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Scientists and religious leaders call for end to fighting over Darwin's legacy

Scientists and religious leaders call for end to fighting over Darwin's legacy

Prominent scientists and leading religious figures have joined forces to call for an end to the fighting over Charles Darwin's legacy.

Ahead of the 200th anniversary of the pioneering naturalist's birth on Thursday, they warn that militant atheists are turning people away from evolution by using it as a weapon with which to attack religion.

However, in a letter published in The Daily Telegraph, they also urge believers in creationism to acknowledge the overwhelming body of evidence that now exists to back up Darwin's theory of how life on Earth has developed.

It comes after a survey of 2,000 people conducted by Theos, the religion think tank, found that half believe the theory of evolution cannot explain the complexity of the natural world. One in three said they thought God created the Earth within the past 10,000 years.

The influential signatories of the letter include two Church of England bishops, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain and a member of the Evangelical Alliance, as well as Professor Lord Winston, the fertility pioneer, and Professor Sir Martin Evans, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

To read this article in full, click here.

The full letter is below:

Darwin ceasefire

SIR – The 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, one of Britain’s most brilliant scientists, falls on Thursday.

We are concerned that, according to recent research by ComRes for the public theology think tank Theos, only 37 per cent of people in the United Kingdom believe that Darwin’s theory of evolution is (to quote the question used in this survey of more than 2,000 respondents) “so well established that it’s beyond reasonable doubt”.

Evolution, we believe, has become caught in the crossfire of a religious battle in which Darwin had little interest. Despite his own loss of Christian faith, he wrote shortly before his death: “It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist.”

We respectfully encourage those who reject evolution to weigh the now overwhelming evidence, hugely strengthened by recent advances in genetics, which testifies to the theory’s validity.

At the same time, we respectfully ask those contemporary Darwinians who seem intent on using Darwin’s theory as a vehicle for promoting an anti-theistic agenda to desist from doing so, as they are, albeit unintentionally, turning people away from the theory.

In this year of all years, we should be celebrating Darwin’s great biological achievements and not fighting over his legacy as some kind of anti-theologian

Dr Denis Alexander

Director, Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, St Edmund’s College Cambridge

Inayat Bunglawala

Dr Francis Collins

Former Director, National Human Genome Research Institute, United States

Professor David Cutler

President, Linnean Society of London

Professor Martin Evans

Director, School of Biosciences Cardiff University

Professor Susan Greenfield

Director, Royal Institution, London

Dr Usama Hasan

Senior Lecturer in Engineering and Information Sciences Middlesex University

Clifford Longley

Mary Midgley

Former Senior Lecturer in Philosophy Newcastle University

Rt Rev John Pritchard

Bishop of Oxford

Rt Rev Lee Rayfield

Bishop of Swindon, Former Lecturer in Immunology, University of London

Professor Nancy Rothwell Deputy Vice Chancellor University of Manchester

Justin Thacker Head of Theology, Evangelical Alliance

Baroness Mary Warnock

Lord Winston

Professor of Science and Society Imperial College London

Paul Woolley

Director, Theos

Posted 11 August 2011

Evolution, Darwin

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