Creationism is primarily an American phenomenon. In the Middle East, Islam’s account of creation is accepted without question. In Europe, opposition to evolution is almost unheard of. In Catholic countries, the pope’s acceptance of evolution in 1996 ended any debate on the issue. Yet, in America–and to some extent Australia, thanks to American evangelism–evolution remains contentious. Creationism, “Creation Science” and “Intelligent Design” remain popular explanations for the origin of species. But of course, its popularity doesn’t make it any less ridiculous. These efforts are born of an imaginary crisis between science and faith. But, if you happen to understand the Pantheistic nature of the Bible’s teachings, then all conflict disappears.

Ultimately, evolution is a tautology. Evolution means nothing more than a change in allele frequency over time. An individual is “evolutionarily fit” insofar as it has some advantage that allows it to reproduce more. “Survival of the fittest,” then, becomes nothing more than a shorthand for the obvious tautology that if you have some advantage that will help you reproduce more than others, you’ll be more likely than others to reproduce.

Evolution’s explanatory power comes from the implications of that simple truth over a sufficiently long time-table, and how it can give rise to new species.

Biologists identify a species as the set of individuals such that each individual can mate with another and produce viable offspring. Viable offspring are themselves able to reproduce; thus, mules are not viable, so donkeys and horses are different species. However some species, like the yellow-rumped warbler, have distinct subspecies, or “races.” The Cornell Lab of Ornithology describes the two subspecies thus:

Audubon’s Warblers share the basic pattern of the Myrtle Warbler, but they differ by having a yellow (rather than white) throat, and they have paler gray upperparts without a black cheek patch. Instead of the black flank and breast streaks of the Myrtle Warbler, the Audubon’s Warbler has solid black across the breast and down its flanks. Where Myrtle Warblers have white spots on the outer two or three tail feathers only, Audubon’s Warblers have more extensive white tail spotting.

Aubudon and Myrtle warblers can mate with each other and produce viable offspring (so they’re still the same species), but that offspring will always be an Aubudon or a Myrtle. It will never mix traits from the two subspecies. Simple diversity has, over generations, clumped together and become genetically interdependent. No warbler will ever have an Aubudon’s yellow throat, and a Myrtle’s black cheek patch.

Once that level of division is achieved, speciation is nearly assured. Mixing between the two groups becomes impossible, and if further mutations within one group or the other makes them incompatible with their distant cousins, who but ornithologists would notice it?

Diversity is not evenly distributed, and mating is not entirely random. Some traits are better adapted to some environments than others, and with pressure from natural selection, a divergence between two isolated populations can easily lead to speciation. Over a sufficiently long timeline, speciation and evolution become inevitable.

Most Creationists simply don’t understand what evolution is. Creationists have spent a great deal of time and effort obfuscating the issue, of course. The way science works doesn’t help, either. Creationists try to insinuate doubt in evolution by pointing out differing opinions among scientists. This works because most people don’t understand that science is all about the on-going argument, the petty bickering and fighting from which knowledge gradually emerges. Even given nothing else, we can be confident evolution is true because no scientist has yet achieved fabulous wealth and celebrity by disproving it. If there was any serious flaw in the theory, it would already have been exploited. Proving all your teachers wrong is the single best way to get ahead as a scientist.

Of course, for a pantheist, there is no conflict whatsoever. Nothing exists in a vacuum; evolution says species arise from interacting with one another and the world around them. Competition within species for mates and between species for resources, geography and the occasional cosmological event (like the supposed orbit of our sun’s companion) create species and drive evolution. As species–and as individuals–we are shaped by our relationships with everything around us. We are constantly created by the whole rest of the universe. For a pantheist, evolution is just another way of saying that G-d created us.

In that light, the first two chapters of Genesis can be read in a whole different light–not as some simple science text, but as a profound, poetic expression. Chapter 1 and chapter 2 each contain a different, contradictory story of Creation. After all, how many days did G-d take to create the heavens and the earth? Genesis 1:1-2:3 describes the six days you’re probably thinking of, but then Genesis 2:4 talks about the day (singular) “that the Lord G-d made the earth and the heavens.”

