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A direct descendant of Charles Darwin has joined Catholic Voices, the project founded in Britain to speak up for the Church in the media.
The Catholic Herald reports that Laura Keynes, a great-great-great-granddaughter of the English naturalist, returned to her childhood Catholic faith after a period of agnosticism.
The daughter of an atheist father and a mother who had converted to Catholicism but later became a Buddhist, she was baptised Catholic.
But she says she drifted into agnosticism in her teens and “away from any contact with the Church”.
When she began studying for a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford she started to “reassess those values. Relationships, feminism, moral relativism, the sanctity and dignity of human life”.
The Catholic Herald says the debate sparked by Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion inspired her to read more about the subject, and she concluded that “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.”
Describing how her decision was received by loved ones, Keynes says: “That I freely chose to be a Catholic after much thought and analysis, and wasn’t brainwashed into it, baffles my friends and family alike.
“I overheard one comment: ‘But she seemed like such an intelligent girl.’ So when people ask ‘A Darwin and a Catholic?’ what they’re saying is that I confound expectations.”
Although Keynes hails from Britain’s sceptical “intellectual aristocracy” — a web of families including the Galtons, Benns, Keynes and Darwins — among her family members was a 17th-century Jesuit, Father John Keynes, who wrote A Rational Compendious Way to convince without any Despite, all Persons Whatsoever dissenting from the True Religion.
The title finds an echo in a more recent book published by Catholic Voices co-founder Austen Ivereigh: How to Defend the Faith without Raising your Voice.
Sources:
Laura Keynes (Standpoint)
Image: Catholic Herald
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