麻豆社

Good morning. It was on this day in 1844 that Charles Darwin wrote probably his most famous letter, to his best friend Joseph Hooker, in which he began, tentatively, to explain his ideas about natural selection. 鈥淚t鈥檚 like confessing to a murder鈥� Darwin wrote. And for many in the coming decades, the victim of this murder was none other than the Almighty himself.

Sixteen years later, Hooker was also there at that famous debate between Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley that set the tone of the Victorian debate about science and religion. The bishop asked Huxley if he was descended from an ape on his mother or his father鈥檚 side. Huxley, like many of his scientific friends, developed a visceral dislike of the Church of England and of its unwarranted sense of intellectual privilege.

But I wonder if things are slowly changing, that one of the unexpected consequences of the last few years - both because of Covid and the Climate Emergency - is that science and religion are creeping towards a more nuanced relationship. 鈥淚t is high time to forget the phoney war between faith and science鈥� wrote the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams in the Guardian over weekend. And he is right.

For one thing, the climate emergency requires us all to pull together. There are nearly 8 billion people who call this earth their home, the overwhelming majority have some sort of faith: 2.3 billion Christians, nearly 2 billion Muslims, over a billion Hindus and so on. Globally, faith is growing 鈥� and it remains one of the most effective delivery mechanisms for our ethical values. This means that the acrimony between science and religion is a very dangerous distraction from the existential challenge of our generation.

And the truth is, Darwin鈥檚 confession to a murder was always a tad overdramatic. God survived. There will always be people who look out of their window and reach for the language of creation to describe what they see. And there will always be those who use the more sober language of natural science. I tend to think of both perspectives as two very different aspects of human experience, equally important.

Others will disagree, of course. But nonetheless, what seems to have been happening over the last few years is that, more and more, people of faith and people of science have been lining up alongside each other, shoulder to shoulder, both concerned with the same thing 鈥� out there on the same demonstrations, calling for the same action to be taken.

Of course, we all always approach the climate emergency with a wide variety of different ways to describe our ultimate values. But the one thing that binds us together, especially now, is that 鈥� whether you measure it, or pray for it, or both - we are all talking about the same world.

That tired old argument is a luxury we can no longer afford. Now is the time for a reset of the relationship. And just perhaps, it is happening already.

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