Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Robert Wright has carved out a distinct niche in American journalism. While his essays range freely across the political landscape -- from foreign policy to technology -- it's his meaty, book-length forays into evolutionary psychology and the sweep of history that have set him apart. Now his latest book goes after bigger game: God Almighty.

Actually, "The Evolution of God" never grapples with the most basic religious question -- the existence of God. Instead it charts the twists and turns of how God's personality has kept changing over the centuries, and specifically, how the rough-and-tumble politics of the ancient Middle East shaped the Abrahamic religions. The book is filled with richly observed details about the Bible and the Quran, though Wright wears his learning lightly as he guides us through several thousand years of religious history.

There's something to offend just about everyone in this book. Wright recounts in harrowing detail how the early Israelites, who'd been conquered and humiliated by the Babylonians, invoked Yahweh to wreak vengeance on their enemies. This is no God for the faint of heart! And he's no gentler on Christianity. Wright's Jesus is not the prophet of peace and love but a sometimes mean-spirited apocalyptic preacher obsessed with the approaching End Times. Islam's founder, Muhammad, comes across as much a warrior as a prophet, bent on annihilating his enemies when they cross him.

Another week, another book chastising, or cheering, the new atheists. God can't have had such publishing appeal since a bunch of renegade Jews, who followed a loser called Jesus, decided to publish their collected memories and letters.

But this month, two books are a cut above the rest. For one thing, they pack hilarious rhetorical punch. You'd expect that in Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, by Terry Eagleton. His review of The God Delusion in the London Review of Books became a minor publishing event in its own right: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology," it began.

Eagleton does not let up now. Of Daniel Dennett's scientific treatment of belief, he writes: "[Dennett] is rather like someone who thinks that a novel is a botched piece of sociology." To Christopher Hitchens, whom he respects, Eagleton says: "Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov."

The Templeton Prize, awarded for contributions to "affirming life's spiritual dimension", has been won by French physicist Bernard d'Espagnat, who has worked on quantum physics with some of the most famous names in modern science.

Quantum physics is a hugely successful theory: the predictions it makes about the behaviour of subatomic particles are extraordinarily accurate. And yet, it raises profound puzzles about reality that remain as yet to be understood.

The bizarre nature of quantum physics has attracted some speculations that are wacky but the theory suggests to some serious scientists that reality, at its most basic, is perfectly compatible with what might be called a spiritual view of things.

Once he's finished paying taxes on his £1 million Templeton Prize, Bernard d'Espagnat says that he wants to use part of his award to foster study of apophatic, or “negative”, theology. “It's the only form of theology that I appreciate,” the French physicist said. “It would be a good thing if it were investigated a little more than it now is.”

D'Espagnat is the 2009 winner of the Templeton Foundation's annual award for affirming life's spiritual dimension. The award, which boasts a monetary value pegged above that of the Nobel Prize, was announced on Monday at Unesco in Paris and will be presented to D'Espagnat by Prince Philip in a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace on 5 May. Now a spry 87, the laureate can look back on a long and illustrious career as senior physicist at the Cern particle physics laboratory in Geneva and physics professor in leading French and American universities. But it's his metaphysical thinking, most recently set out in his 2006 book On Physics and Philosophy, that won him the prize.

PRESIDENT OBAMA wants to end the culture wars. He recently called for "common ground" on abortion reduction and an end to the "stale and fruitless debate" over family planning. His joint address to Congress this week could be an opportunity to change that debate. But to make a real difference, he'll have to tell two truths that the left and the right don't want to hear: that morality has to be practical, and that practicality requires morals.

Start with abortion. Pro-lifers tend to show up after a woman is pregnant, imagining that laws and preaching will make her bear a child she doesn't want. They're mistaken. Worse, they're too late. To prevent abortions, we have to prevent unintended pregnancies.

