Articles - From the Vicar

Dear Friends

As I write this on the day marking 200 years since the birth of Charles Darwin I would like to share some thoughts about how we relate our faith to science. Darwin was born into a world in which faith and science co-existed without vast, bitter and inevitable conflicts. Certainly new scientific discoveries forced people to reassess some things. For example, the emerging science of geology had blown apart the widely held view that the world had been created around 4000BC. However, many Christians (since Augustine onwards) had been arguing that the six days of creation should not be taken literally or seen as a "scientific" account. The new insights of geology challenged many people to look again at what the Genesis accounts of creation were really about. Some were able to do this; others tried to hold on to their views in spite of the geology. But it did not mean a "war" between faith and science. Indeed, when Darwin was born perhaps a majority of scientists were actually clergymen.

The publication of "Origin of the Species" certainly caused great debate. Many of those who criticised it - both believers and non-believers - did so on purely scientific grounds. Equally, among those who accepted it quickly were both believers and non-believers. The possibility of evolution had been around for quite some time and was not in itself that difficult for most people to embrace. What many religious people did baulk at though was the evolution of human beings from earlier life forms. There was a desire to keep the idea that humans had been specially created by God. For many it seemed that only in this way could the status of human beings as "made in the image of God" be defended. As evolution has been more and more confirmed by scientific discoveries (especially in the field of genetics) Christians and Jews have had to rethink what it means to be made in God's image. Faith and science have not stayed in watertight compartments and science has impacted on the way we think about our faith. But there is not, and has never been, a simplistic war between science and faith.

Sadly, since the time of Darwin some scientists have tried to argue that there is such a war. That battle cry has been taken up in our own day by Richard Dawkins and others. Very unfortunately, creationists man the barricades from the opposite direction, giving substance to the "war" thesis. Meanwhile those of us in the middle rejoice in what science has unravelled of the mysteries of the physical universe. We may have to do some hard thinking about our faith at times, but then God gave us brains (even if he gave us them over a period of millions of years of evolution). Surely we are meant to use them to understand his creation and to think about our faith. The astronomer Kepler is reputed to have said that the task of science "is to think God's thoughts after him". How could there be a conflict between that and walking the path of faith?

With best wishes
David

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