LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Ray Kurzweil may not be a household name, but the blind know who he is. He invented the first reading machine and then reduced its size to a hand-held gadget. Kurzweil will be remembered more as a man on a mission to tell the world what life will be like in the age of technology. Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates said he is the best in the world at predicting the future, and what a world he predicts.

RAY KURZWEIL: This is a design of a robotic red blood cell. We are going to put these technologies inside us, blood-cell-size devices that will augment our immune system, make us a lot healthier, destroy disease and dramatically push back human longevity, go inside our brains and actually enable us to remember things better, solve problems more effectively. We are going to become a hybrid of machine and our biological heritage. In my mind, we are not going to be transcending our humanity. We are going to be transcending our biology.

SEVERSON: Kurzweil has written several books. One of the most recent, called “The Singularity Is Near,” predicts that by the year 2050 nonbiological artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, creating a hybrid of man and technology.

KURZWEIL: What I am predicting is that we will have machines—we are going to need a different word because these are not like the machines we are used to. These are going to be machines that will seem as human, as real, as conscious, as any actual human being.

SEVERSON: Even if nonbiological or artificial intelligence created in places like MIT is not as close to “singularity” or matching human intelligence, as Kurzweil believes, it’s close enough that scientists and ethicists are now saying we need to take a serious look at its ramifications. Professor Christian Brugger is a bioethicist at Saint John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver. Brugger disagrees with Kurzweil that humans can ever come close to perfection with technology.

PROFESSOR CHRISTIAN BRUGGER (Saint. John Vianney Theological Seminary): I don’t think that the technology is the problem. What I have concerns about is the philosophy that stands behind it, the idea that somehow we are going to be able to overcome human limitation or we’re going to overcome death.

SEVERSON: What troubles Brugger the most is the notion that technology will one day replace God.

BRUGGER: If we start to think about technology as a kind of savior, is it going to overcome our misguided ambitions? Is it going to overcome those kinds of prejudices that cause us to hate our neighbor? To many of us who follow a religion, we’d say that God would help us to overcome those things.

SEVERSON: Kurzweil argues that it’s human nature for mankind to utilize technology to overcome human limitations.

KURZWEIL: We are the species that does change ourselves. We didn’t stay on the ground. We didn’t stay on the planet. We didn’t stay with the limits of our biology. If you want to speak in religious terms you can say that’s what God intended us to do.

SEVERSON: Kurzweil bases his predictions on what he calls the exponential growth of artificial intelligence in the fields of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics.

KURZWEIL: Informational technology is growing exponentially, not linearly. Our intuition says it grows like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5—thirty steps later you’re at 30. The reality is that it grows 2, 4, 8, 16, and 30 steps later you are at billion.

(giving a speech): When I was a student at MIT, I went there because it was so advanced at that time it actually had a computer, and it costs tens of millions of dollars. It took up half a building. The computer that I carry around and that we all carry around is a million times less expensive. It’s a thousand times more powerful.

SEVERSON: John Donoghue is a professor of neuroscience and engineering and director of the Brown University Institute for Brain Science. He says his work has not progressed exponentially. But in only 10 years he’s been able to implant sensors in the brains of paralyzed patients enabling them to operate a computer, type, run a robotic limb simply by thinking, sending out brain signals.

PROFESSOR JOHN DONOGHUE: The value of the technology is first for people who are severely paralyzed. The first step is to give them any control at all. They can’t do anything without help from someone else. People want and feel some sense of pride in taking care of themselves so anything we can restore is a great step.

SEVERSON: Neuroscience has yielded other life altering advances. For instance, there are now over 75,000 Parkinson patients worldwide who’ve had tiny electrodes implanted in their brains. Doctors say the operation significantly reduces tremors and allows patients to rely less on medications.

KURZWEIL: By the way, nobody is picketing, protesting, oh, people putting computers in their brains—that that is somehow unnatural or defies the way things should be.

SEVERSON: Bioethicist Brugger worries that science will soon cross the line to where brain implants will not simply heal patients, but enhance their ability to think and compete.

BRUGGER: If we move in this direction of radical human enhancement, are we going to develop those who are and those who aren’t? The enhanced and the unenhanced? I mean, Lord, we can’t even find the money to get everyone braces who needs braces.

KURZWEIL: When the technologies are only affordable by the rich they actually don’t work very well. Consider mobile phones. Fifteen years ago somebody took out a mobile phone in the movie. That was a signal this person is very powerful and wealthy, and they didn’t work very well. Now 5 billion people out of 6 billion have mobile phones, and they actually work pretty well.

COLIN ANGLE (CEO of iRobot): A lot of people worry about one day there will be a knock on the door, and there will be a robot, and you would say where did that come from? And I will tell you that the future is going to be much stranger.

