There will be no escaping Darwin and his legacy in 2009. Articles, books, exhibitions and programmes on TV and radio will be devoted to him and his writing. It is the 200th anniversary of his birth and the 150th of the publication of the origin of the Species. Clearly a fuss should be made, he was one of the intellectual giants of the 19thcentury with meticulous research, original insight and his book was and remains controversial.

We must make sure that we do not allow the atheist to hijack Darwin as their prophet nor simply espouse the secularist view that Darwin debunked the Bible. Notice the bus adverts in London – ‘There is probably no God’, which I predict to be just the beginning of a campaign to seek to consign Christian faith to the shedder. Darwin will not fit the atheist mould that Dawkins and co would wish on him. He made few pronouncements about religion, and remained agnostic though he had many questions about faith.

Having left medical school in Edinburgh, Darwin went to Cambridge to study for the Anglican ministry in 1828. He read much theology and some of his notes are still in the Cambridge Library and show that at that time he completely believed in the historical reliability of the New Testament. His main interest in Cambridge however was natural history. He learnt much from Prof. John Henslow, a botanist and Anglican cleric, and wanted to study theology under him. Henslow was very orthodox and completely accepted the Thirty Nine Articles. He thought then the Earth was millions of years old and like most of his day saw no conflict with his faith. Just before he left on the Beagle, Darwin went round North Wales with the Revd Prof Adam Sedgwick of Cambridge to study the geology of Wales. In 1831, Darwin was planning to be ordained. All the evidence from his early life points to his being an orthodox believer. Indeed his purpose in setting out to explore the world onboard the Beagle was to understand the world that God had made.