In a historical coincidence, Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born on the same day — February 12, 1809. The Englishman lived in a wealthy home in Shrewsbury, but without any focus in life, leading his father to comment, “You will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” He left at 22 on a voyage to the Pacific on board HMS Beagle. Five years later he returned carrying inside his head a theory so revolutionary that he kept it right there for nearly two decades. On his voyage, Darwin meticulously studied the flora and fauna in the Galapagos and came to the conclusion that different species evolve continuously and those that adapt best to the changes in environment survive and dominate. That worried him. If all life evolved biologically then something was fundamentally wrong with what mankind, particularly the Christian world, perceived the origin of the human race to be.

Darwin published Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859 and followed it up later with Descent of Man, which brought the human race into the same scheme of evolution as the rest of life. The problem was that if all animals and man had been evolved in an ascendant manner, then, in the words of H G Wells, “there had been no first parents, no Eden, and no Fall. And if there had been no fall, then the entire historical fabric of Christianity, the story of the first sin and the reason for atonement, upon which the current teaching based Christian emotion and morality, collapsed like a house of cards.” The Church, of course, reacted with horror. For years it fought hard to proscribe Darwin’s theory, but is today looking for a way to reconcile his thesis with the fundamentals of its ethics.

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