My wife and I arrived home the other day from a vacation in the far-off Galapagos Islands to learn that the Terri Schiavo case had escalated to Congress and the federal courts.

The left was arguing, with considerable justification, that Washington had no business intervening in what is essentially a state matter, though such a critique might come better from folks who aren’t spending most of their waking hours inventing reasons for Washington to get itself involved in practically everything else. The right was arguing with at least equal justification that Florida’s judges, who managed to bring the country to the brink of constitutional crisis in 2000, had once again messed up badly by, among other things, allowing an adulterous husband to remain in charge of his wife’s fate.

The vituperative nature of the debate was almost enough to send us rushing back to the seeming serenity of the Galapagos, a collection of volcanic outcroppings in the Pacific Ocean 500 miles west of Ecuador. On second thought, however, that might not offer much relief. The Galapagos Islands, after all, are the geographic epicenter of perhaps the bitterest modern debate of all: Darwin’s theory of evolution.

This debate, pitting as it does two fundamental views of man against each other – man as little more than glorified ape, or man as created in God’s image – form the competing visions that can be detected at the root of most of our political arguments, most emphatically the argument over how to deal with the tragedy that befell Terri Schiavo.

Not that the Galapagos isn’t a great place to visit. No TV, no cell phones, and the equator runs smack through the archipelago, making for nice warm days, a relief from a long, hard winter. Moreover, the expert naturalists on our Lindblad cruise ship knew exactly where to find the tortoises, iguanas, sea lions, blue-footed boobies, and all the other fascinating wildlife – especially the famous “Darwin’s finches” around which Charles Darwin developed his theory of natural selection (“Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life,” as he subtitled “The Origin of Species,” published a quarter century after HMS Beagle returned to England from its round-the-world cruise).

The shock waves of Darwin’s theory are still reverberating, as the latest spate of quarrels over whether and how to teach the theory of evolution in the nation’s schools evinces. Indeed, an IMAX film about the Galapagos is under attack for allegedly suggesting that Darwin’s theory is proven fact. Thus hiking around the Galapagos, far from offering respite from a troubled world, is in many ways a descent into the heart of the troubles.

Is what one is seeing evidence that man is simply the result of a lot of happy biological accidents? Or is Darwin’s theory just a theory – and a deeply flawed one at that?

As creationists are quick to note, Darwin never claimed to have witnessed the actual origin of a species, despite the title of his famous book. And even Darwin confessed that given such marvels as the human eye, it “seems … absurd in the highest possible degree” to imagine that only biological chance is at work.

But later scholars have attributed such comments as a bow by Darwin toward the reigning dogma of his times. As Steven M. Stanley, now a distinguished paleobiologist at Johns Hopkins University, put it to me once: “How good a designer was the guy who created the human knee?”

Thus my own predilection is for some sort of fusionist perspective: The scientific evidence for evolution is strong, and worth learning about in our schools, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a Creator, who for reasons of his own allows things to … well, evolve. To believe otherwise is to reduce mankind to incidental status, in which case who cares what happens to Terri Schiavo, or to subject science to a religious test, in which case we risk undercutting the spirit of open inquiry that has been a crucial source of the West’s inventiveness and prosperity.

It seems to me demeaning and unfair to our democratic process to say that the Schiavo controversy is only the work of political opportunism. The dispute reflects a deeper, entirely legitimate “conflict of visions,” in the words of Thomas Sowell. And nothing you can see in the Galapagos will dissuade you of that – though, alas, it may not permit you to forget about it, either.

Mr. Bray is a Detroit News columnist.