Our original fantasy was to take a motorcycle and sidecar through South America, back when we were young and foolish and actually rode motorcycles. The problem was that every time it looked like an auspicious time when we could actually manage to do this kind of trip, even without the sidecar and motorcycle, people in the places we wanted to go were shooting at each other! That did not seem the most opportune time to do it.
This year nobody was shooting at each other, so we headed off.

We started in Lima and then went up to Cuzco and spent a few days in Machu Picchu. The highlight was to have a guide tell us about the religious images of the Incas; the Condor, the Puma and the Anaconda–symbols of the heavens above, the earth below and the underworld. He then insisted that those peoples were not dumb, pagan, idol-worshipers, but people with an acute sense of what in our Seventh Principle is the interconnectedness of all life. He had to know that there were likely people in his potential audience for whom the notion of affirming the indigenous religion of the peoples would be offensive. I admired his courage and his eloquence in doing it.
One of the highlights of that piece of the trip for me was a bit of dueling banjos, as in the movie Deliverance.
I had my ukulele with me and, the night before, we had met a couple of musicians outside a restaurant and paid a few coins to listen to them. When they saw us in a restaurant later, they came in and played for the restaurant. The next morning I'm sitting out in front of the hotel playing my ukulele and from maybe eight or ten stores away, up the street, is coming back to me the same thing I'm playing. Only it’s on a harp and the 10-stringed indigenous instrument. And we had dueling banjos going for a while. Then the guys came down the street to where I was. The one who played the 10-string instrument asked if he could play my ukulele. He played it a bit and said, "This is not tuned right." He tweaked the strings and then commenced to play Andean music on a Hawaiian ukulele. I wasn't fit to live with for a couple of days afterwards.

Then we went to the upper regions of the Amazon, just over the eastern side of the Andes, and spent a week wandering with guides through various pieces of that environment. We went into the villages, back into the jungle, were hoisted up into the treetops, and rode on steel cables in the very tops of the canopies where there's a whole different ecosystem than anybody sees from down on the ground.

There are, believe it or not, pink dolphins in the Amazon. Now, I was prepared for a dolphin that was kind of, you know, pale-colored perhaps, and maybe with a tinge of pink such that, if you had a good imagination, you would call a pink dolphin. I wasn’t prepared for a dolphin that was the color of the healthiest flamingo you ever saw. It is absolutely breathtaking to see one of these incredible, bright pink creatures break the water of the Amazon River.

From there we went to the Galapagos. I had been fascinated with the Galapagos, as was Nancy, from as early as we heard about the magic that Darwin saw when he visited the islands on the H.M.S. Beagle. He was the science officer, or whatever they called it in those days, bringing back samples and descriptions and drawings of what went on in British ships of that time. What he saw was a group of islands with finches, among other animals, on them and the finches were all different. There are some 13 or 14 species of finches. They are all from the same original pair of finches. There are few other small birds on the island. All of the small bird niches on the islands are filled with these finches. But on no single island are there more than three variations of the finches. I have this wonderful picture taken on the last island that we visited with three finches all in the same picture, a warbler finch that is brilliantly yellow across its breast, a woodpecker finch that actually uses little twigs to poke bugs and things out of niches and crannies in the trees, and a ground finch which is very dark-colored and scurries about on the ground. On each island there is a different selection of finches. Some of those finches have beaks that look like they could bite your finger through. Others have long, skinny beaks for going into flowers. Each of the various subspecies of finch has found for itself a niche and, over time, has acquired the tools to efficiently exploit that particular niche.

It was as if there was an assembly of tools available to the finches and an assortment of camouflage suits, and the birds could pick the tool that best suited the situation that they found themselves in and could pick the camouflage suit that best protected them in that situation. It looks intentional. I get scoffed at for being anthropomorphic and anthropopathic, but that's the way it looks. It looks as if, either by the birds' intent or by the designer's intent, this has been very carefully planned and carried out.

