‘Dear Mr Darwin, we’re so sorry for rubbishing your work’ says C of E

A DECISION by the Church of England to apologise directly to Charles Darwin for exposing him to ridicule over his theory of evolution has been met with howls of derision.

According to the Mail on Sunday, in a bizarre step, the C of E  will address its contrition directly to the Victorian scientist himself, even though he died 126 years ago.

This is how Hornet magazine lampooned Darwin

Church officials compared the apology to the late Pope John Paul II’s decision to say sorry for the Vatican’s 1633 trial of Galileo, the astronomer who appalled prelates by declaring that the earth revolved around the sun.

The officials said that senior bishops wanted to atone for the vilification their predecessors heaped on Darwin in the 1860s, when he put forward his theory that man was descended from apes.

The Church is also anxious to counter the view that its teaching is incompatible with science. It wants to distance itself from fundamentalist Christians, who believe in the Biblical account of the creation of the world in seven days.

An article to be posted on the Church’s website will say:

Charles Darwin, 200 years from your birth [in 1809], the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still. 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.

The article has been written by the Rev Dr Malcolm Brown, the director of mission and public affairs of the Archbishops’ Council, the Church’s managing body, which is headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams.

Dr Brown writes:

People, and institutions, make mistakes and Christian people and Churches are no exception. When a big new idea emerges that changes the way people look at the world, it’s easy to feel that every old idea, every certainty, is under attack and then to do battle against the new insights. The Church made that mistake with Galileo’s astronomy and has since realised its error. Some Church people did it again in the 1860s with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. So it is important to think again about Darwin’s impact on religious thinking, then and now.

Dr Brown adds:

His [Darwin’s] 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. But while it is not difficult to see why evolutionary thinking was offensive at the time, on reflection it is not such an earth-shattering idea.

But former Conservative, Minister Ann Widdecombe, who left the Church of England to become a Roman Catholic, said:

It’s absolutely ludicrous. Why don’t we have the Italians apologising for Pontius Pilate? We’ve already apologised for slavery and for the Crusades. When is it all going to stop? It’s insane and makes the Church of England look ridiculous.

Andrew Darwin, a great-great grandson of the eminent scientist, said he was ‘bemused’ by the apology, which seemed “pointless”.

Why bother? When an apology is made after 200 years, it’s not so much to right a wrong, but to make the person or organisation making the apology feel better.

Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Association, said:

It does seem rather crazy for an institution to address an apology to an individual so long after his death. As well as being much too late, the message strikes me as insincere, as if there is an unspoken ‘but’ behind the text. However, if it means that from now on the Church of England will say ‘No’ to the teaching of creationism in school science lessons, then we would accept the apology on Darwin’s behalf.