SEVERSON: Colin Angle is the cofounder and CEO of iRobot, better known as the creator of the Roomba, the floor cleaning robot or the PackBot robot used to disarm roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, and soon to be released—robots that can keep track of grandma and remind her when it’s time to take her meds.

ANGLE: We call it a physical avatar, and so that these robots would allow a doctor to visit a patient in their own home without ever having to leave his doctor office. These robots are meant to be surrogates for people, so the personality of the doctor will be the personality of the robot.

BRUGGER: I think that iRobots are wonderful, if they can do the vacuuming for me so I can read a good book. I’m happy with that. But iRobots are not my wife, and they are not my children. They are not even an animal.

SEVERSON: Angle doesn’t believe robots will ever replace humans, but he says notwithstanding the science fiction stories of robots run amok, society needs them.

ANGLE: Throughout history there are many different situations where technology exists and can be used for good or evil, and I think that as robots become more capable we need to be careful about using robots to help society.

DONOGHUE: The classic scary story is “The Matrix,” of course, where you plug in and you live in this other reality.

SEVERSON: The reality where computers take over the world:

(from the movie “The Matrix”): “We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.” “AI? You mean artificial intelligence?” “A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them.”

SEVERSON: Kurzweil himself worries about technology falling into the wrong hands.

KURZWEIL: The same technologies that are being used to reprogram biology away from heart disease and cancer, presumably good things, could be deployed by a bioterrorist to reprogram a biological virus to be more destructive, and that’s actually a specter that exists right now.

SEVERSON: He says he’s working with the military to develop a system to detect rogue viruses, something like the virus protection found in today’s computer software. But he sees the good society can gain from artificial intelligence far outweighing the bad.

KURZWEIL: That was the family religion. It was personalized: You, Ray, can find the ideas that will change the world.

SEVERSON: Kurzweil has patented over two dozen inventions, including the first music synthesizer, which he sold to Stevie Wonder. President Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Technology, and few have more faith in technology than Ray Kurzweil.

KURZWEIL: Computers are already better than humans at logical thinking. It is our emotional intelligence, the ability to be funny, to get the joke—that is the cutting edge of human intelligence. That’s the most sophisticated, complicated thing we do, and that’s exactly the heart of my prediction that these computers will match us in emotional intelligence, which includes our whole moral system.

BRUGGER: I don’t think that will ever be reached because now we are dealing in the realm of the spirit. If the entire realm of the spirit that has been spoken about in the history of poetry and literature and philosophy and theology is reducible to electrical synapse, then we can reproduce it eventually in a machine, because electricity is at the basis of the machine. I deny that premise. I think that there is more to human beings than reducible to measurable stimuli, and in that regard I don’t think that machines are ever going to be able to be human.

SEVERSON: Undaunted by his critics and skeptics, Kurzweil is so convinced that artificial intelligence will one day enable man to live forever he is doing everything he can to be around when it happens.

SONYA KURZWEIL (making a toast): Well, here’s to living forever. That’s not just a salutation in our family.

KURZWEIL: I want to live indefinitely, and actually I think we all do. People say, oh, I don’t want to live forever, 100 would be great. When they get to 100, they don’t want to die tomorrow.

SEVERSON: Kurzweil is so determined to live “indefinitely.” He takes as many as 200 supplements each day, says this regimen made it possible to reverse both his diabetes and his age. His most recent full-blown checkup results show he has the body and mind of a 40-year-old. Kurzweil is 62 and striving for immortality.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Boston.

KIM LAWTON, guest anchor: Science and religion are sometimes at odds over the environment, but one prominent biologist is pleading for both to work together in order to protect the earth’s biodiversity — the many species of plants and animals that scientists say are at risk. E.O. Wilson is the author of a recent book, THE CREATION. He spoke with Bob Abernethy.

ABERNETHY: The thin layer of life covering the earth’s surface is made up of perhaps 10 million species of plants and animals, maybe more, and many scientists say those forms of life are in mortal peril. One of those sounding the alarm is biologist and retired Harvard University professor E.O. Wilson.

Dr. E.O. WILSON (Biologist and Author, THE CREATION: AN APPEAL TO SAVE LIFE ON EARTH): I want us to save the creation — not just care about it, but to save it.

ABERNETHY: Wilson is a broadly learned man with many honors, among them two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his lifework — the study of ants.

Dr. WILSON: Here is a typical drawer of hundreds if not thousands of specimens.

ABERNETHY: His mission now is to protect all the Earth’s species. The greatest threat to biodiversity, says Wilson, is humankind’s appetite for more and more lumber and food and minerals and space to support six-and-a-half billion people, on the way to nine billion. Wilson says it is human over-consumption that’s the greatest threat to other species, and therefore a problem for us, too.