How? The conservative answer is abstinence. That's a worthy aspiration. But as a stand-alone national policy for avoiding pregnancies, it's foolish. Mating is the engine of history. It has overpowered every stricture put in its way.

The liberal answer is birth-control availability. In recent years, this has become a second front in the culture wars. Many pharmacists have refused to sell oral contraceptives. In December, President George W. Bush extended that right of refusal to cover other medical professionals unwilling to participate in birth control. Mr. Bush also halted American aid to international family-planning organizations that provide abortion services; Mr. Obama recently restored it.

Mr. Obama, like many other pro-choicers, doesn't like to preach on these issues. He talks about family planning purely in terms of access and affordability. Overseas, that's a huge challenge. But in this country, the principal cause of abortions isn't that we can't get birth control. It's that we don't use it.

WHILE many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.

This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.

Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. "It's not that religion is not important," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, "it's that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress."

The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society.

Between the 8th and 16th centuries, scholars and researchers working from Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan to Cordoba in Spain advanced our knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, medicine and philosophy to new heights. It was Musa al-Khwarizmi, for instance, who developed algebra in 9th century Baghdad, drawing on work by mathematicians in India; al-Jazari, a Turkish engineer of the 13th century whose achievements include the crank, the camshaft, and the reciprocating piston; Abu Ali ibn Sina, whose textbook Canon of Medicine was a standard work in Europe's universities until the 1600s. These scientists were part of a sophisticated culture and civilization that was based on belief in a God – a picture which helps to scotch the myth of the 'Dark Ages' in which scientific advance faltered because of religion.

SCIENCE AND ISLAM weaves the story of these scientists and their work into a compelling narrative. He takes the reader on a journey through the Islamic empires of the middle ages, and explores, both the cultural and religious circumstances that made this revolution possible, and Islam's contribution to science in Western Europe. Masood unpacks the debates between scientists, philosophers and theologians on the nature of physical reality and the limits of human reason, and he describes the many reasons for the eventual decline of advanced science and learning in the Arabic-speaking world. SCIENCE AND ISLAM is essential reading for anyone keen to explore science's hidden history and its contribution to the making of the modern world.

Biologist Stuart Kauffman has plenty of experience tilting at windmills. For years he's questioned the Darwinian orthodoxy that natural selection is the sole principle of evolutionary biology. As he put it in his first book, "The Origins of Order," "It is not that Darwin is wrong but that he got hold of only part of the truth." In Kauffman's view, there is another biological principle at work -- what he calls "self-organization" -- that "co-mingles" with natural selection in the evolutionary process.

A physician by training, Kaufmann is a widely admired biologist; in 1987, he was a recipient of a MacArthur "genius" award. He's also one of the gurus of complexity theory, and for years was a fixture at the Santa Fe Institute, the renowned scientific research community. A few years ago, he moved to the University of Calgary to set up the Biocomplexity and Informatics Institute.

If this sounds heady, it is. And getting Kauffman to explain his theory of self-organization, "thermodynamic work cycles" and "autocatalysis" to a non-scientist is challenging. But Kauffman is at heart a philosopher who ranges over vast fields of inquiry, from the origins of life to the philosophy of mind. He's a visionary thinker who's not afraid to play with big ideas.

Cambridge, England.

From Charles Darwin to Richard Dawkins, science has been seen as an ally of atheism, religion's aggressive adversary.

‘Historically, religious faith—and its denial—have played a major part in science,’ says Keith Ward, author of The Big Questions in Science and Religion. The pioneering work of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler all came into conflict with church authorities and doctrines, although these astronomers and cosmologists insisted they were sincere believers. In fact, theology was once considered the "queen of the sciences."

Modern scientists do not routinely identify their spiritual affiliation; it's extremely difficult to say for certain how many are religious. Even so, among contemporary American scientists, many–perhaps a majority–have declared themselves skeptics, secularists, agnostics and atheists. Carl Sagan, arguably America's best-known cosmologist, and an agnostic, wrote a book titled The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.

