A friend recently gave me a badge. It says, 'Thank God for Darwin!'
Some people seem to think that Charles Darwin was a great enemy of religion, but I don't reckon he was. Neither were Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, or other great scientists.
Take Isaac Newton. In his time many scientists had come to believe that the earth went round the sun, but they didn't know how. What Newton did was to explain how it happened. The earth would have shot out into space if it weren't for gravity, which makes it turn around the sun.
What scientists do is explain how things happen. By Darwin's time many people had realised that the earth had been around for a very long time, and that there were creatures like the dinosaurs that had lived long ago but then become extinct.
What Darwin did was to come up with an explanation of how species develop: that creatures change in small ways and those that fit their environment in a better way survive, and pass on the changes to their offspring.
I think that Einstein was right when he said that what scientists are doing is 'drawing God's lines after him.'
What science does means that when I look at the world, the birds outside my window, the clouds in the sky, the flowers growing, I can not only appreciate them as they are but also be amazed at the ways they work, and how they've come about. And we can continue to discover more and more.
At my friend's church they had a science festival, including a Dinosaur Day for children. I'm not planning on organising one, but it seemed to me like a good idea. We appreciate the work of musicians, artists and poets. Why not scientists? Thank God for Darwin, and the rest of them.
David Osborne
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