Darwin’s Cathedral

I was at the London’s Natural History Museum last week. This huge, cathedral-like structure contains within many thousands of exhibits, including whale skeletons and reconstructed dinosaurs (I particularly like this picture as the stegosaurus appears to be about to eat a carnivorous breakfast).

It also includes information on how my ancestors transformed themselves into semi-humans and humans. Within this basilica of natural religion, silent and contented, sits the great prophet of our age, Charles Darwin. Visitors clamour to be photographed by the great man.

Paul writes in Romans that we humans ‘changed the truth of God into a lie and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator’. By exchanging God’s intelligent, artistic and inventive designs for a long, drawn out process of mutation and death, we assure ourselves that we creatures are the highest life-forms in our universe.

Indeed, Darwin’s role as secular high priest is developed by Conor Walton in The New Religion, displayed at the National Gallery, showing him with other scientists standing before humanity’s new altar, upon which is the object of adoration: the evolving ape, aka ourselves.