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.
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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