Paddling my canoe along the Kentucky River last fall, I passed beneath hundred-foot-high limestone palisades, following a great blue heron as he too, in short intervals of flight, made his way upriver. I suspected he was heading toward an impressive rookery built in the crown of a dying sycamore that leaned out over the river about a mile upstream. The heron stopped often to preen on deadfalls near the banks, then folded his head and neck into a tight S shape and climbed back into the air. At times the heron would wade into the shallows, spear a small silverfish, and then swallow it whole with one quick shiver of his throat. He attacked his prey so fast that his head looked like an arrow shot from his body and tethered to it by that long unspooling neck. I read somewhere that a great blue heron cannot see its reflection in the water. Surely this is an evolutionary adaptation, a way for a fishing bird to better see fish.
I was thinking about blue herons and evolution together because I had been reading Jerry A. Coyne’s book Why Evolution Is True, which depicts, in four illustrations, the evolution of the 225-million-year-old dinosaur Coelophysis bauri into Compsognathus longipes of the Late Jurassic, then Jeholornis prima from the Lower Cretaceous, and finally Ardea herodias, the modern great blue heron. Nineteenth-century paleontologists were the first to notice the similarities in the skeletons of birds and some dinosaurs. Darwin himself knew of the 145-million-year-old fossil Archaeopteryx lithographica, a famous transitional form (part bird, part reptile), discovered in 1860 in a German limestone quarry not unlike the gorge I had been paddling through that fall day. In the 1990s, many more “feathered dinosaurs” were discovered in lake sediments throughout China. Like the modern heron, these creatures had an opposable toe for perching. As the fossils get younger (closer to us in time), the reptile tail shrinks and a larger breastbone that could have supported wings and flight begins to appear. According to Coyne, the early transitional birds would have either glided down from trees, like flying squirrels today, or used their wings for propulsion while running, like the contemporary chukar partridge, until they eventually—it must have been quite a shock—took flight.
If I had kept paddling up the Kentucky River, I would have eventually reached the Cumberland Plateau of central Appalachia. John Muir, in his only book about the eastern United States, said that the plateau’s oaks were the most beautiful he had ever seen and that its rock shelters were the “most heavenly places” he had ever dropped his pack. Today there are still many such idyllic places throughout the broadleaf forest of eastern Kentucky, but the black-and-gray scar of mountaintop-removal strip mining has annihilated more than five hundred of its mountains, has buried thousands of miles of headwater streams, and is hastening the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide—a main cause of climate change. What is the connection between coal and evolution? Just this: I believe that a great deal of the current environmental crises can be blamed on our particularly American and almost willful misunderstanding of Darwin’s remarkable theory.
In his introduction to Why Evolution Is True, Coyne ponders why, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, 60 percent of Americans still say they do not believe in the theory of evolution. I contend that a fundamental reason—one that has great consequences for both our spiritual and our ecological well-being—is that the religious movement known as creationism ignores one profound fact of life: the entire chorus of life, more than 10 million species, share one common ancestor that first appeared on earth 3.5 billion years ago. For thousands of millions of years, that singular substance took the form of free-floating bacteria, until two billion years ago when they began to form communities, fortresses held together by thin membranes. Then some of the bacteria transformed into oxygen-absorbing mitochondria, and a command center, the nucleus, took shape. The cell was born. Then cells took up residence inside larger organisms, which in turn developed their own protective membranes—shells, flesh, exoskeletons. What followed was the period, from 570 to 530 million years ago, that paleontologists call the Cambrian explosion. Bivalved brachiopods, whose outlines I still see pressed into the limestone banks of this river, emerged, along with the trilobite, bearing a compound eye, and the echinoderms, ancestors to the modern sea urchin and starfish. The marine plants and animals climbed the banks and shores to colonize the terrestrial world. Reptiles turned into dinosaurs and dinosaurs turned into birds. Then whales, porpoises, and primates started swimming and walking around with much larger brains than any species that had come before. At some point, roughly 10 million years ago, an organism that we would recognize in the mirror—evolutionary biologists call her Mitochondrial Eve—walked across the African savanna, plucked the quill from a vulture, and wrote down the story of her origins.
Of course, scientists have been redacting that story ever since, but today the genetic and fossil evidence tells us this: every one of the 10 million species on the planet still retains the same mitochondrial DNA of our common ancestor. This evidence may be the strongest argument for why evolution is fact, not theory; or, to use Coyne’s words, for why evolution is true. To understand this most basic truth is to realize that human beings are literally, genetically kin to all other living creatures. And this kinship seems to me the most sublime and hopeful idea any prophet or philosopher could have ever conjured. It gives us a reason, beyond the difficult hope of altruism, to follow the Golden Rule: to treat others—all others—as we wish to be treated, because they are our brothers and sisters, cousins and second cousins.
