The Church of England has marked the Darwin bicentenary by launching a new website about the great scientist. (Thanks to Ruth Gledhill for the link.) The front page links to several articles about Darwin. One of them shows how he began his life as a good Anglican. Another charts in his own words his loss of Christian faith:

disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete.

Yet another page shows how despite this he remained an active member of his village church in Downe, Kent.

The most interesting article on this site is Good religion needs good science, by Rev Dr Malcolm Brown, Director of Mission and Public Affairs of the Church of England. Brown seems to accept that Darwin’s description of evolution was good science, but is rightly concerned about the philosophcal “Darwinism” which has been built up around it. The whole essay is all worth reading and cannot be summarised briefly, but here is a taster:

It is hard to avoid the thought that the reaction against Darwin was largely based on what we would now call the ‘yuk factor’ (an emotional not an intellectual response) when he proposed a lineage from apes to humans.

But for all that the reaction now seems misjudged, it may just be that Wilberforce and others glimpsed a murky image of how Darwin’s theories might be misappropriated and the harm they could do …

Natural selection, as a way of understanding physical evolutionary processes over thousands of years, makes sense. Translate that into a half-understood notion of ‘the survival of the fittest’ and imagine the processes working on a day-to-day basis, and evolution gets mixed up with a social theory in which the weak perish – the very opposite of the Christian vision in the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55). This ‘Social Darwinism’, in which the strong flourish and losers go to the wall is, moreover, the complete converse of what Darwin himself believed about human relationships. From this social misapplication of Darwin’s theories has sprung insidious forms of racism and other forms of discrimination which are more horribly potent for having the appearance of scientific “truth” behind them. …

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. … But the point of natural selection is that it is precisely by being most fully human that we demonstrate our fitness. And being fully human means refusing to abdicate our ability to act selflessly or lovingly and to challenge thin concepts of rationality which equate “being rational” to material self interest. …

The problem for all Christians is discerning where the surrounding culture is really a threat and where it is compatible with our understanding of God. …

Brown ends with these interesting words of apology:

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. But the struggle for your reputation is not over yet, and the problem is not just your religious opponents but those who falsely claim you in support of their own interests. Good religion needs to work constructively with good science – and I dare to suggest that the opposite may be true as well.