And God is good – indeed, He is very good. For, more than half of my life in a dog collar, I have served in God's own county, in Sheffield, in Wakefield and now in Bradford.

A few weeks ago, I appreciated God's goodness afresh. I had to travel from London Victoria to Canterbury by train during the rush hour. There was hardly standing room. We were pressed together like sardines but with no interaction or conversation or eye contact, and we swayed along together through mile after mile of likewise jam-packed houses.

But two people did engage in conversation – a black guy who radiated such joy that he defied you to be miserable, and a white lady with an experience she couldn't keep to herself.

I listened. The lady had just been on a course in another part of the country. Near the hotel where she stayed there was a wonderful park, and during some free time she had wandered through it.

"There were families picnicking and playing together," she said. "Three generations playing together just like it ought to be. And there were Asian and white people and black people all mixing in the same park."

Then the lady went on: "And people up there are so friendly. They don't ignore you like down here." She and a couple of other women had walked around together in the evening – "and we felt perfectly safe".

This all sounds too good to be true but the lady had been on a course at the Bradford Royal Infirmary and had stayed at a hotel in Manningham. My heart was bursting with pride. "I come from Bradford and I live five minutes walk from that park!"(the magnificent Lister Park). It is one of the best parks in Europe and good value for the many people who enjoy it. Because it is so good, people use it and respect it and it provides a meeting place for people from different communities and different backgrounds. All sorts of children, who are colour blind, play on the same swings together.

And some clever think-tank reckons we should give all this up and move to London.

Another person who seems to have it in for Bradford is Professor Richard Dawkins. Defending criticism of the first of his Channel 4 programmes on Charles Darwin, he wrote: "I expect it's true that few believers Libby Purvis meets over canapés are not creationists. But 'most believers'? Most believers in Bradford? The Scottish Highlands? Pakistan? Indonesia? The Arab world? South America? Indeed, North America?"

I live in Bradford and I have never been a creationist who thought the world came into being in six short days a few thousand years ago, not even as a child, and neither have I found church people tumbling over each other to tell me they are creationists.

What I do find is that a lot of people who are not Christians, thanks to Professor Dawkins, expect me to be one and are disappointed and even angry to discover I am not. A teacher in a secondary school I visited, once asked: "How can you be a Bishop and a scientist?" I briefly taught chemistry at university.

The Theory of Evolution describes how all life, including homo sapiens, developed over millions of years. Its ability to explain so much and with such elegance is breathtaking, but I would not want "the survival of the fittest" to determine how we share railway trains in the rush hour or multi-cultural Bradford or, indeed, this amazing, life-sustaining but finite planet

Darwin noticed, but he could not explain, how it was that in every society he studied it was the most altruistic people who were most respected and not the most ruthless, those who were willing to put the interests of others, including those who were not their relatives, ahead of their own – in Richard Dawkins' language, how a bundle of selfish genes somehow came together to produce selfless people.

My conversation on the train about "beautiful" Bradford led on to a discussion about how we live together socially, helped by the joyful gentleman who also happened to be a committed Christian, about values such as trust, mutual respect, love, forgiveness.

We cannot survive on our own in this world. We need each other and this means living in a counter-Darwinian, anti-evolutionary way. These values don't just exist like the law of gravity; they have to be put into practice, nurtured and polished, protected. The lady I met on the train had seen these values alive and well in Bradford.

There are two sides of the whole thing – substance and image. Substance is better than image, but we need to be clearer of what our own image of Bradford is. Otherwise, we shall continue to be victims of the negative image that others perpetuate.


The Right Reverend David James is the Bishop of Bradford.