Charles Darwin’s descendant finds faith

For broadcast on 2CH Sydney, 30 June 2013.

The British Catholic Herald reports that Laura Keynes, the great-great-great-granddaughter of the English naturalist Charles Darwin, has become a Christian.

The daughter of an atheist father and a Buddhist mother, she was baptised Catholic but drifted into agnosticism in her teens and “away from any contact with the Church.”

Ironically, the debate sparked by atheist Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion inspired her to read more about the subject, and she concluded that the “New Atheism seemed to harbour a germ of intolerance and contempt for people that could only undermine secular humanist claims to liberalism.”

She writes: “If atheism’s claim to the intellectual high ground is bolstered by my ancestor’s characteristic ability to explore and analyse inconsistencies in the evidence, that same family characteristic led me towards a sceptical assessment of what can and can’t be known absolutely.”

She kept searching for the truth until the truth found her.

I’m Rod Benson for the NSW Council of Churches.