I'm actually glad you mentioned the monkey matter. I like theological questions. I hope you don't mind me standing at a lectern for a moment to express some thoughts on this.

If the Supreme Being is an artist, I think the jury's still out on what sort of processes he/she has used and is still using. That adds to the mystery of it. If we say God wouldn't have used certain natural processes such as natural selection in the work of creation, wouldn't we be limiting him? Are we going to decide now and for all what kinds of processes God is working with? Is the creation ongoing, or was it a onetime thing? There are moths in England that had a documented change in coloring since the Industrial Revolution. Their color changed and adapted to increased amounts of soot in the air. Is this just mechanical causality, or does it partake of ongoing creation and therefore stand as an expression of God's work? Just because somebody explains something with a mechanism, I don't think that threatens God's employment prospects. The more mechanisms we find, the greater will be our crisis of integration, so we need a power that can harmonize all these mechanisms.

Was the original creation totally unlike the ongoing creation? Was the original creation divine, in contrast to the mechanisms that clicked in afterwards? I want to believe that there's something divine in the ongoing creation. I also want to believe that a divine consciousness was involved in weaving the fabric of laws, principles, and constants that underlies our world. If it was involved in incubating this fabric of laws, then it exists in harmony with them.

There is a drift in the structure of the haemoglobin molecule, which lets us learn something about the divergence in human populations. Evolutionary mechanisms are an important way to understand why different populations have differing levels of immunity against disease germs. Guns Germs and Steel. Scientists have found strains of algae that exchange genetic material. When strain A and strain B have an exchange, all the mitochondrial DNA of A is killed off (to avoid a strength-sapping competition between genomes within the offspring's protoplasm). The nuclear DNA of A and B is exchanged equally, but only B provides protoplasmic DNA. There is a gene that secretes a toxin, and only B's protoplasmic DNA has the counter-gene to block its effect. This is not quite a male-female thing yet, but it's similar to how an ovum contributes both nuclear and protoplasmic DNA while sperm is only allowed to contribute nuclear DNA. In other words, we are gradually learning yet another aspect about how sexual differences arose. This makes me all the more intrigued by the intricacy and deeply rooted travail of the creation. I would not want to think I can deny God permission to express his creative will through these methods.

Suppose somebody tells me that tempera-based paint was used to paint the "Last Supper." Wouldn't I be a strange art critic if I said Da Vinci could not have used eggs in his paint, because the lowly chicken is not worthy of providing a medium to present Jesus and his disciples? Couldn't the primate genome have provided something in the way of material to be shaped by the ongoing creation? Once material is shaped and something intangible is added, can't it be made into something different from what it made before? This is not the same as saying we "came from monkeys." It could mean that sometimes God likes to work with materials and tools, which after all is only a modest claim. Once the monkey material is utilized in a new way, we can make a case that it is no longer monkey material. Many people would be able to accept this. I think maybe hard-core creationists would prefer to think that God gets his material from thin air rather than from any segment of nature. It seems an unneeded rift has appeared because of people's attitudes (including those of hard-core evolutionists), not because of what's really out there.

I'm not a hard-core evolutionist either. I cannot conceive of the fabric of life arising from blind random variations. Something has to be capable of producing variation before variation can be a mechanism of evolution. In other words, I too, like you, believe that there is something more awesome than mere mechanism underlying the creation. But that doesn't mean we have to throw out evolutionary mechanisms in our broad view of creation. I think some very intelligent people move toward creationism because the more they learn about clashing mechanisms, the more they hunger for a power that can integrate them.

I use the name God spontanously sometimes. The cry rises from my heart, often when I'm sick or worried about human self-destruction. But it's not a word that sounds like an explanation: to me, it sounds like a mystery. I also like the word "Dao," or the Way. I like the word Heaven, and the Buddha-nature.

Here's my take on God. When we poor, mortal, limited beings reach beyond ourselves to help or connect with another, that's when we prove what we are. Spirit realizes itself best of all by jumping across gaps. It leaps across gaps of time; it leaps across gaps of space and of isolated individuality. When we show love (the kind that fosters others in their essence), our limited selves begin to tap an infinite reservoir. Each one of these acts of reaching makes a spark of light. As far as I can see, the body of God is made up of such shimmering tissues. Looking closer at these tissues, we see a multitude of those sparks going off here and there, like a star-field of fireflies. The sparks elicit each other, like cells supporting each other within that body. Right now this body is trying to heal itself because there are some places where the sparks cannot easily go off, where the physiology of love and light is being blocked by narrow, grudgeful human purposes. I don't claim to know about the mind of God, but I am interested in the workings of what I see as his body-in-this-world, as best I conceive it. I hope we have some common grounds of faith.