Ape relations

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 584.

At the time of writing his great work, Darwin himself believed in God, writing about a creator who imposed laws on matter and breathed life into nature.

"There is grandeur in this view of life," Darwin concluded, and many have subsequently agreed.

Today there are high-profile evolutionists who combine their science with religious faith.

Kenneth Miller is a Roman Catholic biologist who campaigns against the latest form of creationism to take hold in parts of America, Intelligent Design. The former head of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins, combines Protestant belief with his work as a geneticist (and with a much less successful sideline as a religious folk-singer, which can be sampled on YouTube).

Near Darwin's grave in Westminster Abbey is that of another god of science, Sir Isaac Newton, who held the Lucasian Professorship of mathematics at Cambridge three centuries before Stephen Hawking.

We can guess what Newton would have thought of the theological conclusions of his successor. Atheism, Newton wrote, is "senseless and odious". For his own part, Newton was certain that the order of the cosmos revealed a God who was "very skilled in mechanics and geometry", a God who rather resembled Newton himself.