Dr. WILSON: We are threatened by the immense loss of future scientific knowledge, of future products that could enrich humanity and give us a higher quality of life. But the loss that I care about most is in our — in spiritual enrichment, in living in the magnificent original environment in which humanity was born.

ABERNETHY: Wilson says the natural world cleans water, pollinates plants and provides pharmaceuticals, among many other gifts.

Dr. WILSON: Thirty trillion dollars worth of services, scot-free to humanity, every year.

ABERNETHY: Wilson says scientists have identified 25 so-called hotspots — two-and-a-half percent of the earth’s land surface — in which nearly half of all the plant and animal species have been found. He wants the world to spend $30 billion to protect those ecosystems, in his words to “throw an umbrella over them.” The same species in other places might be endangered, but those in the hotspots would survive.

Wilson has long been a secular humanist, but he was raised a Southern Baptist in Alabama, and he understands religion’s power. So his new book, THE CREATION, is addressed to an imaginary Southern Baptist minister.

Dr. WILSON (From THE CREATION: AN APPEAL TO SAVE LIFE ON EARTH): Pastor, we need your help. The Creation is the glory of the earth. Let’s see if we can’t get together on saving it, because science and religion are the most powerful social forces on Earth. We could do it.

ABERNETHY: Wilson’s imaginary pastor could be Richard Land, a Southern Baptist minister who is the chief spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention. He’s a radio broadcaster and the author of his own book on the environment, THE EARTH IS THE LORD’S.

Dr. RICHARD LAND (President, Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission): Genesis chapter 1 tells us that God put man in charge under his headship. Human beings have dominion and are given dominion. But then that’s tempered by Genesis chapter 2, where man is put into the Garden to till it and to keep it. We’re not to just worship nature in its pristine form. We have a divinely mandated responsibility to both develop the earth for human betterment and to protect it and to guard it and keep it and exercise creation care.

ABERNETHY: Land accuses Wilson of being too concerned about wildlife and not enough about humanity.

Dr. LAND: He looks upon human beings as an alien species to the habitat of nature and that we are the ones that are destructive and that we have been a catastrophic event. Nature would have been far better off without human beings. As a Christian, we believe that God created the creation for humankind. So while we are to give respect to all life, we must treat human life with reverence. And there is in Christian theology a hierarchy of species, and there is a firebreak between human beings and the rest of creation. It is human beings that God gave a soul.

ABERNETHY: And protecting other species?

Dr. LAND: We certainly need to do all we can without causing grievous harm to human beings. There’s the difference — without causing grievous harm to human beings.

ABERNETHY: Land says millions of people, especially the very poor, would be devastated by some proposals for protecting the environment. Wilson insists that biodiversity could be protected without hurting humans.

Dr. WILSON: It would increase our standard of living if we did it sensibly with less material and energy consumption and conservation of the rest of life. We can actually increase the productivity of the world while saving all of the, or most of the remaining species.

ABERNETHY: Wilson sees a problem in what he says is the implication for some Christians of the belief that Christ is coming again.

Dr. WILSON: And that therefore there isn’t a lot of value in paying any attention to what we do to the Earth. We could go ahead and tear it all to hell and back, and I do consider that, frankly, as a gospel of despair, a view of humanity and our place on this Earth that is indefensible.

Dr. LAND: I personally have never met an evangelical Christian who believes that. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s a mythic figure. I believe that history will culminate in a radical second advent of Jesus Christ to judge the quick and the dead and to redeem his creation and humankind. But I specifically repudiate that you can draw from that that we can ignore the biblical admonitions and the biblical commands to exercise creation care. I think that is a false theology.

ABERNETHY: And Wilson’s idea of setting aside those 25 hotspots to protect their ecosystems?

Dr. LAND: As long as it can be done by not severely damaging the human beings who are in that eco-culture.

ABERNETHY: Land acknowledges that protecting the environment is becoming a high priority issue for many evangelicals.

Dr. LAND: Oh, I think that’s right. I think it’s a growing consensus among evangelicals and a growing consensus among Western civilization in general, and evangelical Christians are a part of that. The devil’s going to be in the details. It’s going to be in how do we address this?

Q: As briefly and as strongly as you can put it, what do you want all of us to do?

A: I want us to save the creation. Not just care about it, but save it. A large percentage of the Earth’s ecosystems and the species that live in them are endangered, and many will go extinct unless we take proper action.

Q: How serious is this threat of destruction? You have made some calculations and estimates about what percentage of existing species might be lost in some period of time.

A: It might be best to preface that by saying that the official list, which has been gone over species by species by experts, has something like 40 percent of the fresh water fish species in the world at some degree of risk, and about 25 percent, very roughly, of the frogs and other amphibians and reptiles and things of that sort, and 12 percent of the birds, and they are at sufficient risk so that most specialists on biological diversity would agree that as many as one-half of the species of plants and animals on Earth will be gone by the end of this century if we don’t do something.

