It was ‘the book which shook the world’, as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was popularly dubbed, which posed an even greater problem for the educated, Victorian Christian. It is almost incredible that such amazing coincidences can happen but, just as both Newton and Leibniz working simultaneously and independently came to devise the branch of mathematics known as calculus, so both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace independently formulated theories on the subject of natural selection. Although Darwin had arrived at his basic theory as early as 1838, he withheld publication on religious grounds, until he felt compelled to publish his work, which was finally done in 1859.

Reaction to the publication was immediate: scientific and religious authorities alike mounted attacks on the validity of the theory, claiming that Darwin could neither explain how variations within a species occurred nor how they were passed on to succeeding generations. The eminent scientist James Joule7 was one of 717 contemporary scientists who signed a document which opposed the theory. But when the dust had finally settled, the alternative view by which science might exclude the hand of God from the work of creation, became widely accepted; and the effect of this work on modern thinking, right up to the present day, simply cannot be overstated. In the same year as the publication of The Origin, the German theological scholar Tischendorf was able to persuade the monks of St Catherine’s monastery to surrender the Codex Sinaiticus8, one of the earliest surviving copies of the Greek New Testament; and four years later he was able to gain access to the other most important surviving New Testament manuscript, the Codex Vaticanus which had been, up to that time, safely hidden away within the Vatican. So began the age of textual criticism of the scriptures. Scholars became increasingly aware of errors in the King James translation of the Bible.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was unthinkable, amongst the educated classes, to hold agnostic views and yet by the end of that century, there was so much scientific evidence which appeared to contradict Christian teaching and possibly the Bible itself, that it was not only possible but even respectable, to hold atheistic beliefs. By 1927, in The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud was able to make his clever and infamous gibe that man had created God in the image of his father, citing scientific evidence to support his conclusion. ‘Freud suggested, reason has by and large conquered superstition; the higher critics have “gnawed away at the probative power of religious documents; natural science has shown up the errors they contain; comparative research has been struck by the fatal resemblance of the religious conceptions we revere to the mental products of primitive peoples and times.” ‘ comments Peter Gay in his Biography of Freud9.

In the twentieth century, evolutionary thinking achieved such dominance that its application has provided an explanation for the entire creation process. From the very instant of the Big Bang; through the formation of various generations of stars and galaxies; the development of planetary solar systems and the formation of the Earth; on through the chemical processes which were the precursor to life; and finally to the spark of life itself. The whole of which has been pre-pended to the original theory, which then takes us further, ever upward through the evolutionary tree of life to the pinnacle of the whole process: mankind.