This week, with the holiday of Simchat Torah, Jews all over the world begin again the annual cycle of Torah readings, starting with the opening chapters of Genesis and the biblical account of Creation.

Creation is a hot subject these days. What used to be called “creationism,” and now goes by the name of “intelligent design” (a buzz phrase so recent that you won’t find it in a pre-21stcentury dictionary),is now second to the “right-to-life” as a public policy issue on the agenda of the Christian Right. Indeed, if the Christian Right had its way, more high school students would be taking courses in “intelligent design” than in trigonometry or French.

There is of course an element of sheer lunacy to this. To deny the scientific validity of evolutionary theory, whatever its still problematic aspects may be, is, at this stage of history, about as rational as denying the validity of the Copernican theory of the solar system. It’s flat-earthism transferred to the plain of biology.

And yet the parallel is not perfect. The question of whether the earth orbits the sun or the sun orbits the earth is an either/or one. Both propositions cannot be true. This is not quite the case with evolution vs. “intelligent design.” Although one can view them also, as the Christian Right does, as mutually exclusive possibilities, it is hardly necessary to do so. Many less-than-lunatic-fringe Christians would do themselves a favor if they understood this.

The biblical account of Creation might even help them to do so. It’s hardly an accident, after all, that life, according to the Bible, started with the plant kingdom, followed by fish, birds, mammals, and human beings, all more or less in the same order that evolutionary theory places them in. This does not mean that the author of Genesis read Darwin. But it does mean that both the author of Genesis and Darwin, from very different perspectives, understood that the simpler forms of life preceded the more complex ones, and that the complexity of humans far exceeds that of any other species.

From the point of view of the believer in the Bible, indeed, there is no very good reason why the biblical God cannot be conceived of as having created the different stages of life by means of evolution rather than in opposition to it. True, the Bible tells us that he did his work in six days while evolution speaks of hundreds of millions of years, but the Bible also says of God, in the Psalmist’s

words to him, “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past and as a watch in the night.” The relativity of time and of our measurement of it is not a strictly modern notion, and a “day” of Creation, to anyone but a diehard literalist, need not mean 24 hours of 60 minutes each.

Biblical fundamentalists express themselves as if to impute the utilization of natural processes to the God they believe in were to slight his powers: Since a God wishing to create man could have done so, being God, with a figurative snap of his fingers, it is blasphemous to suggest that he might have preferred the slower path of DNA mutations. What Omnipotent Being would leave anything as important to the cosmic snail’s pace of Nature?

Yet a moment’s serious reflection should convince those who hold such views of their own illogic. In the first place, far from enhancing God’s powers, they have curtailed them by laying down their own rules for how he is and is not allowed to get things done. And secondly, they have denied themselves the pleasure of seeing his own handiwork.

After all, if the creation of man by natural evolution is not a divine miracle because it all boils down in the end to the behavior of organic compounds, then what that is miraculous is left us? Not the stars in the sky, which we now know are composed of the same atoms and molecules that we have on earth; not the waves in the sea, which are simply wind-driven algorithms of di-hydrogen oxide and sodium chloride; not a sunrise, or a rainbow, or a newborn baby. Deny God access to evolution and you chase him out of the entire universe.

Creationists claim to be offended by the thought that they descend from the apes. And to descend from dirt, which the Bible tells us man was created from, is nobler? Is a God who made man by breathing into a lump of clay really any more impressive than a God who could turn a quadrupedal, tree-climbing primate into an Einstein? Both are good tricks if you can manage them.

The real difference between a religious and a mechanical view of the universe has nothing to do with the scientific facts, which – to the extent that they have been established as such – no one of sane mind would choose to contest. It has to do with their interpretation. As William Blake once said, “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.” This is not a disagreement over the laws of chemistry and optics responsible for making chlorophyll green.

Intelligent design? If you have the eyes for it, it’s everywhere. But you won’t see it better by refusing to look at evolution. On the contrary: You’ll be missing out on the best part of it.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.