Q: What if they disappear?

A: In very brief summary, what we will lose would have otherwise been incalculable value to future generations — well, to our own generation — in scientific knowledge, in potential new products, including pharmaceuticals that can be discovered in these species. We will lose enormous value and ecological services. It’s been estimated that the wild creatures of the world, the ecosystems they form, provide roughly $30 trillion worth of services scot-free to humanity every year. But to come quickly to the issues that I have most recently brought up, we will have severe spiritual loss, and we ought to also have for all generations to come, if we don’t do something about it, a bad conscience for having allowed the world biodiversity, and I will also call it “the Creation,” to disappear.

Q: You say severe spiritual loss. What do you mean by that?

A: The rest of life is important for humanity. It’s important not only for our day-to-day welfare and for our potential to manage a healthful life for humanity, but it is important for our psychological well-being. Psychologists have now established that probably due to the fact that humanity has lived in the midst of wild nature and came into being in wild nature’s environment that we are hard-wired to a very substantial degree to respond to it in particular wars, and to gain a sense of security, of depths of relationship, on occasion a sense of unlimited frontiers to explore, and the sense of our own worth. It’s a mix that, put together, produces spirituality.

Q: I can imagine someone saying that we have a growing population. We need to expand out into more and more farmland. From your perspective, that means destroying the natural habitat. Wouldn’t a lot of people think there was more practical value in growth and more economic prosperity than there would be — that that would be more important than protection of the species?

A: Well, let me put it this way, and with a metaphor, with a parable, so to speak. It would be a more immediate practical value to the French people to sell off all of the contents of the Louvre, take the money and put it into, well, whatever. But that would be very short-term, would it not, in terms of what would be yielded in money and income and perhaps comfort? But consider, too, it would be even greater practical value to burn it and use it for fuel. But, of course, the value of that would only last a matter of a few hours.

Q: What I’m trying to get at is the extent to which we are threatened by the loss of all these species. A: We are threatened by their loss.

Q: Why?

A: We are threatened by the immense loss that it entails of future scientific knowledge, future products that could enrich humanity and help stabilize our economies and give us a higher quality of life. We would be at severe loss, and you can measure it in dollars, of the ecosystem services, like the cleaning of water, the maintenance of water systems, pollination and so on that these wild systems provide for us. But the loss that I care about most is in spiritual enrichment, in living in this magnificent original environment in which humanity was born.

Q: What might be lost unless we act? What are the figures?

A: We know 1.8 million species of plants and animals and microorganisms today. We know them enough to classify them and identify them. The actual number is perhaps ten million, I think at least ten million, but when you include the microorganisms, it could go to a hundred million.

Q: We’re not conscious, most of us, of all these species on which you say we depend.

A: I don’t say it. It’s a fact that we depend on balanced, harmonious ecosystems for our lives.

Q: If we continue on the road we’re going, then, are we at risk of going hungry?

A: Let’s put it this way. Eventually yes, but I think the long-term loss would be the pauperization of the Earth. We’d get along, but it would just be a far poorer, less stable Earth. You know, I wish you would ask me the following question: Should we really be giving up fertile land and reducing our agricultural output worldwide and other resource output to save this species?

Q: Consider it asked.

A: Okay. In fact, the good news part of all of this big issue of the living environment and its conservation is that if we use our science, if we use common sense, we can actually increase the productivity of the world while saving all of the, or most of the remaining species. And we can do it in part by studying and making use of the resources of new food crops, new genes that can improve existing crop productivity, and furthermore the restoration for agricultural purposes of parts of the world that have become wasteland. But there’s another reason why this is such a foolish equation to draw, you know, between development versus conservation, and that is that we now know that something like one-half of the plant species of the world and perhaps 40 percent, very roughly, of the best known groups of animals, you know, like birds, mammals, and reptiles, are found on the land at least, and only about two and a half percent of the land surface. We call these the hotspots; the scientists have got them identified and mapped to some extent. We know how to save or at least throw an initial umbrella over a large part of the rest of life, including some of the most endangered species of ecosystems, by saving only two and a half percent of the land surface of the world. And if you throw in, in addition, chunks of the tropical forest wildernesses in the Congo and the Amazon and New Guinea — those wouldn’t be terribly expensive to acquire — you’re getting up to about 70 percent of the known species.

Q: What would it cost to preserve that much of the Earth’s surface?

