The idea that the world is approaching a crisis is now widespread. Fossil fuel dependency, a shortage of drinking water and available food supplies for an overpopulated planet, together with a desire to acquire more efficient weapons of mass destruction are summarised by the Darwinian concept that nature is now preparing to cull out those unfit to survive. However, in his second book on evolution, ‘The Accent of Man’, Darwin notes that humanity’s feelings of compassion for underprivileged impoverished people, is so pronounced that it surely must somehow play an important role in human evolution.

Scientists, such as Jacob Bronowski, commenting on the ‘Assent of Man’, argues that human ethical consideration can actually alter the existing environmental reality and in doing explains the evolutionary functioning of ethical thought. Conversly, if the reader considers that a ruthless culling of humanity is a despairing natural law, then the reader cannot be blamed. Lord Bertrand Russell won a Nobel Prize for advising us to worship that law, because Albert Einstein considered that such a law governed everything. Einstein’s accepted that this heat death law, developed to explain the mechanical reality of the functioning of a steam engine, was in fact the premier law of all of science. Russell was not a devout Christian but advocated that we must worship that law, Sir Arthur Eddington, Einstein’s close colleague, was a devote Christian and he also he agreed with Russell that we should worship the universal heat death law, as God’s supreme law.

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