God either causes or allows "major tragedies to occur as a warning to sinners," say 20% of U.S. adults. While 43% say most evil is caused by the devil, 47% disagree–a statistical tie. But most (68%) would not say human nature is basically evil. So where does evil dwell–in the devil or in mankind? The Baylor survey allows for overlapping views; it finds 36% strongly agree with both statements.

"Those who believe God causes or allows bad things to happen did not speak in terms of tragedies being God's fault," says Baylor sociologist Christopher Bader. Bader says people told him that "tragedies are our fault. We have sinned as a nation and God has stood aside and allowed terrible things to happen." At his Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency, the Rev. Rick Warren asked the presidential candidates: "Does evil exist?" Both candidates said yes.

Nature, one of the world's leading science magazines, normally carries obituaries only of Nobel prizewinners and scientists of similar stature, but it made an exception for Sir John Templeton [subs nec], the financier and philanthropist who gave hundreds of millions of dollars to promote the scientific study of religious beliefs. He thought they were true, or at least referred to real facts about the world, and thus could be studied with profit by real scientists. Naturally, this infuriates the Dawkinsian atheists, who, for all their talk of applying reason to religion, want in fact to abolish it and extinguish its memory except as something with which to frighten children. So I was aware that writing the obituary was a controversial undertaking.

I only had one letter back, though, which surprised me, and it was a reasoned and interesting one from which I learned a great deal. A reader in Dallas, Texas, write in to protest because I had said that people who believed the universe was amoral must think of themselves as being on the losing side.

To many nonbelievers, like myself, we are perfectly content with believing that the universe is amoral and without purpose. Believing this way takes nothing away from our fascination with this place or its mysteries, nor does it make us less emotionally 'positive' than others. To me, believing this way feels neither false to the facts nor to be on a losing side. I assume that those who do believe in a purpose-driven, moral universe also don't feel that they are on a losing side.

Sir John Templeton, who died last week, gave hundreds of millions of dollars to scientists whom he hoped might put religious beliefs on a more solid foundation. His very substantial Templeton Foundation—with assets of nearly $1.5bn—has attracted particular reprobation in recent years. Some say its aim—to sponsor ‘human progress’ through scientific research in religion—is simply misconceived: in Stephen Jay Gould's famous distinction, science and religion are two magisteria, fundamental but separate.

Others have been more vociferous in their critique. In Richard Dawkins‘ book, The God Delusion, the Templeton Foundation warrants five index entries, one of three-page length. I do not know whether Dawkins has read much Freud, but he seems to be feeling his way towards the link the founder of psychoanalysis made between gold and excrement.

I should confess that I have been a minor beneficiary of Sir John's largesse, as a Templeton–Cambridge journalism fellow. That said, now might be a good moment to put the aims of the foundation to the test. For what progress has its funding produced in relation to science and religion? It's a big question, but then Sir John liked the big questions. So consider the thoughts of, say, three of his Templeton prize winners. They are, perhaps, illuminating.

Is it possible to be a true religious believer and at the same time enjoy good relations with people of other faiths or none? Moreover, can you remain open to new ideas and new ways of thinking?

Fethullah Gülen, a 67-year-old Turkish Sufi cleric, author and theoretician, has dedicated much of his life to resolving these questions. From his sick bed in exile just outside Philadelphia, he leads a global movement inspired by Sufi ideas. He promotes an open brand of Islamic thought and, like the Iran-born Islamic philosophers Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Abdolkarim Soroush, he is preoccupied with modern science (he publishes an English-language science magazine called the Fountain). But Gülen, unlike these western-trained Iranians, has spent most of his life within the religious and political institutions of Turkey, a Muslim country, albeit a secular one since the foundation of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's republic after the first world war.

Unusually for a pious intellectual, he and his movement are at home with technology, markets and multinational business, and especially with modern communications and public relations—which, like a modern televangelist, he uses to attract converts. Like a western celebrity, he carefully manages his public exposure—mostly by restricting interviews to those he can trust.