A: The latter figure, one that covers as much as 70 percent, would cost, if ideally applied — and, of course, you know this, a lot of this has got to be political, economic planning and the like — would cost one payment of about $30 billion. Now $30 billion is a lot of money, you know, when you just say the word, but it’s worth pointing out that that’s only one part in a thousand of the world domestic product. In other words, humanity — and all of the countries in the world — has its annual domestic product combined of about $30 trillion, so that a $30 billion cost to save a very large part of the rest of life, one thousandth of that, now this seems to me, and I’ve never been rebutted on that, to be the best bargain ever offered humanity. Another way of putting the figures that have been worked out by teams of biologists and economists is that $30 billion would save, at least for a while, would throw an umbrella over some 70 percent of the known species living on the land.

Q: And what about people in this country? Suppose we took seriously what you propose. Would it require that we lower our standard of living, and if so, how much?

A: It would increase our standard of living if we did it sensibly. It would mean that we would now include in our programs of scientific and technological advance the methods to make far better use of already cultivated land, other natural resources that we have of alternative energy sources, all those things, you know, that we now are waking up to as crucial to our future, quite apart from the living environment from the creation. We move in that direction, and then include in it the goal to take through with us, through this bottleneck that we’re in right now of overpopulation and over-consumption, gross consumption, to take through as much of the rest of life and creation as we can until we can get on better footing economically and environmentally. Then this would be worth tremendous amount of effort on our part as a country and the world at large.

Q: How much would population growth have to be reduced in order to accomplish what you want?

A: You know, the question is moot, because we already know that the population is slowing down; growth is slowing down fast. Right now we are at a point of somewhere around an average worldwide of three children per woman, fertility worldwide. And that is down to about half of what it was 40 years ago or so. It turns out that women get a little more freedom, a little more security, more independence, and more control over their own reproduction virtually everywhere in the world, they reduce the number of children they have. They want a small number of quality children. It’s as simple as that. So, it’s been estimated that due to this downward trend of fertility, we will peak worldwide at a population of somewhere around 9 billion, and that’s, say, roughly 40 percent more than are on the earth today. That’s manageable.

Q: What about the implications for government power? The kinds of things that would have to be done, it seems, require a certain amount of coercion on the part of the state, no?

A: No, sir. In a free, capitalist, competitive democracy like the United States, it only requires markets, some boosting markets, some kind of encouragement, and that can come about by two means. One, and foremost, is public awareness. As the public becomes better informed about what the world and America’s environmental problems are, and therefore can see things in personal, human self-interest, then they will begin to ask questions of how we can accomplish this. And when they see the role that biodiversity plays in the stability of the world and how valuable it can be in every respect to us now and the future generations, then we will get a bottom-up pulse of opinion that can push it, expressed in the marketplace, expressed in the polls and voting booths. The other way is — and this has to come about as part of the political process — we should put subsidies on those kinds of scientific and technological advances. We have all kinds of subsidies already; most of them are to pursue what often are ruinous environmental practices, you know, such as the fisheries, at least in the past. And now we need to be able to encourage industry and technological innovators to move in the direction of producing a better world with material and energy consumption and conservation of the rest of life.

Q: I’d like to take you through some of what I imagine to be the objections of a Southern Baptist pastor, the kind of person to whom you have addressed your book. You’re speaking from the point of view of someone who was long ago convinced that evolution and natural selection are the way we all got to be the way we are. I can imagine someone who would say Genesis doesn’t say that. Genesis says God created everything in six days.

A: That’s precisely why I wrote THE CREATION. I put my cards face up on the table as a biologist who indeed has spent his life working on evolution and is convinced of its reality. But then, having expressed my own personal beliefs very frankly, including my secularist interpretation of the position of humanity and the universe, I offer a hand of friendship. That’s something I don’t think any natural scientist of my acquaintance has ever done, particularly when they start arguing about these issues. And that’s why I address the Southern Baptist pastor. He stands in for the evangelicals, who stand in for religious believers who have that moral view, generally: Pastor, we need your help, and it doesn’t matter what either one of us, or any of us, believe about how it got there. The creation is there. It’s the glory of the Earth. It’s the treasure house and the responsibility of humanity. Let’s see if we can’t get together on saving it as common ground in a good American tradition, and if we did, because science and religion are the most powerful social forces on Earth, we could do it. It would be a wonderful way to get together and put the best of what we have, your commitment, your religious passion, your beliefs put to a good purpose, and the scientists’ passion, based on secular knowledge, scientific knowledge — I mean, that’s what we do. That’s our business is to find out all these facts, put them together, and solve the problem.

Q: There are people who claim that evolution is not yet proven.

