This week, a new film about Charles Darwin called Creation has been showing at cinemas.

It tells of the struggle he had reconciling his scientific findings with his Christian beliefs. Darwin was no atheist out to destroy faith, but a thoughtful man who questioned things. He probably ended his life as an agnostic, but his journey should encourage believers in the continuing challenge of relating belief to what they see around them.

Plenty of Christians accept Darwin's idea of evolution and are able to continue believing in God. The trouble is, Darwin has been hijacked by atheists like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who thinks all Christians are Creationists with their literal belief in the stories of creation in the book of Genesis.

These stories look as though they are about how God created the world, but they were written thousands of years ago by pre-scientific people. What they are really about is how God wants humans to live with His creation, a moral and theological question which is very relevant today.

Dawkins is a brilliant scientist and propagandist. He has taken Darwin's ideas and developed them as a scientist, but he has also used them to support his own atheism.

Darwin's ideas do not have to lead in that direction. There are lots of scientists who are also Christians. We need to know which hat someone is wearing when they speak.

Today we are used to paying attention to scientists when they say something is true and we have learnt so much about our world from them. But there is another kind of truth that people of faith, poets and artists know about – values we live by, visions we dream of, mysteries deeper than words.

Scientists, as scientists, cannot speak about these things, though they may do as human beings. So Christians do not need to be defensive about their beliefs. But these beliefs do need to be reasonable and take account of scientific truth.

Darwin started out with the idea that the universe was like a gigantic watch with all its parts carefully designed and in their proper place, and that God was the watchmaker.

His discoveries of fossils, bearing witness to much earlier and extinct forms of life that seemed to be related to, but different from, current life forms, led him to the idea that creation was a process, and not a single, finished act.

Through a process of trial and error, dead ends and new birth, the Tree of Life had emerged in all its variety, from one common root, with humans at one end of a branch. If this process was so apparently random and so brutal, then where did God the Watchmaker fit in?

Darwin struggled with this dilemma for all his life – the amazing beauty, variety and abundance of life, which cried out for a creator, but the callous brutality of the process of creation which seemed to deny such a creator.

It's a contradiction that all Christians face. We sing, "All things bright and beautiful" as though nature is entirely harmonious and idyllic and talk about creation being God's handiwork , when it is far from obvious.

Glorious sunsets and tranquil oceans may bring us close to God, but the other side is the merciless, desert sun and the cruel, chaotic sea.

We need a picture of God that can take account of all reality. Darwin's watchmaker won't do.

God has to be the God of evolution, a God who doesn't just create at the beginning but continuously, a God who creates the right conditions but then lets the process go on, a God who is willing to take risks, not control everything.

Darwin helps us as we go on exploring.