In an interview on ABC's Nightline last night, co-anchor Cynthia McFadden asked President George W. Bush about evolution and creation:

Cynthia McFadden: So you can read the Bible and not take it literally. I mean you can—it's not inconsistent to love the Bible and believe in evolution, say.
George W. Bush: Yeah, I mean, I do. I mean, evolution is an interesting subject. I happen to believe that evolution doesn't fully explain the mystery of life and ...

McFadden: But do you believe in it?
Bush: That God created the world, I do, yeah.

McFadden: But what about ...
Bush: Well, I think you can have both. I think evolution can—you're getting me way out of my lane here. I'm just a simple president. But it's, I think that God created the earth, created the world; I think the creation of the world is so mysterious it requires something as large as an almighty and I don't think it's incompatible with the scientific proof that there is evolution.

Stephen Johnson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and a devout Christian, expressed a similar view in an in-depth profile published in The Philadelphia Inquirer this past weekend. Asked about evolution and creation, Johnson, who majored in biology at Taylor University, an evangelical college, said, "It's not a clean-cut division. If you have studied at all creationism vs. evolution, there's theistic or God-controlled evolution and there's variations on all those themes." —Heather Wax