A: I think they’re wrong. I think the evidence is overwhelming. But that said, I don’t think that should be a serious stumbling block even in terms of the cooperation of religious [communities] and environmentalists and scientific researchers at all, because we can find, I think, common ground without settling that argument. I want to put aside the culture wars. I want to call a truce on the culture wars. Or if they continue to be conducted, I’d like to have them conduct this on a different battlefield. I want to see these differences in worldview acknowledged but then put aside, or at least that the culture wars, as they’ve been conducted recently, occur on a different battlefield. It can be simultaneously, but I want to join on another terrain that in the long-term I believe will prove to be more important for humanity to solve this other big problem.

Q: Some people say history is going to come to an end very soon. The end times are approaching, perhaps within our lifetime, so why do we have to worry about all these species? We’ve got better things to think about.

A: On the matter of end time, I know a lot of people believe in it, especially within the evangelical movement. But it comes down to really a matter of time, doesn’t it? There are some who believe that it is upon us, that it will occur in our lifetimes, it could occur within a few weeks, and so on. But I think the majority of Christians and possibly a majority of evangelicals don’t believe that it’s coming that quickly. If you accept it — as a secularist I wouldn’t, but let’s say you accept it, that it’s coming. Then it really is a matter of how long it is off. Even if it’s a short time off, I believe that the Bible was quite plain, and that common sense makes it compelling, and that everything that is human that we feel as human should make it a precept of our morality that we take care of the creation. An evangelical leader, I think it was Billy Graham, but certainly one of that fame and caliber, said not long ago that just because we’re stewards of the Earth doesn’t mean that we should be trashing it.

Q: There’s a line in your book: “Pastor, tell me this is not true.” You were referring to this idea that we don’t have to take care of the Earth because it’s all going to end very soon, and you said that was a gospel of cruelty and despair.

A: A very small majority of Christians, and maybe a small majority even among the born-again Christians, believe that the Rapture, that is, the bodiless asset of those born again, saved by the Redeemer, will occur very quickly, very soon, in our lifetime, and that therefore there isn’t a lot of value in paying any attention to what we do to the Earth. We could go ahead and tear it all to hell and back and make whatever use of it we want, because it’s been given to us sort of like a Christmas present to be unwrapped and used by the Creator. I do consider that, frankly, as a gospel of despair, of pessimism, a view of humanity and our place on this Earth that is indefensible.

Q: And some people might say don’t worry too much about it. Human beings are resourceful. Some of them are brilliant, and human genius will get us out of this.

A: Yes. I’ve faced the argument many times. That comes from the other extreme. Now we’re departing from the religious as such, and now we’re going over to what can be called techno-mania, and that is an unlimited faith in human potential to solve our problems, including of our own making. No matter how serious they are, we’ve always been ingenious. We’ve always figured out some way of replacing things we threw away, of restoring things we destroyed, of finding new sources of strength and energy. So we’ll just rely on human genius, we’ll rely on science, and we’ll rely on technology to pull us out, no matter how badly we screw up. So it’s okay to just plow full ahead and have total faith in humanity’s ability to adapt to all changing conditions. You might say that’s a kind of secularist extremism way at the opposite side of the pole of those in the evangelical movement who say it doesn’t matter what we do to the Earth, we will be provided for by God.

Q: Do you think human genius could solve it?

A: Well, let me put it this way. Can human genius solve all problems of our own making as we are totally reckless about how we handle our own environment? I think there are lots of situations that could be imagined in which no amount of human genius can solve the problems. If you chose to take a nose dive off a ten-story building, we can’t do anything for you. We’re just not that brilliant.

Q: Back to the imagined Southern Baptist pastor. What arguments would you put to him that you would want him to answer?

A: I think straight talk. In fact, what I’ve done in THE CREATION is to say, and the key to this is respect, deference, and a willingness to ask for help from the secularists, particularly the secular- based scientists and environmentalists, and to say, particularly in my case I could say I know the evangelical culture. I know the Bible. There’s a lot for me to learn. I’d like to learn more. I’d like to learn more about the worldview of Judeo-Christianity and particularly evangelicalism. But now I’d like to take you on a tour through my world and tell you how I see modern biology, where it is today, where it’s going, what the problems are that we’ve revealed concerning the environment and the like. So that’s the first thing I say to my new friend, the Southern Baptist pastor, and then I say, “You know, I’m not in a position to tell you this, but I would be so heartened if you agreed that there’s common ground and that somehow what I could lay before you, and my colleagues, you know, in science and environmental work — we lay before you something that you see as worthy of your ministry.”

Q: Isn’t the idea of stewardship strong in the Bible? Can it ever be interpreted to mean that God put us in charge and we can do anything we want with these lesser forms of life? And there is also plenty that says we have a responsibility to look after what God created.

