God of Gaps losing ground? - Science is just one gene away from defeating religion
at Sunday, March 1, 2009
Guardian - February 22, 2009, by Colin Blakemore
When I was a medical student at Cambridge in the Sixties, I walked to lectures past the forbidding exterior of the Cavendish Laboratory, as famous for Crick and Watson's unravelling of DNA as for Rutherford's splitting of the atom. One day, scrawled on the wall, was a supreme example of Cambridge graffiti: "CRICK FOR GOD".
The process of Christian accommodation is a bit like the fate of fieldmice confronted by a combine harvester, continuously retreating into the shrinking patch of uncut wheat.
No surprise that pivotal advances in science provoke religious metaphors. Crick and Watson's discovery transformed our view of life itself - from a manifestation of spiritual magic to a chemical process. One more territorial gain in the metaphysical chess match between science and religion.
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was certainly a vital move in that chess game - if not checkmate. In an interview for God and the Scientists, to be broadcast tonight in Channel 4's series on Christianity, Richard Dawkins declares: "Darwin removed the main argument for God's existence."
That wasn't, of course, Darwin's intention. In 1827, he scraped into Cambridge to study for the church. But by 1838, with the wealth of experience from the Beagle's voyage inside his head, Darwin had conceived the idea that natural selection - survival of the fittest - had created new species. Even after she accepted his marriage proposal, Darwin's cousin Emma, a strict Unitarian, fretted that his heretical theories would lead to their separation in the afterlife!
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