From the first, the life sciences – most particularly, the underlying Darwinian theory of evolution through natural selection – have had a fraught relationship with the Christian religion, starting with the fact that they deny absolutely a six-day creation, a historical Adam and Eve, and the claim that sin came into the world only because of the bad behavior of this original pair. Given the seminal importance of Darwinian thinking, not the least in understanding human nature, biological and cultural, easing this relationship is in the interest of us all.

we have a moral code that meshes with Christianity, why then are we so often non-social and why do we so blatantly disobey the dictates of Jesus Christ? “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:43–4). Think about it. The Great War (later called the First World War), 1914–1918, between (depending how you count) 20 and 40 million dead. The Second World War, 1939–1945, 60 to 80 million dead. The Russian Civil War, 1917–1922, 5 to 10 million dead. The Chinese Civil War, 1927–1949, 10 million dead. And so it goes. We are not yet at the pogroms, from the Turks killing Armenians, Stalin and the Kulaks, Hitler and the Jews, down to Rwanda and the killing of the Tutsis, not to mention half a million women raped as a preliminary to grotesque mutilation of genitals.

“Just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts!” This famous directive by Sergeant Joe Friday – apparently never actually made in this form – is from the television series Dragnet. Unfortunately, while this may be adequate for detecting and solving crime, not so elsewhere. The idea that science is simply a matter of recording empirical experience is hopelessly inadequate and misleading. Science is about empirical experience, but it is about such experience as encountered and interpreted – and with effort and good fortune – as explained by us.

Let us return to the address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science given in 1967 (later published in Science), by medieval historian Lynn White Jr. He threw down the gauntlet. The son of a Presbyterian minister and himself a lifelong active Presbyterian, White felt nevertheless that his religion had given rise to much that needed answering. “Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt.” White’s thesis is relatively straightforward. Modern science and technology – and the appalling environmental consequences – are the children of the Christian faith. But we get ahead of ourselves. Let’s plunge right into looking at some of these environmental consequences, using as our exemplar the most pressing environmental issue of them all: global warming.

Remember: “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground” (Genesis 1:26). It is there right at the beginning of the Old Testament; it is also in the New. We are unique and hence have a position superior to other animals. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reaffirms this. “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?” (Matthew 6:26).

Ask the basic question: Can a Christian be an organicist? And respond with the basic answer: Yes! There are Christians who welcome the idea of an organic Earth, at the least. Thomas Berry, a Catholic priest no less, had a theological vision of the world that made the organic thesis central. “The universe is not a vast smudge of matter, some jellylike substance extended indefinitely in space.

At the beginning of this book, I told you – warned you – that I am a historian and philosopher of science, not a theologian. You may now be feeling that you should have taken that comment a lot more seriously than you did. The cobbler should stick to his last. I have plowed blithely on without once discussing that fundamental Christian notion of substitutionary atonement – the claim that Jesus died on the Cross to forgive us our sins; and as for something like transubstantiation – the claim that during the eucharist the bread and wine turn literally into the body and blood of Christ – forget it.

Evolution was both known and generally accepted very rapidly after the Origin. Darwinism, even. In the summer of 1860, Charles Dickens’ widely read weekly, All the Year Round, carried two anonymously published articles on the theme of the Origin (with a third early in the next year).