If we were to insult the supposedly divine author by denigrating such poetry to a merely literal account, then it would be obvious that this is nonsense. It contradicts what we know to be the case regarding evolution and the age of the earth, and contradicts itself immediately. But, as a poetic expression, it is somewhat amazing.

1. On the first day, G-d creates light. If the Big Bang theory is correct, then all that existed in the universe at the beginning was energy–or, metaphorically, “light.”
2. On the second day, G-d creates “the firmament,” separating “the waters above” from “the waters below.” This could be read as a reference to the formation of our heliosphere and solar system, or simply the formation of our planet–separating the “waters” of the earth from the “waters” of the vast vacuum of space.
3. On the third day, G-d made dry land appear out of the water. The Snowball Earth theory puts the earth as a frozen ball of ice–covered in water–until the appearance of microbial life began to form an atmosphere, which helped create a Greenhouse effect and melt the ice, warming the earth. Similarly, the first mass extinction was caused by too much oxygen being expelled into the atmosphere. Only the emergence of mutants that could actually breathe it stopped the extinction of all life. The carbon cycle began, and the survivors of that first generation of life became the ancestors of all manner of microbial life, fungi, and plants. While there’s certainly no one-to-one relationship between the Snwoball Earth theory and the first mass extinction and Genesis 1:9-13, reading the verses does remind me of those things.
4. I have no way of reconciling the fourth day (Genesis 1:14-19), except to point out how it undermines the literalist interpretation of Genesis. It isn’t until the fourth day that the sun is created; how were “days” measured before that? What are days, before there is a sun?
5. On the fifth day, G-d creates fish first, then birds. This follows the progression of evolution on our planet quite nicely; life began in the oceans, and later amphibians and reptiles came up on the land. Many of the dinosaurs most likely evolved into birds.
6. It is only on the sixth day that G-d creates mammals, again keeping to the true evolutionary timeline, where mammals appear quite late in the game. Humans are created last of all–and as such a young new species, that isn’t far from the mark.

Of course, as I said, that isn’t the only account of Creation in Genesis. Genesis 2 has a very different account, one that focuses solely on humans. In Genesis 2:5, humans are created before plants, instead of the day after. Here is where we have humans made from dust and placed in Eden. While Genesis 1:27 implies strongly that males and females were created at the same time, Genesis 2 describes how G-d formed females after males, from Adam’s rib. G-d’s first attempt to make companions for Adam, though, where mammals, made also out of the dust in Genesis 2:19 (another contradiction between the two accounts).

Genesis 1 is remarkably true in its ordering of events. I have always looked at it as the most poetic expression of evolution I have ever heard. I also find it denigrating and insulting when such a beautiful piece of poetry is reduced to a mere science text. Once again, I find fundamentalists, and this time Creationists, to be sacrilegious and blasphemous.

But how would the ancient Hebrews know this ordering? I have no idea, but I’m willing to give them as much credit as I am to the shamans of the Australian Aborigines and Yanamamo, who said they had gone back to watch the creation of the world, and experienced it as light and sound. The sound they identified as the static on the anthropologists’ radios. A quaint little story, until COBE confirmed that radio static is casued by background radiation from the beginning of the universe….

I’ve studied shamanism too long to discount such things entirely. I don’t know how it works, but it appears that it does, in fact, work. The Dogon of Mali knew about the Galilean moons and even Sirius B centuries before we did. It seems clear to me that there are other ways of knowing, beyond scientific reductionism. I’m willing to grant the same possibilities to the ancient Hebrews as to the rest.

For a pantheist, there is no separation of evolution and creation. They are expressions of the same phenomenon, couched in different terms. Evolution does not rule out a god, but it may force you to rethink how you define him. And ultimately, if G-d is so superlative in all his forms, how can we ever define him? How can he ever be confined to mere human language, even the language of a scripture?