What Darwin realized, of course, was that no intention was necessary. In any given population there is a wide range of variation. That variation will include a number of changes, differences, from animal to animal. Those birds with the variation that best fit the particular situation they found themselves in got more food and had more babies. Over time, that variation would become the dominant variation, but there would still be that range of differences.
We saw a poignant example of this. One of the things that is everywhere on all of the islands are the most ridiculous-looking birds you could ever wish to see. They are called blue-footed boobies, and they have bright electric blue feet and legs. There are also Naska or masked boobies. The Naska boobies look exactly the same except no blue feet and slightly different pattern to the coloration. But the naska boobies nest in low branches and the blue-footed boobies nest right on the ground. We got to walk through the nesting grounds for both of these kinds on a number of the islands.

A baby boobie is even more ridiculous-looking than the adults. It looks like somebody took a whole bunch of cotton balls and something with glue on it and started throwing cotton balls at the pile of glue. On one of the islands we came across a baby blue-footed booby that was almost as big as an adult. This booby, sitting on the ground waiting for Mommy to come feed it, had a normal bottom beak but the top beak curved off to one side with a sharp hook in it. The guide said this chick, of course, will die. As long as its parents will feed it, it will survive, but when it reaches adulthood and its parents go off and leave it, this booby will die.

I said to him, "Are you sure? Are you sure there is not a niche here on this island where that booby, even with a wicked curve to his beak, can find something that nobody else happens to be eating? Is it possible that what we have in this wicked curved beak booby is a new subspecies of booby down the line awhile into the future?"
He smiled wryly at my silliness and said, "Well, yes, it's possible."

But I couldn't have asked for a better illustration of the process that produces speciation; nor could Darwin. Some people look at this apparent intentionality, that wonderful close fit of the equipment and the behavior of the animals in the natural world, and say, "Ah hah! a designer. This universe must have been created by somebody who was paying wonderfully acute attention to incredible detail to produce the diverse, marvelous environment we have on earth." They find the idea of random selection produced by these variations within populations way too large a leap of imagination. A designer is a much more esthetically pleasing image for it.
I personally find that the whole process called "evolution" is an incredibly elegant and, indeed, beautiful idea. The environment goes through changes -- the weather changes, the vegetation changes. As it does, animals and plants over time find their niches, find the places where they're most suited or able to survive. Out of that wrestling for niches comes an incredible rich and wonderful diversity of life. It is a conceptual model that, so far, best accounts for all of the data. It is, of course, not provable. No one can do a double-blind experiment on the past. The debate about creationism and evolution is an ironic one in that none of the images, conceptual models or theories are provable in the usual sense of that word. The only proof is that, so far, it best accounts for the observed information. However, unlike the alternate explanations, evolution is falsifiable. All it takes is one piece of data that won't fit the model. And the model has to be either changed or abandoned . This is something that is not true of the designer paying attention to such wonderful details.

I was again struck by the beauty of the idea as I walked the trails of the lush Amazon jungle and, in comparison, the gaunt hills of the Galapagos Islands. Those who hold literalistic ideas about the Bible, of course, do not find evolution esthetically pleasing at all. Rather, they find it offensive and as a contradiction to God's word. And it must be admitted that the image of a creator god attentive to such fine detail does have an esthetic appeal of its own. It was just that esthetic image that the Jewish poet of the fifth century BCE was trying to catch in that poem that we call the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. He was writing about the good-ness, the beautiful-ness, the wonderful-ness of the natural world, where the competitor of his day claimed that the natural world, because it was made of matter and not spirit, was evil.

I also love James Weldon Johnson's poem, in God's Trombones, about creation. It's cast in the form of African-American sermon but it, too, has that sense of the goodness, the beauty, the incredible interconnectedness of all life.

The two sets of images are not necessarily in conflict as long as we let our poets be poets and our scientists be scientists. Each of them has an appeal and a beauty, a specialness to it; except, as I say, to those committed to a literal interpretation of ancient scripture.