A: Well, I’m not a biblical scholar. But I’ve read a lot in the Bible, and I grew up with it, and the feeling that I had from the very beginning was that the Bible preaches stewardship, that is, gives us responsibility. It gives us the rule of the Earth, the dominion of the Earth, but it also gives us responsibility, and it does not tell us really to transform everything into a cornfield, you know, to make everything just produce more people and more products to feed more people. There’s nothing in the Bible there that I’m aware of — I’m willing to stand corrected — but I go by Genesis and this magnificent command, I think it was on the fourth day of creation: “Let the waters be filled with countless living creatures, and let the birds fly above the Earth beneath the vault of the sky.”

Q: In one of your books it was widely interpreted that you were saying our behavior and everything about our lives was determined by our genes, much more than people at the time wanted to hear. You were the center of a lot of controversy, which eventually died down. But where do you stand now on that, on the extent to which we are the creatures of our genes and, on the other hand, we are shaped by our environment and by free will?

A: It’s a tough question to answer today, even though we know a great deal more about the relation between heredity and environment in shaping the human character, and by that I mean not just our individual traits as human beings, but the entire panoply of human nature. Thirty years ago, I published a book called SOCIOBIOLOGY and proposed that there is such a thing as human nature and that a lot of what we tend to do, what can be called instincts in humans, has a biological basis. The idea was very controversial. In fact, it was very substantially attacked. At that time, what was called a blank slate view of the brain was in almost complete control of the academic world, of social sciences. Marxists — that was their prayer book, the blank slate, because they believed at that time that humanity was entirely the product of culture and environment and that the brain came into existence, that is, in each human a blank slate on which experience inscribed our character. We know that’s not true now. The blank slate view disappeared rather quickly in the face of scientific evidence. But that evidence did not lead to the view of human beings as genetic automatons, you know, all determined and not in control of our own destiny. No, it led to something else. It led to a picture, and it’s getting clearer all the time, of humans as having a true nature that we all share, and that these are expressed in our emotions, and that they make some things easier for us to learn and other things very hard to learn. They make it certain that we’ll have strong emotions in different stages of our lives that make it almost compelling to do one thing as opposed to another. But it gives us enormous freedom in the way we do that and in the way we can control or enhance those traits that are hard-wired into our brain. I think that’s the basic idea today concerning the nature of human nature.

Q: Is one of the things that is hard-wired into us the idea that God exists?

A: Yes. Maybe not the Judeo-Christian God, but the idea that there are deities, there are supernatural forces in more elementary societies. These are sometimes just the spirits of the ancestors that are with us and wandering about and helping guide us, but the idea of supernatural guidance and empowerment of our tribe — notice tribe, not all of humanity, but particularly the group we belong to — I believe is hard-wired in us.

Q: Is there hard-wiring for the idea of there being something more than the material world?

A: Yes.

Q: Not just for the tribe but for all –

A: Yep.

Q: — for all human beings, something more that deep down we have a yearning for, experience of, and contact with?

A: I think that one of the deepest of human qualities hard-wired in the brain, if you wish, is the intense desire to belong to a group that shares important parts of its culture, and shares the sense of purpose larger than individual self, and shares, in the most cases it would be, a supernatural approbation and guidance and favor. In the case of secularists, we have the same types of grouping, culture formation, but now it comes and gets its expression as great goals of humanitarianism, a desire to learn as much about the universe as possible. But whatever form it takes, it seems to be fundamental to human beings.

Q: Can a person be both a good scientist and a person of religious faith?

A: Absolutely. I think that a person who is fundamentalist, to the extent of being a biblical literalist — you know, very strict interpretation of the actual words as sacred script and who denies that evolution ever occurred — is going to have trouble doing science in certain broad areas of biology. But otherwise I would say for those who accept that humanity came about by evolution, and that would include members of the Roman Catholic Church, for example, and most denominations, it is quite possible to have all the accoutrements of spirituality and believe in a deity.

Q: As a secular humanist, do you think everything can or will be explained by science?

A: No.

Q: Do you think that science can tell us everything there is to know about living?

A: I believe that science will, in the end — and remember science is not some body of entities that exists apart from humanity or from other belief systems; science is simply that body of knowledge from which we have gained some confidence by testing, by transparency, by logical connections to other bodies of science; [it] is the most democratic of all human activities, and it is one that’s widely shared, so let’s be clear on what science is. I would say that the scientific knowledge expanding still, almost at exponential rate, has already covered and given different explanations, and different world views apply, to a large part of what religion earlier appropriated to itself. But will science explain everything? No. We’re not that smart. Even with supercomputers, we’re not going to explain everything. There’s just too much complicated detail out there. We may get finally our unified theory of physics. We may come to understand in substantial detail how almost every species on Earth came into being and so on. But that’s still far from everything.

Q: Religious people often remind us that there are things like beauty and our appreciation of beauty. There are things like moral law. There are things like the religious impulse itself. I think a lot of people would argue that these are things science can never explain, because they are part of a spiritual reality that science doesn’t deal with.

