A breath of fresh air:the Church of Eng­land is to offi­cially apol­o­gise to Charles Dar­win—126 years fol­low­ing his death—for dis­miss­ing his the­ory of evolution.

This apol­ogy coin­cides with the release of a new CoE web­site pro­mot­ing Dar­win and his views, released this morning.

The trou­ble with homo sapi­ens is that we’re only human. Peo­ple, and insti­tu­tions, make mis­takes and Chris­t­ian peo­ple and churches are no excep­tion. When a big new idea emerges which 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 – and the bicen­te­nary of Darwin’s birth in 1809 is a good time to do so.

[…] the Church of Eng­land owes you an apol­ogy for mis­un­der­stand­ing you and, by get­ting our first reac­tion wrong, encour­ag­ing oth­ers to mis­un­der­stand you still. We try to prac­tice the old virtues of ‘faith seek­ing under­stand­ing’ and hope that makes some amends. 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. Good reli­gion needs to work con­struc­tively with good sci­ence – and I dare to sug­gest that the oppo­site may be true as well.