Interestingly enough, Pope John Paul II, came around. You may not be aware, but back in 1996, addressing a conference on science and religion, he said to them that, indeed, the universe probably was created by a process very much like what evolutionists describe; all except for, of course, the creation of the human soul. The lines are interesting. "It is indeed remarkable," said John Paul II, "that this theory has progressively taken root in the minds of researchers following a series of discoveries made in different fields of knowledge, the . . . results of studies undertaken independently from each other constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory. Taken literally, the Biblical view of the beginning of life and Darwin's scientific view would seem irreconcilable. In Genesis, the creation of the world and Adam, the first human, took six days.

“Evolution's process of genetic mutation and natural selection, survival and proliferation of the fittest of the species has taken billions of years, according to scientists. If the human body,” he says,” has its origin in living material which pre-exists it,( and he went on to say several things confirming that that's probably so) the spiritual soul is immediately created by God.”

So, even with the caveat, the Catholic Church, at least, is prepared to let our poets be poets, our scientists be scientists, our religionists be religionists without necessarily having to battle with each other. There is a recent post script to be added to that. The current Pope, Benedict the 16th, apparently has instructed folk at the Vatican to see if they can undo the damage that John Paul II did back in 1996. But what is clear here is that what is at stake is not primarily religious.

What is at stake is not primarily theological. What is at stake is primarily political, and therein lies the tragedy and the sadness of much of the collision of religion and science in the modem world. What is also true is that there is a fairly short list of issues where Catholic and Evangelical Christians have backed themselves into a very awkward corner.

The Mormon Church had a similar problem a few years ago. The leader of the Mormon Church is considered a prophet and whatever he says, after sufficient prayer and meditation, is God's official version and given to the people. A previous leader of the Mormon Church had said that black folk could not be full members of the Mormon priesthood. A few years ago, just a few weeks before they were to lose a lawsuit having to do with an African-American Mormon Boy Scout trying to apply for his God and Country Award--and it was clear they were going to lose–God managed to get through to Mr. Kimball, the leader then. Things had changed and the rules need to change to reflect the realities of real world. It was just fine for this young black man to become a Mormon priest and have his God and Country Award.

The Catholic Church and the Evangelical Christians are in a more awkward situation in that it is much more difficult for them to change those kinds of things. Even if a majority of their adherents were to realize that, "Gee, it might be appropriate to let our poets be poets and our religionists and scientists do their thing, as well," they cannot let it happen. Evangelicals, because of the long history of proof-texting, of insisting that what the Bible says must be literally followed; Catholics, because of being stuck with a set of Ex Cathedra statements by past popes who were speaking in a totally different historical context. The most dramatic example is Pius IX who, back in 1860, issued the Syllabus of Errors, a long list of things which are anathema; including things like democracy, voting, locomotives, telegraph, radio . On many issues, they cannot embrace the modern world without appearing to abandon their faith.

Creationism, in any of its guises, has no place in our biology classrooms. But it may well belong in our social studies classrooms as a poignant example of how ideological thinking can lead us into the inability to effectively live in the real, existing world with the real choices and decisions that are actually before us.


To walk behind the guide wielding his machete, cutting a virgin trail through dense rain forest with every step;
Seeing a species of plant or bird or animal that I have never seen before, all around me the sounds of a universe I had not tuned my ear to;

To walk through a nesting ground of these amazingly gangly birds, ungainly-on-the-ground but so graceful in flight;

To have your bus stopped in the middle of the road because there was a turtle almost as big as a Volkswagen sitting in the middle of the road;

To step off the boat onto the volcanic rocks at the edge of the ocean and have these black marine iguanas laying there in the middle of the trail, perfectly well aware that the trail belongs to them, piled one on top of the other, having a little sunshine, warming themselves up before they go back into the water and have something more to eat;

To share that water, snorkeling in the islands with penguins chasing schools of fish past me, with seals playing water polo with me underwater;

To be engulfed by that rich diversity of vibrant life with every available niche filled with a unique way of creating life, sustaining life, and passing that gift of life on . . . ;

That will be with me for years to come.

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The First Unitarian Church of Honolulu