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Church of England apologizes to Charles Darwin

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on Wed, 09/17/2008 - 7:49pm

OK, they're Anglicans. And so what? Malcolm Brown, Director of Mission and Public Affairs for the Church of England:

Darwin’s meticulous application of the principles of evidence-based research was not the problem. His theory caused offence because it challenged the view that God had created human beings as an entirely different kind of creation to the rest of the animal world.

Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still. We try to practice the old virtues of 'faith seeking understanding' and hope that makes some amends. But the struggle for your reputation is not over yet, and the problem is not just your religious opponents but those who falsely claim you in support of their own interests. Good religion needs to work constructively with good science – and I dare to suggest that the opposite may be true as well.

At which my hackles rose. But then I thought about this point that Brown raises:

Humanity has acquired the capacity to reflect, to imagine, and to reason from what is known to what is not yet known. Some animals may have these features in a very rudimentary form, but the human capacity is so much greater as to be effectively unique. It is our capacity to imagine other people as more than bodies, but as persons, which marks us out. It is that, above all, which has enabled the human mind and will to achieve so much. And if this capacity – which we can characterise as the capacity for love – is consistent with Darwin’s ideas of natural selection, it suggests that our capacity as a species to act in ways which appear to be against our personal interests has, paradoxically, enabled us to survive as “fitted” to our context and environment. So the pseudo-Darwinian reductionism, which elevates selfishness into a virtue and celebrates power and dominance, is not only a misunderstanding of Darwin but may even contribute to human decline by eroding those aspects of being human which have given us such a natural advantage. Even the more sophisticated versions of 'Social Darwinism', which interpret all human behaviour in terms of the struggle for dominance and the maximisation of genetic advantage through the generations, risk presenting us with an image of being human which makes us slaves to some kind of evolutionary imperative, as if we are programmed in ways we cannot over-rule. But the point of natural selection is that it is precisely by being most fully human that we demonstrate our fitness. And being fully human means refusing to abdicate our ability to act selflessly or lovingly and to challenge thin concepts of rationality which equate “being rational” to material self interest. It is vital that Darwin’s theories are rescued from political and ideological agendas that are more about controlling human imagination and unpredictability than about good science.

Yeppers. He's talkin sense, Merle.

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jimbo's picture
Submitted by jimbo on

He is talking about ignorance. This church has decided to admit they were wrong, and has admitted they acted in ignorance of reality as defined by self-questioning science. Other, like palin, refuse to extend their minds, and push to infect us and most importantly our children with their ignorance. At one point after Hillary was denied the Democratic nomination I thought seriously about voting for McCain. palin's nomination put a quick end to that. I will neve vote for ignorance (as I didn't vote for bush).

Damon's picture
Submitted by Damon on

For a denomination/sect the Anglicans have to be one of the more thoughtful ones. At least Darwin didn't have to wait over 300 years like Galileo did for his apology. lol!

makana44's picture
Submitted by makana44 on

For example, Joe Biden is ignorant of what it's like to be a single mother whose child was hurt in an accident and needed to be treated in an emergency room and required an eight day hospital stay then used all three of her credit cards to pay for the bill and has since been hounded into insolvency but can find no relief through bankruptcy because of the bill Joe Biden championed and then walked through Congress on behalf of his masters at MBNA.

Obama is ignorant of what it's like to be a woman who for the last twenty years has worked as a...oh, my brain hurts.

Clintonites, ObamaCons, BidenBiddies, McCainiacs, PalinDrones...we all seem to be ignorant of why the other is so passionate about their choice being the only right choice.

If being fully human means refusing to abdicate our ability to act selflessly or lovingly, then we all have been somewhat less than fully human this election season.

Hopefully November 5, regardless of the outcome, will dawn with most of us remembering.

But I'm not betting the farm...

Damon's picture
Submitted by Damon on

Does this thread about Darwin have to translate into 2008 United States presidential politics?

Caro's picture
Submitted by Caro on

>>being fully human means refusing to abdicate our ability to act selflessly or lovingly and to challenge thin concepts of rationality which equate “being rational” to material self interest.

Brown makes an extremely important point for our day and age. Scientific studies are showing more and more that altruism is as much a part of our nature as is self interest. But you'd never know that if you only heard the PR from the mighty megaphone built by a group of wealthy right-wing American families.

From the book I'd finish on this topic, if I could ever find a publisher:

People who live in tribes do not have a “greed is good” mentality. In a tribal environment selfishness is discouraged, while generosity is admired and rewarded. One did not become a chief simply by being the strongest. An aspirant for chiefdom had to build coalitions of supporters, be willing to listen to the wisdom of the elders, and respect the natural world. He was most likely to become and remain chief if he was known as a brave hunter and warrior, but also as a fair and generous person.

Living in groups actually predates our species, if we can assume that the common ancestors of humans, apes, and monkeys lived in the same kinds of troops our simian relatives live in to this day. Evolutionary biologists are finding that social skills, including altruism, honor, and even a sense of fairness and justice are tendencies found in the apes, our closest relatives. (See Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Frans de Waal.) Perhaps we can also assume, then, that these are traits we and the apes have inherited from a common ancestor.

We need to consider BOTH parts of our nature in deciding how to act and how to live. Teaching us to be so lopsided in the direction of selfishness may be the worst legacy ever given to a nation.

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

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