Denis R. Alexander on Darwin
"It would be great if atheists, agnostics and religious believers alike could celebrate Darwin as the brilliant biologist he was, not as the icon of a particular ideology."
Denis R. Alexander, writing in Nature
Alexander, a lymphocyte biologist and director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge, believes that teaching religion as well as science, and the way they are linked, is an important endeavor. There has been, he says, “constant traffic” between the two camps throughout history, which has provided “complementary accounts of the same reality”. Perhaps more pragmatically, he also notes that the majority of taxpayers have religious beliefs, so pitting the two camps against one another might actually backfire against science, if those holding the purse strings become suitably fed up. Instead, the two sides should peacefully co-exist and try to strike a balance: “boundary disputes” only arise when one side attempts to dismiss the other.
You can read Alexander’s correspondence with a subscription to Nature.