Edward Wilson quotes: http://www.nyu.edu/classes/neimark/eow.html
[PT interviewer is Jill Neimark]
PT: You call yourself a deist. What do you mean by that?
EO: A deist is a person who's willing to buy the idea that some creative force determined the parameters of the universe when it began.
PT: And a theist is someone who believes that God not only set the universe in motion, but is still actively involved.
EO: But I've been doing a kind of Pascalian waffling as a deist. I think being an atheist is to claim knowledge you cannot have. And to say you're agnostic is to arrogantly dismiss the whole thing by saying that it's unknowable. But a provisional deist is someone like myself who leaves it open. You see, evolutionary biology leaves very little room for a theistic God. I'd like it to be otherwise. Nothing would delight me more than to have real proof of a transcendental plane.
PT: Why?
EO: If the neurobiologists came through with enough evidence and said, There is another plane, and it is quite conceivable that the individual essence somehow implanted there is immortal, wouldn't you be happy? I'd be very, very happy. I'd congratulate my colleagues when they went to Stockholm to get the Nobel Prize, and I'd be personally relieved.
PT: Relieved of what?
EO: It would mean that human existence really is exalted and that immortality is a prospect, providing this God is not a God of irony and cruelty who is going to send everybody the other way. That reminds me of an argument I like to give. Maybe God is sorting the saved from the damned, but the saved will be those who have the intellectual courage to press on with skepticism and materialism. They would be His most independent and courageous creations, would they not? Particularly the ones who faced the charges of heresy.
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