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.

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.

Moreover it could be that God may express his purposes through the changes we know as theory of the evolution. In which case Darwin's discoveries do nothing to diminish the fervour of the believer. His son Francis noted that the American botanist Asa Gray, an evangelical and friend of Darwin, observed that if the beautifully illustrated orchid book ‘had appeared before the Origin, the author would have been canonised rather than anathematised by the natural theologians.’

For me the Bible is the Word of God, but one that needs interpretation and exploration. It is not good enough of our opponents to contrast Genesis One and Darwin’s theories to pillory Christian faith as ridiculous. Nor is it a solution to retreat into a creationism, typified by groups in the United States, which demonise scientists whose whole desire is to explore the amazing world. Curiously so many scientists, botanists and cosmologists are themselves committed Christians. This then is not science (or Darwin) versus Christianity, but the one learning from and informed by the other.

Of course there are the secularists who seek to sweep away Christian faith as hopeful notions of deluded people. One such attempt is made this month by adverts on London busses – ‘Don’t worry, there probably isn’t a God’. Frankly I am not worried, there is a God and any seeker can come any Sunday morning to United to find him in the joyful peace and exuberant grace of our worship! In this battle thoughtful Christians will always have the last laugh!  

Howard