But this is not how many religious people view the matter. Ever since Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, Christians in particular, and American Christians even more particularly, have shuddered at the thought that humans “descended from monkeys.” They find it an insult to their intelligence, an affront to the belief that they were created, as the Book of Genesis says, in the image of God. But if all life derived from one substance, why not call that substance God? Why not say that all life was created in the image of God?
Actually, I think I will, because what we’re really dealing with here is that perennial philosophical problem of the one and the many. Is life made up of one common substance or is it completely heterogeneous, and if the latter, does anything hold all that heterogeneity together? This question haunted the pre-Socratic philosophers. Thales said that all matter is made of water; Heraclitus said fire. And it didn’t get settled, at least to my thinking, until when in 1677 Spinoza published his Ethics, in which he posits that because God is infinite, the entire universe is comprised of one holy substance that functions as a whole. And because God is infinite, there can be nothing outside of God. Spinoza’s God is not some other, some creator standing apart from the creation; Spinoza’s God is the creation. Whenever he invoked the deity, Spinoza always referred to deus sive natura—God-or-nature. Nature was at once natura naturans, the unique creator, and natura naturata, the unique creation. Furthermore, being infinite, God-or-nature possesses limitless “attributes.” Because nothing exists outside God-or-nature, that first substance must have been self-created and must continue the act of self-creation by improvising on new attributes—what scientists call species. We might say that all of God-or-nature’s improvisations, its adaptations, are the evolutionary work of one self-creating whole.
Spinoza leads us to a compelling conclusion: the surest and closest path to God leads not through the dark night of the soul but rather through the sun-inspired diversity of the natural world. As I paddled along the Kentucky River on that Indian summer day, I felt a strong sense that I was paddling through the aqueous elements out of which all life emerged. The last wildflowers were blooming along the bank, and as I followed the blue heron, I experienced what I think Spinoza meant when he said, “The greatest good is the union that the mind has with the whole of nature.”
Which brings me to my point: The true miracle is the world as we find it. A Mediterranean wanderer once even called it the kingdom of God. The great mistake of creationism is that, in schools all across the country, it has tried to teach religion as biology when in fact we should embark on a much more inspiring mission—to teach biology as religion.
Creationist thinking sees the world as it wants the world to be, but not as it is. It wants to believe that only humans were created in the likeness of God, separate from all other species. Neither the fossil record nor our standard four-letter DNA code supports this creation story. Aside from it being essentially unsubstantiated, the creationist view strikes me as an extraordinary failure of the imagination. Can we not possibly imagine God as any greater than . . . us? If not, then it’s no wonder we treat the rest of creation as nothing more than a “natural resource” to be cut down, mined, polluted, and destroyed.
Creationists all seem obsessed with finding atop Mount Ararat some remnant of Noah’s Ark; they write books justifying the ark’s historical veracity, right down to discussions of how Noah dealt with the tricky issue of waste management. Yet never have I seen the argument to prove the existence of the ark extended to the logical concern that right now, because of human pressures, the very species that Noah supposedly saved are going extinct at a rate of one per hour. Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson predicts that we could lose half of all species by the end of this century.
Why is there no conservation imperative in the creationist movement? Why do these believers want so badly to prove the divine creation of the world but have nothing to say about its preservation? Why is their love for the Creator so detached from their concern for the creation? Why are they not awestruck, as was Job, when the voice in the whirlwind details the astonishing diversity of this rare planet?
Answers have been proffered, of course. Perhaps the most common one points to the Book of Genesis, where Yahweh gave man “dominion” over the world. I have often heard strip miners cite the “dominion” passage as their rationale for tearing apart the mountains of Appalachia. But this is nothing more than a flimsy justification for desecrating the creation. It is a violation of the laws of nature and therefore a violation of the law of the Creator, the law of divine providence. According to the United Nations’ Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, human beings have now degraded 60 percent of all “ecosystem services” to unsustainable levels. In the great “satanic mills” that poet William Blake brooded over, we are quite literally setting the world on fire. It isn’t simply unsustainable—it is a sacrilege. To begin to see the natural world as a sacred place, an unroofed church, is the first way—and perhaps the only way—to convince the majority of Americans that we must stop destroying it. This pastoral impulse can be traced back to Thomas Jefferson’s plea for Americans to resist a manufacturing economy because “those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.” I propose therefore a new creationism, one that really does look to nature as a scripture wherein we can read miracle after miracle: the awesome spectacle of a flying squirrel gliding through a forest’s understory; the African tailor bird, which sews together two leaves for its nest with a long piece of grass; the ongoing creation and regeneration of topsoil. This new creationism would hinge on two principles—one scientific, the other religious:
I know some of my biologist friends will shudder at this second principle, but unlike the teaching of religion as biology, the teaching of biology as religion does not violate any scientific method; it simply imbues matter with spirit and thus overcomes a terrible dualism that has always lingered at the heart of fundamental Christianity, a dualism that has allowed for much abuse of the natural world. The creationists, after all, got the word right; they simply have been looking at the creation through the wrong end of the telescope. To understand the natural world as a divine scripture is to imbue the creation with the holy and to begin treating it as such.