More than 350 years after the inquisition hounded Galileo over charges of heresy, physicist Howard Van Till, of Calvin College in Michigan, confronted a little inquisition of his own. Van Till roused a small but fervent pack of enemies at the conservative college with his book, The Fourth Day, in which he argued that the stories of the Bible and science's account of evolution could both be true.

His critics on the school's board of trustees had no interest in reconciling the religious account of creation with a naturalist explanation of how life and the universe have evolved over the ages. For years after the book's release in 1986, Van Till reported to a monthly interrogation where he struggled to reassure college officials that his scientific teachings fit within their creed. Van Till's career survived the ordeal, but his Calvinist faith did not. Over the next two decades, he became the heretic his critics had suspected.

Evolution remains the thorniest issue in the ongoing debate over science and religion. But for all the yelling between creationists and scientists, there's one perspective that's largely absent from public discussions about evolution. We rarely hear from religious believers who accept the standard Darwinian account of evolution. It's a shame because there's an important question at stake: How can a person of faith reconcile the apparently random, meaningless process of evolution with belief in God?

The simplest response is to say that science and religion have nothing to do with each other—to claim, as Stephen Jay Gould famously did, that they are ‘non-overlapping magisteria.’ But perhaps that response seems too easy, a politically expedient ploy to pacify both scientists and mainstream Christians. Maybe evolutionary theory, along with modern physics, does pose a serious challenge to religious belief. To put it another way, how can an intellectually responsible person of faith justify that faith—and even belief in a personal God—after Darwin and Einstein?

Two-lane Gardena Avenue and a stand of oak trees are all that physically separate the Al-Amal Muslim School and Totino–Grace Catholic School in Fridley. But in the science classrooms, the schools are divided by deep tenets of faith and centuries of East–West tradition.

Totino–Grace's biology teacher, Marcia Wiger, opens a lesson on evolution by reading from Genesis and then explaining Charles Darwin's landmark theory. She sees no conflict between the two: ‘We look at religion as religion and science as science.’

Across Gardena, though, evolution stops before it reaches humans. ‘We cannot believe that man came from apes,’ said Al-Amal's science teacher, Hala Bazzi. ‘Allah gave man full conscience and intelligence and knowledge that made him superior.’

Still, science has served as a bridge for Wiger and Bazzi, who started out as collaborators and along the way became friends.

‘I've always been obsessed with the mind-body problem,’ says philosopher Renee Feuer Himmel. ‘It's the essential problem of metaphysics, about both the world out there and the world in here.’

Renee is the fictional alter ego of novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. In her 1983 novel, ‘The Mind-Body Problem,’ Goldstein laid out her own metaphysical concerns, which include the mystery of consciousness and the struggle between reason and emotion. As a novelist, she's drawn to the quirky lives of scientists and philosophers. She's also fascinated by history's great rationalist thinkers. She's written nonfiction accounts of the 17^th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the 20^th-century mathematician-philosopher Kurt Gödel.

Perhaps it's not surprising that Goldstein would end up living with Steven Pinker, a leading theorist of the mind. He's a cognitive psychologist at Harvard; she's a philosopher who's taught at several colleges. Although they come out of different disciplines, they mine much of the same territory: language, consciousness, and the tension between science and religion. If Boston is ground zero for intellectuals, then Pinker and Goldstein must rank as one of America's brainiest power couples.

In October, Malaysia's first astronaut will join a Russian crew and blast off into space. The news of a Muslim astronaut was cause for celebration in the Islamic world, but then certain questions started popping up. How will he face Mecca during his five daily prayers while his space ship is whizzing around the Earth? How can he hold the prayer position in zero gravity? Such concerns may sound absurd to us, but the Malaysian space chief is taking them quite seriously. A team of Muslim scholars and scientists has spent more than a year drawing up an Islamic code of conduct for space travel.

