My dear friend and erstwhile classmate Father Mervyn Fernando’s insightful review of Reverend Michael Dowd’s book titled "Thank God for Evolution" is refreshingly open-minded and even intellectually daring for a priest of the Roman Catholic Church (The Island 11 February). For years Father Mervyn has been a committed disciple and lucid exponent of geologist - anthropologist - theologian Reverend Teilhard de Chardin’s "Evolutionary Cosmology". Rev. Dowd’s book has now enabled Father Mervyn to come right out and join him to "thank God for evolution".

I write this to suggest that while thanking God for evolution, a strong case can also be made for thanking Darwin for God. How come? you will ask. Here goes! The first edition of Darwin’s book titled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was published on 24 November 1859; and second edition came out in 1860. If the passionate believers in a Creator God who viciously attacked Darwin’s Origin of Species had read a copy of the second edition to the very end, they could have sincerely thanked Darwin for God. I say so because in the second edition, Charles Darwin bent over backwards to enable committed Christians like his wife Emma, to believe both in evolution and in a Creator.

The grand concluding sentence of the first edition goes like this: "There is grandeur in this view of life with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." In the second edition which came immediately afterwards, Charles Darwin inserted the words "by the Creator" after the word "breathed" in the final sentence quoted above. Thus, the concept of a Creator God received the imprimatur of Charles Darwin himself. In the event, what was perhaps the greatest discovery in the history of science was made palatable to the prevailing dominant religious ethos in the country.

Charles Darwin died on 19 April 1882. The man who said that revealing his discovery of the fact of evolution was like "confessing a murder" was buried in Westminster Abbey, the final resting place of the great and good English. He was eulogized by the Church for his "ardent pursuit of truth" and as "a true Christian gentleman". To cap it all, perhaps the most enchanting tribute to Darwin came from an unidentified old English lady: "To be sure, Darwin proved that there is no God. But God is so kind, he will forgive him."