There is, in fact, a biblical precedent for this, and it can be found in a gospel that many New Testament scholars now believe is older than Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.1 At the beginning of the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus’s followers ask him about their great preoccupation, the kingdom of God. Jesus replies, “If your leaders say to you, ‘Look, the kingdom is in heaven,’ then the birds of heaven will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you.” Here Jesus is obviously mocking the traditional understanding of a kingdom on high. And the futile gesture of looking “in the sea” for the kingdom of God reminds me of a Persian parable in which a single fish spends its entire existence searching for the ocean. Only when a trawler’s net finally catches the fish does it look down at the ocean and realize it had been swimming there its whole life. We make the same mistake, Jesus is telling his followers in the Gospel of Thomas. The only thing that prevents us from seeing the actual, immediate world as the kingdom of God is our own blindness to it, our own obtuse insistence that it must lie somewhere else. Like the rooms in our own homes, the familiar seems so common to us that we fail to see it at all, and we certainly fail to see it as anything extraordinary. This, essentially, is the genius of Thomas’s itinerant Jesus: he has, in his own words, cast a new light on the world so that the most common occurrences—seeds sprouting in the dark ground, we know not why—become evidence that the natural world is the immanent kingdom of God. In Thomas’s Gospel, Jesus performs no miracles because, presumably, the creation itself is the one true miracle, could we only see it as such. But we don’t, and so even in the penultimate saying of Thomas’s Gospel, the fishermen following Jesus seem to have learned nothing:
His followers said to him, “When will the kingdom come?”
“It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, ‘Look, here it is,’ or ‘Look, there it is.’ Rather, the father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.”
Of course, in Luke 17:20–21, Jesus makes a similar claim about the basileia tou theo. But scholars have puzzled over whether Luke’s Greek should be translated as “the kingdom of God is within you” or “the kingdom of God is in your midst.” Thomas leaves no doubt when he records Jesus as saying that “the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you.” This collapses and separates out both translations of Luke’s Greek into two more lucid and beautiful ideas. The first is revealed when, “Jesus said, ‘Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.’” He demands that his followers actually pay attention to the variegated beauty of the natural world. He is, in effect, telling them to stop trying to be theologians or eschatologists and instead become . . . biologists. More to the point, he is telling them to see the laws of God in the laws of nature. Then “what is hidden”—God’s law—will be revealed in what is “disclosed”—the law of nature. In Thomas’s Gospel, Jesus follows up this idea with a powerful corollary—that there is a kingdom within us that is a reflection of the kingdom spread out before us. It is as if the tips of two triangles meet at one point and when they touch, both are transformed by the other. Biology becomes an interior, spiritual enterprise.
Or to shift metaphors, I sometimes imagine this point as the surface of a two-way mirror, an image inspired by Coleman Banks’s limpid translation of Fariduddin Attar’s twelfth-century epic poem Manteq at-Tair—The Conference of the Birds. The poem is an allegory in which the world’s birds gather to search for their king, called the Simurgh. The journey, which will take them across “the seven valleys of the Way,” is fraught with hazards, and when the flock finally reaches the last valley, it has been thinned to only thirty (si-) birds (-murgh). This is the pun on which the poem depends, because when the thirty birds reach the chamber of the Simurgh, they enter a kind of trance:
and in each other’s faces they saw
the inner world. They did not know
if they were still themselves,
or if they had become God.
At last, in a deep state of contemplation,
they knew they were the Simurgh,
and that the Simurgh was the thirty birds.
They saw both as one and the same being.
No experience can equal that experience.
