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Darwin v’s Bible – Survival of the fittest? |
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Written by Howard Mellor
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Tuesday, 17 February 2009 |
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Page 2 of 3 His contact with the church was not always positive. His diary mentions worship--"a stupid sermon" in Plymouth before he sailed, and a few services on board. By 1834 doubts were creeping up on him, and he told some Signoritas in a Chilean church that he was ‘a sort of a Christian’. After that, comments in his notebooks are much more skeptical. However, he did not stop believing in God or reading religious books.
Perhaps the most significant thing in his faith journey was the death, in 1851, of his ten-year old daughter Annie. Darwin lost his belief in God's love as he could not square suffering with God's love, either in this instance or in nature, which many years before Tennyson had described as ‘red in tooth and claw’. However, when in 1859 he wrote The Origin of Species, he thought the universe to be so full of wonder that it could not have occurred by Chance.
If you concede – as the majority of Christians do without trouble – that Genesis One and the scientific discovery are not at loggerheads then there is a possible meeting of ways. Genesis One expresses in beautiful poetry and theology the proposal that God brought all things into being. The word which we see in our English Bibles as ‘day’ need not be 24hours but can also be a aeon of time. How amazing that so many years before Darwin breathed his first, that the Biblical writers had the insight which makes the phases of Genesis mirror, in broad terms, the processes of evolution identified by scientists.
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