Did Darwin Kill God

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I'm a huge admirer of Charles Darwin.

His theory of evolution is one of

the greatest contributions to science

perception of life on earth forever.

I believe religious alternatives

like creationism

and intelligent design are nonsense.

You may think that that would make

me an atheist, but I am a Christian.

I believe in God.

As a philosopher and theologian, I write

and lecture on Darwinism and Religion,

and I am disturbed how the debate

has been hijacked by extremists.

On one side stands Richard Dawkins,

crusader against the belief in God.

Not only is it unscientific,

it doesn't do justice

to the grandeur of the universe.

Dawkins is the flag bearer of a strand

of Darwinism called ultra-Darwinism,

which believes the theory

of evolution implies atheism.

There's no role

to play by a creative God,

an intelligent God,

a benign God of any sort.

And facing them

are the fundamentalist believers

who tell us evolution is wrong.

The Bible tells us...

the age of the earth. The universe

is only about 6000 years.

I believe that Christ was God incarnate

and that he was resurrected from the dead.

But I also believe creationists

are wrong to read Genesis literally.

The war has gone on long enough,

so I'm on a journey

to the heart of this conflict

to show that it is possible to believe

in both Darwin's theory and God.

I'll be discovering what traditional Christianity

really thought about the creation of life,

unravelling the true impact of

Darwin's theory in Victorian Britain,

and seeing whether modern Darwinism

does indeed destroy my Christian faith.

In November 1859, one upstanding

Victorian would publish a theory

that would challenge everything

we understood about the world.

He was Charles Darwin.

Science was about to launch its most

deadly weapon in its war against religion.

The arrival of Darwin's theory

of evolution is seen by many

as the death of divine creation,

and the birth of modern atheism.

Darwin's theory has been called

a universal acid.

It has eaten away through every traditional

understanding of the world, including belief in God.

It contradicted the Biblical view

that God created the world -

and plants and animals -

in just six days, 6000 years ago.

If this account was central to

Christianity, then it was in grave danger.

But to think this is to misunderstand

the very essence of my faith.

I've come to Israel,

the land of the Bible,

to uncover what the founders of Christianity

thought about the creation of life.

There is an assumption

that for thousands of years,

people thought that it was a factual account

of the actual creation of life on earth.

But to assume this is to make a huge

mistake about the meaning of the Bible.

And to see why,

we need to look closely

at what it actually tells us.

"Genesis, chapter one.

"In the beginning, God created

the heavens and the earth.

"God created the light and darkness

and the first day was formed. "

Genesis 1 continues to tell us

what God created on each day.

On the third day, the land produces vegetation

- trees and plants are made.

And on the sixth day, God makes all

the creatures, including humans -

who are made in his image.

But something confusing happens

when we get to chapter two.

We are told a different story.

We are told that Adam was made

before any plants appeared.

In chapter one,

man and woman are made together

after all the plants and animals.

In chapter two, they are made separately,

and Adam is made before any plant appears.

The two accounts

contradict each other.

I'm in Jerusalem

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