Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday reminds everyone the story behind the origins of species. More than 1,000 religious congregations around the world have signed up to give sermons on the theme of religion and science as part of the fourth annual Evolution Weekend. The event demonstrates the falsity of claims that religious belief and evolutionary theory are incompatible.

In honor of the Darwin birthday, as well as this year’s 150th anniversary of the publication of the “Origin of Species,” the National Science Foundation has put together an anthology on the current state of evolutionary theory titled “Evolution of Evolution.” Furthermore, many authors have recently published books about Darwin and his evolutionary theory. For example, Jerry A. Coyne wrote “Why Evolution Is True” and Keith Thomson wrote “The Young Charles Darwin.”

Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist who realized and demonstrated that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors through the process that he called natural selection. His 1859 book On the Origin of Species established evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature. The Academy of Natural Sciences was the first American institution to recognize the importance of his ideas on evolution, and it promptly elected him to membership in 1860.

Many religious believers now accept Darwin’s essential legacy, the evolution of man as a part of nature from the bottom up rather than as an exception to the rest of nature, but they also believe that there is a spiritual part of men and women independent of their material existence.