As to harmonizing the theory of evolution with the Biblical account of
creation, I do not believe it can be done, and I do not see why it should be.
The story of Genesis is beautiful, and profoundly significant as symbolism:
there is no good reason to torture it into conformity with modern theory. [12]

Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of
every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and
bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and
belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting
suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knowledge grows or alters
continually, it clashes with mythology and theology, which change with
geological leisureliness. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a
galling shackle or hateful barrier, and intellectual history takes on the
character of a "conflict between science and religion". Institutions which were
at first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and
morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control, and
become secular, perhaps profane.

The intellectual classes abandon the
ancient theology and—after some hesitation—the moral code allied with it;
literature and philosophy become anticlerical. The movement of liberation rises
to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralyzing disillusionment
with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports,
deteriorates into epicurean chaos; and life itself, shorn of
consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary
wealth. In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body
and soul, in a harmonious death. Meanwhile among the oppressed another myth
arises, gives new form to human hope, new courage to human effort, and after
centuries of chaos builds another civilization. [10]