with Galileo's astronomy, and has since realised its error. Some church people did it again in the 1860s with Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. So it is important to think again about Darwin's impact on religious thinking, then and now - and the bicentenary of Darwin's birth in 1809 is a good time to do so."

The Church's reaction when Darwin proposed that humans had descended from apes was "misguided", Dr Brown says in his essay, 'Good religion needs good science'.

He goes on to argue that Darwin's theories do not contradict Christian teaching.

"Darwin was, in many ways, a model of good scientific method. He observed the world around him, developed a theory which sought to explain what he saw, and then set about a long and painstaking process of gathering evidence that would either bear out, contradict, or modify his theory ... There is nothing here that contradicts Christian teaching," he writes.

"Jesus himself invited people to observe the world around them and to reason from what they saw to an understanding of the nature of God (Matthew 6: 25-33)."

Dr Brown went on to state that it would be a "travesty" to the work of Darwin to treat it as "an all-embracing theory of everything", as he pointed to "insidious" forms of racism and discrimination that have been justified by the natural selection theory.

"The difficulty is that his theory of natural selection has been so effective within the scientific community, and so easily understood in outline by everybody, that it has been inflated into a general theory of everything - which is not only erroneous but dangerous," he writes.

"Christians will want to stress, instead, the human capacity for love, for altruism, and for self-sacrifice.

"There is nothing here which, in principle, contradicts Darwin's theory. Humanity has acquired the capacity to reflect, to imagine, and to reason from what is known to what is not yet known."

2009 will also mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species' in 1859.

The commemorative section on the Church of England website also includes a welcome from the Bishop of Swindon, the Rt Rev Lee Rayfield, a former biological scientist.

"Theology and science each have much to contribute in the assertion of the Psalmist that we are 'fearfully and wonderfully made'. I hope that this new section will not only provide a source of information and knowledge about Charles Darwin and his work, but that it will prove to be a resource for growing in wisdom and understanding," he said.

'Darwin and the Church' is on the web at www.cofe.anglican.org/darwin/