Did Darwin Kill God Page #2

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realisation through the course of time.

He tells us that,

over time, life evolves.

And many of the Church Fathers

echoed his views.

This is not to say that Augustine

knew about natural selection,

but if we were to tell him

about this today,

he would be wholly unperturbed.

When we read what the early Fathers

of the Church wrote about the Bible,

it's clear it stands at the heart of

Christianity, not as a science textbook,

but as

a communication of God's nature,

and the reason for existence.

For them,

God was not an armchair God

who sat outside of his creation

watching it unfold,

but nor was it a deity

who intervenes arbitrarily.

Rather, God was seen

as ever-present in all creation.

This was, and remains,

the view of orthodox Christianity,

a view that would be completely

compatible with Darwin's theory.

But, of course, Christians

have not always remembered this,

and over the centuries, there have

been some who read Genesis literally.

The most significant took place in the

I've returned to England, for in Westminster Abbey

lies someone who was central to this development.

The Reformation saw

some Christians reject the authority

of the Catholic Church in Rome,

embracing instead the Bible

as the ultimate source of authority.

Scripture, not the Pope,

was now their master.

The decision of Luther and Calvin

to question Papal authority

opened the floodgates for anyone

to read the Bible as they wished.

Hundreds of years

before the Reformation,

Saint Augustine had warned

against using the Bible

to deduce the exact way in which

the earth was formed, but in 1650,

one Irish archbishop did just that,

Archbishop James Ussher.

Ussher believed the Bible held the

information as to how the world began.

He worked like a detective...

unravelling all the clues

that were hidden in the Bible.

He noted down

every date that was mentioned,

and he calculated all the periods of

time covered in the numerous genealogies.

Taking this information

into account,

Ussher was able to determine the

exact moment God created the earth.

It was on the evening

of the 22nd of October, 4004 BC.

Ussher's calculation would have remained, at

best, an interesting, if eccentric, speculation

were it not for the fact that it made it

into every page of the King James Bible,

the most widely read edition

of the Bible for the next 300 years.

But, despite this,

traditional Christianity prevailed.

The book of Genesis

was not to be read literally.

And by the time

we get to the 19th century,

Victorian Christians were unearthing

evidence which would stop them

from making the same mistake

as Ussher.

In the first half of the 19th century,

every fashionable member of society

would have had a souvenir that directly

contradicted the biblical age of earth -

a fossil.

Advances in the understanding of

fossils and the formation of rocks

led geologists to propose that the earth was

formed over a series of millions of years.

It was unquestionably much older

than the age suggested by Ussher.

And there was another discovery which flew

in the face of a literal reading of Genesis.

It destroyed the idea that God had

made all the creatures on the same day.

Victorian scientists were

unearthing the fossils of dinosaurs,

millions of years older

than the oldest-known human remains.

And what did the Church

think of this?

It could hardly oppose it,

as the geologists who were proposing these ideas

were Anglican clergymen. They were men of God.

For most of the 19th century,

science was almost

a branch of religion, with Anglican clerics

holding the top jobs at Oxford and Cambridge.

I've arranged to meet historian

Pietro Corsi to understand

the relationship between religion

and science in the 19th century.

By the time of Darwin's

Origin of Species,

only a minority

of Anglican ministers believed

the earth was

as the Bible described it.

Those who were interested in geology

accepted geology as a science and

were not worried about the question,

"How old was the earth?" They simply

accepted that it must have been pretty old.

So people who believe

that the Bible

had a precise description of the earth, by

that time, belong almost to the lunatic fringe.

In November of 1859,

Victorian Britain was confronted

with the Origin of Species,

Charles Darwin's masterpiece.

All life on earth had evolved

over billions of years,

through variation and selection,

from a common ancestor.

And that included mankind.

WOLF HOWLS:

The story we have been told

is that this shattered Christianity,

wrecking the belief

that God created life in six days.

History tells us that this is

the moment that Darwin killed God.

But I find this strange, because,

as we have already discovered,

traditional Christianity had no reason

to be threatened by Darwin's ideas,

and Victorian Christians already had a

sophisticated understanding of the earth's formation.

So where did it all go wrong?

Something had happened to

Christianity in Victorian England.

Some Christians had broken away

from the traditional view

of God and creation.

It was a very English development,

confined to these islands,

and peculiar to Anglicanism.

Britain was in the midst

of the Industrial Revolution,

forging a brave new world

of design and engineering.

Into this society, a completely

new idea of God gained popularity,

presenting God as the great

mechanic, the ultimate designer.

Its leading proponent

was William Paley,

a theologian who compared the intricate nature

of life to the inner workings of a watch.

He argued that life was so complex, each

creature must have been individually designed.

TRAIN WHISTLES:

Darwin's evidence

blew this idea out of the water,

and caused outrage amongst those

who embraced this view.

How dare they be compared to apes?

It was these Christians who were shocked and

disgusted by the implications of Darwin's idea.

His theory did kill God -

but only Paley's God,

which was at odds with the teachings

of the founding Fathers of the Church.

As for Europe, Darwin's theory

made no theological fuss.

It was very much a storm

in an English teacup.

But even in Britain, there were plenty of

Christians who welcomed the idea of evolution.

Nine years after Darwin published, the

Roman-Catholic Cardinal John Henry Newman said,

"Darwinism, true or not,

is not necessarily atheistic.

"On the contrary, it may be suggesting a

larger idea of divine providence and skill. "

Even the Anglican hierarchy agreed.

The Reverend Charles Kingsley affirmed that evolution

revealed, "A noble conception of the Deity. "

What of Darwin? For many,

he's the father of atheism -

born a Christian, has a theory

of evolution, loses his faith -

proof, surely, that evolution

destroys belief in God? No.

Darwin was born a Christian, and lost

his faith, but not because of evolution.

In 1851,

Darwin was hit by personal tragedy.

His ten-year-old daughter Annie was struck

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