Rediscovering Darwin with the help of the church

While MSNBC greets Darwin's bicentenary with trivia, the Church of England has created the enlightening and equally entertaining On the origin of Darwin Web site.

At the very introduction we learn of the man himself:

What is extraordinary is that Darwin was surrounded by the influence of the Church his entire life. Having attended one of the best Church of England boarding schools in the country in Shrewsbury, he trained to be a clergyman in Cambridge; was inspired to follow his calling into science by another clergyman who lived and breathed botany; and married into a staunch Anglican family (see the section Darwin and the Church).

There is no room in this collection for creationist chicanery. Instead, there is sound perspective. In his essay "Good religion needs good science," Rev Dr Malcolm Brown writes:

But whilst it is not difficult to see why evolutionary thinking was offensive at the time, on reflection it is not such an earth-shattering idea. Yes, Christians believe that God became incarnate as a human being in the person of Jesus and thereby demonstrated God’s especial love for humanity. But how can that special relationship be undermined just because we develop a different understanding of the processes by which humanity came to be? 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.

Taking some care to dispose of one of the misapplication of Darwin to brutal social theories, Brown further writes:

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.

This attempt to understand the science and its meaning without replacing it with arbitrary pseudotheories is valuable in itself and as a contrast with the endless attempts in this country to inject religious instruction into science classes.