This story illustrates the obstacles that face scientists in Muslim countries. While it's always risky to draw generalizations about Islam, even conservative Muslims admit that the Islamic world lags far behind the West in science and technology. This is a big problem for Muslims who envy the economic and military power of the United States.

What's so striking about the Muslim predicament is that the Islamic world was once the unrivaled center of science and philosophy. During Europe's Dark Ages, Baghdad, Cairo and other Middle Eastern cities were the key repositories of ancient Greek and Roman science. Muslim scholars themselves made breakthroughs in medicine, optics and mathematics. So what happened? Did strict Islamic orthodoxy crush the spirit of scientific inquiry? Why did Christian Europe, for so long a backwater of science, later launch the scientific revolution?

It's official. Scientists really are less religious than most folks are. In fact, close to 52 percent of American scientists claim no religious affiliation at all, as opposed to 14 percent of the general population. Should we be surprised?

Probably not. But a new study conducted by University of Buffalo sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund at least sheds some helpful light on why so many scientists got to be that way.

Forget science fiction. If you want to hear some really crazy ideas about the universe, just listen to our leading theoretical physicists. Wish you could travel back in time? You can, according to some interpretations of quantum mechanics. Could there be an infinite number of parallel worlds? Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg considers this a real possibility. Even the big bang, which for decades has been the standard explanation for how the universe started, is getting a second look. Now, many cosmologists speculate that we live in a "multiverse", with big bangs exploding all over the cosmos, each creating its own bubble universe with its own laws of physics. And lucky for us, our bubble turned out to be life-friendly.

But if you really want to start an argument, ask a room full of physicists this question: Are the laws of physics fine-tuned to support life? Many scientists hate this idea—what's often called "the anthropic principle". They suspect it's a trick to argue for a designer God. But more and more physicists point to various laws of nature that have to be calibrated just right for stars and planets to form and for life to appear. For instance, if gravity were just slightly stronger, the universe would have collapsed long before life evolved. But if gravity were a tiny bit weaker, no galaxies or stars could have formed. If the strong nuclear force had been slightly different, red giant stars would never produce the fusion needed to form heavier atoms like carbon, and the universe would be a vast, lifeless desert. Are these just happy coincidences? The late cosmologist Fred Hoyle called the universe ‘a put-up job.’ Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson has suggested that the universe, in some sense, ‘knew we were coming.’

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, Alice tells the White Queen that she cannot believe in impossible things. But the Queen says Alice simply hasn't had enough practice. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’ That human penchant for belief—or perhaps gullibility—is what inspired biologist Lewis Wolpert to write a book about the evolutionary origins of belief called Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast.

Wolpert is an eminent developmental biologist at University College London. Like fellow British scientist Richard Dawkins, he's an outspoken atheist with a knack for saying outrageous things. Unlike Dawkins, Wolpert has no desire to abolish religion. In fact, he thinks religious belief can provide great comfort and points to medical studies showing that the faithful tend to suffer less stress and anxiety than nonbelievers. In Wolpert's view, religion has given believers an evolutionary advantage, even though it's based on a grand illusion.

It's an extraordinary publishing phenomenon—atheism sells. Any philosopher, professional polemicist or scientist with worries about their pension plan must now be feverishly working on a book proposal. Richard Dawkins has been in the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic since The God Delusion came out last autumn following Daniel Dennett's success with Breaking the Spell. Sam Harris, a previously unknown neuroscience graduate, has now clocked up two bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. Last week, Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything was published in the US. The science writer, Matt Ridley, recently commented that on one day at Princeton he met no fewer than three intellectual luminaries hard at work on their God books.

As almost every child knows, Judas was the disciple who betrayed Jesus, selling his life for 30 pieces of silver. If there's an arch villain in the story of Jesus, it's Judas Iscariot. Or is it? The newly discovered Gospel of Judas suggests that Judas was, in fact, the favorite disciple, the only one Jesus trusted to carry out his final command to hand him over to the Romans.

