Nice interview, well done.

I look forward to reading Dr Wilson's book. In the meantime, I'd be glad to labor alongside of anyone who wants to protect our world's disappearing species and to combat global warming. We may all disagree on whether God exists, and what God may be like, and is humanity a special creation or not. But we can absolutely work together to advance our common goals. We have to work together, 'cause every day brings us that much closer to 2100 and losing half the world's species! Or to 2050 and losing one-third of the world's species!

I had to postpone reading this interesting interview till this morning.  I am glad I was able to get around to it finally; it was very worthwhile.  Not long ago I wrote something to the effect that E.O.Wilson is perhaps not the best ambassador for science and the environment to conservative Protestant Christians.  I see now that that judgment is likely to be wrong.

I am not quite sure, though, how Wilson gets from "three thousand years of Yahweh," and the well-adapted "binding function" of religious beliefs and practices, to the prediction that the US will become more secular as time passes, after the pattern of Europe.  In some regards that would be undoubtedly a good thing, and I hope Wilson is right.  But I would like to hear him explain why he makes that prediction.

It is not clear what David wants to include in his term "factual baggage."  The creation of the world in six days?  The special creation of two ancestral human beings?  The universal flood?  Very many Christians do not accept these and similar events as literally true, though the doctrine of God as Creator remains central.  Just as we have no problem with the observations of Galileo, though at first it seemed to many Christians that the geocentric cosmology was required by Christian anthropology, so also there is no real problem with Darwin's observations and the theory of evolution.

The immaculate conception and perpetual virginity of Mary, the mother of Jesus?  They are examples of theological creativity on over-drive, and I as a Catholic do not feel bound to accept them literally.  (Other Catholics probably would disagree.)

The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ?  That is a tough one.  Needless to say, all Christians believe that not long after Jesus died, Something Happened, and he was seen by his friends as more alive than ever.  The post-resurrection appearance narratives in the gospels are the basic testimony; they present Jesus as having his own physical body, but the manner of the presentation can be questioned.  Theologians are much exercised to explain what the resurrection was, and what was the nature of Jesus' post-resurrection body.  It is not hard to understand why this subject should be a source of difficulty for non-believers.  Cf. the attitude of the philosophers in Athens whom Paul addressed, at Acts 17:18 and 17:32.

The orthodox doctrine that God is a trinity of three persons, and that the second person, having divine nature from before all time, in the course of history fully assumed human nature as well?  These theological ideas, which I happen to think are among the greatest thoughts that human beings ever thought, are carefully based on the spiritual experience of the Christian Church.  It took Christians a few centuries, with many painful disputes, to work out the details and the vocabulary.  And in fact there have persisted Christian groups that do not quite understand Jesus Christ according to my simple formulation.  And then, many converts to Islam in the first Muslim centuries were Christians who apparently were frustrated with the complexity of the Trinity, and found the simple Muslim doctrine of the oneness of God more attractive.