What the birds finally come to understand is that the creation is an extension, a manifestation of the Creator. In this realization, the entire history of dualistic Western logic, reaching back to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, is vanquished. The knowledge of divine emanation replaces the postlapsarian knowledge of separation from God. In the “outer” world of each other’s faces the birds see the “inner” world of their God. And that inner world has shown forth a light that infuses the physical with the spiritual, that reveals the manifest world as the kingdom of God. Such a realization leads the birds into a deeper state of mediation:
and after a little they asked the Simurgh,
without using language, to reveal the mystery
of the unity and the multiplicity of beings.
Without speaking, the answer came, “This majesty
is a mirror. If you approach as thirty birds,
that’s what you will find. Forty or fifty
birds would come and see forty and fifty.
And although you are now completely changed,
you see yourselves as you were before.
You did well to be astounded and impatient
and doubting and full of wonder.
Lose yourselves in me joyfully,
and you will find yourselves.”
The Simurgh is telling the birds the same thing Jesus is telling his followers in Thomas’s Gospel: We in our multiplicity still harbor the divine presence of the original one, the source and the reconciliation of all being. When we look in the mirror, we must see both; we must see ourselves as we are, and we must see that we are still imbued with what Jesus calls the “father’s light” in this crucial passage:
Jesus said, “Images are visible to people, but the light within them is hidden in the image of the father’s light. He will be disclosed, but his image is hidden by his light.”
Jesus said, “When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your images that came into being before you and that neither die nor become visible, how much you will bear!”
Again, Jesus is telling his followers what the Simurgh tells the birds—the one (light) still exists in the presence of the many (images), but it is simultaneously a revealing and a concealing presence that can be known only through a more-than-rational knowledge that by its nature escapes language and logic. This intuitive knowledge has often gone by the name gnosis, and passages like the one above have often led commentators to insert the adjective gnostic in front of the title the Gospel of Thomas. Many versions of Christian gnosticism circulated in the centuries that followed the life of Jesus, but to me, gnosticism’s central tenet is that we all carry within us that original light (a divine spark, it is sometimes called) of the Creator. But that light cannot be known rationally through the five senses, and so a new way of knowing—gnosis—is required. Through such gnosis, we understand that the eternal one is constantly passing through the earth’s temporal forms, its millions of species. But because that force cannot be contained within an image, Jesus falls back on the paradoxical idea of an imageless image of light—the face we had before we were born. Like a Zen koan, this seemingly contradictory idea jams our rational thought processes and throws us over into the contemplative realm of gnosis. And it is there that we might recognize, just as the birds do when staring at their own images, that the multifarious images of our individual selves are still illuminated by the original light of the one—that they are one and the same because the creation is an emanation of the Creator, and therefore one cannot be separated from the other.
Thus my second principle of the new creationism—the original substance of life, and of the universe, can be called God—is not science but a gnosis. Yet it cannot contradict evolution or any other scientific fact because the physical laws are also the laws of the Creator: deus sive natura, God-or-nature. But whether we are talking about gnostic intuitions or scientific observation, our subject remains the kingdom of God, and what I find so fascinating and inspiring about Jesus’s message in the Gospel of Thomas is the way in which he reconciles a spiritual gnosis with a biological view of nature. In fact, I would claim that the sayings in Thomas represent a truly ecological gospel because, while we can accept the original imageless image as a source of gnostic contemplation, we can also ground that idea in contemporary evolutionary biology. Consider this saying, for example, which can be read as simply a description of the first cell’s division, one that no evolutionary biologist would contradict: “Jesus said, ‘On the day when you were one, you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?’” This is almost the same question that Attar’s birds ask the Simurgh about the one and the many. Perhaps it has been such a persistent question in Western philosophy because it implies that some sense of unity was severed and we were cast adrift on a chaotic, possibly random sea of multiplicity. But in this saying, Jesus seems to understand the question as both theological and biological. Twenty-one hundred years later, evolutionary biologists have answered their side of it by proving that the entire chorus of life shares one common ancestor, and so we are all kin to one another. That implies, to state what is obvious but too often ignored, that since all species on earth are kin, we should act like it. And that, I think, is the answer to Jesus’s question: When we realize that the one has split into two, we should also understand that the two are still bound together—biologically, theologically, and morally—because they are descended from the one. In a later saying, Jesus implies that when we achieve this level of reconciliation, something miraculous will happen: “Jesus said, ‘When you make the two into one, you will become children of humanity,’ and when you say, ‘Mountain, move from here,’ it will move.” Just as life and death are always a closed loop feeding into one another, so the many feed back into the one. Only this time, what unifies them is not only a biological understanding of genetic kinship but also a spiritual epiphany that the natural world is a kingdom of God.