A: I think science will explain a lot, particularly when neuroscience really reaches maturity as a science. But that does not degrade the matter whatsoever. If you explain the total physics of a violin, and you go to explain why the brain responds and what parts of it are responding and perhaps even some reasons, in terms of human survivability, we consider a particular piece of music beautiful, it doesn’t degrade the beauty of it. I think it enhances it, and that’s where science and the humanities and perhaps religion eventually will converge.

Q: Many people think it very important that there is a God who is separate from us, who makes his presence something we can experience in our daily lives, and that experience is of enormous value to people. The idea is that there is a spiritual realm to reality that is separate from the material. Do you acknowledge that?

A: Let me put it this way. I’m a good scientist. I’m not a hundred percent sure about anything, and I do have a kind of driving faith that humanity, having seized Promethean fire, so to speak, and found out how to understand the universe, will keep going until we will be able to explain things like the origin and the mechanics of spirituality. But that’s just a belief that I have, based on the track record of science. I do not believe, but this is a personal belief, that there is any sort of intercession, via divinity or other supernatural force, on human feeling, even the most exalting human feeling. But, as I said to my pastor, you could be wrong. I could be wrong. We may both be partly right.

I’ve tried not to water down in any way the fundamental difference between science and mainstream religion concerning the origin of life. God made the Creation, you say. This truth is plainly stated in Holy Scripture. Twenty-five centuries of theology and much of Western civilization have been built upon it. But no, I say, respectfully. Life was self-assembled by random mutation and natural selection of the codifying molecules. As radical as such an explanation may seem, it is supported by an overwhelming body of interlocking evidence. It might yet prove wrong, but year by year that seems less probable. And it raises this theological question: Would God have been so deceptive as to salt the earth with so much misleading evidence?

Much as I would like to think otherwise, I see no hope for compromise in the idea of Intelligent Design. Simply put this proposal agrees that evolution occurs but argues that it is guided by a supernatural intelligence. The evidence for Intelligent Design, however, consists solely of a default argument. Its logic is simply this: biologists have not yet explained how complex systems such as the human eye and spinning bacterial cilium could have evolved by themselves; therefore a higher intelligence must have guided the evolution. Unfortunately, no positive evidence exists for Intelligent Design. None has been proposed to test it. No theory has been suggested, or even imagined, to explain the transcription from supernatural force to organic reality. That is why statured scientists, those who have led in original research, unanimously agree that the theory of Intelligent Design does not qualify as science.

Some have suggested that scientists have formed a conspiracy to halt the search for Intelligent Design. There is no such conspiracy. There is only agreement among experts that the hypothesis has none of the defining qualities of science. To think otherwise is to misunderstand the culture of science. Discoveries and the testing of discoveries are the currency of science, its irreplaceable silver and gold. Challenges to prevailing theory on the basis of new evidence are the hallmark of science. If positive and repeatable evidence were adduced for a supernatural intelligent force that created and guided the evolution of life, it would deservedly rank as the greatest scientific discovery of all time. It would transform philosophy and change the course of history. Scientists dream of making a discovery of this magnitude!

Without such an event, however, it is a dangerous step for theologians to summon the default argument of Intelligent Design as scientific support for religious belief. Biologists are explaining the previously unexplainable — providing evolutionary steps for the autonomous origin of ever more complex systems — at an accelerating pace. What is to become of the hypothesis of Intelligent Design as the remaining unpenetrated systems decline toward the vanishing point? The hypothesis will be dismissed and with it credibility of the idea of science-based theology. The odds powerfully favor such an outcome. In science, as in logic, a default argument can never replace positive evidence, but even a sliver of positive evidence can demolish a default argument.

You and I are both humanists in the broadest sense: human welfare is at the center of our thought. But the difference between humanism based on religion and humanism based on science radiates through philosophy and the very meaning we assign ourselves as a species. They affect the way we separately authenticate our ethics, our patriotism, our social structure, our personal dignity.

What are we to do? Forget the differences, I say. Meet on common ground. That might not be as difficult as it seems at first. When you think about it, our metaphysical differences have remarkably little effect on the conduct of our separate lives. My guess is that you and I are about equally ethical, patriotic, and altruistic. We are products of a civilization that rose from both religion and the science-based Enlightenment. We would gladly serve on the same jury, fight the same wars, sanctify human life with the same intensity. And surely we also share a love of the Creation.

I hope you will not have taken offence when I spoke of ascending to Nature instead of ascending away from it. It would give me deep satisfaction to find that expression as I have explained it compatible with your own beliefs. For however the tensions eventually play out between our opposing worldviews, however science and religion wax and wane in the minds of men, there remains the earthborn, yet transcendental, obligation we are both morally bound to share.