Rumors about the gospel have circulated for centuries. Early church fathers called it a ‘very dangerous, blasphemous, horrendous gospel,’ according to historian Elaine Pagels. We now know that the manuscript was passed around the shadowy world of antiquities dealers, at one point sitting in a safe deposit box in a small town in New York for 17 years. Pagels herself was once asked by a dealer in Cleveland to examine it, but he only showed her the last few pages, which revealed little more than the title page. She assumed there was nothing of significance. Finally, the manuscript was acquired by the National Geographic Society, which hired Pagels as a consultant to study it.

It had all the fervour of a revivalist meeting. True, there were no hallelujahs, gospel songs or swooning, but there was plenty of preaching, mostly to the converted, and much spontaneous applause for exhortations to follow the path of righteousness. And right there at the forefront of everyone's thoughts was God.

Yet this was no religious gathering—quite the opposite. Some of the leading practitioners of modern science, many of them vocal atheists, were gathered last week in La Jolla, California, for a symposium entitled Beyond belief: Science, religion, reason and survival hosted by the Science Network, a science-promoting coalition of scientists and media professionals convening at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. They were there to address three questions. Should science do away with religion? What would science put in religion's place? And can we be good without God?

Evolution is ‘only a theory.’ Global warming is ‘unproven.’ And science itself is ‘just another opinion.’

Critics of mainstream science seem to be everywhere these days, and we, as journalists, just can't seem to get enough of them. It's just about impossible to pick up a newspaper or watch CNN for an hour without being confronted by someone attacking ideas that most scientists think are so settled that they aren't even worth discussing any more. Meanwhile, the topics that many scientists are working on—the almost daily advances in nanotechnology and genetics, to pick just two—are largely absent from mass-market media coverage. What's going on?

It's the end of absolutes for both religion and materialist unbelief.

Neither has the knockout card, the open-and-shut, slam-dunk, airtight case.

And that should knock both of them back a step.

It was on the second day at Cambridge that enlightenment dawned in the form of a testy exchange between a zoologist and a paleontologist, Richard Dawkins and Simon Conway Morris. Their bone of contention was one that scholars have been gnawing on since the days of Aquinas: whether an understanding of the universe and its glories requires the hypothesis of a God.

The speakers had been invited, along with a dozen other scientists and theologians, to address the 10 recipients of the first Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science and Religion. Each morning for two weeks in June, we walked across the Mathematical Bridge, spanning the River Cam, and through the medieval courtyards of Queens College to the seminar room.

We were there courtesy of the John Templeton Foundation, whose mission is ‘to pursue new insights at the boundary between theology and science,’ overcoming what it calls ‘the flatness of a purely naturalistic, secularized view of reality.’

I would like to say I left the faith of my childhood for exclusively noble reasons. While it is true that I made the final break with Christian Science because I was drawn to a simpler, "mere Christianity," as C.S. Lewis described it, what initially beckoned me from the faith was Tylenol.

As a Christian Scientist, I had been taught that prayer and disciplined thinking had the power to alter my experience, whether that was my wracking cough or my employment status, my mood or my love life. I had witnessed many physical healings as a child, and by the age of 34, I had never visited the doctor (except to set a broken bone) never popped a vitamin, never swallowed an aspirin or taken a swig of cough medicine.

But on one frigid winter day in 1994, I came down with the flu. I slipped in and out of consciousness all afternoon, but in a moment of lucidity I envisioned the medicine cabinet above the bathroom sink. At that moment, what flashed in my mind's eye like a blinking neon sign was Tylenol, Tylenol, Tylenol. A friend of mine, I recalled, had left some Tylenol during a visit.

I'm curious: Is there anybody on the stage that does not… believe in evolution?

That was the question put to the 10 GOP presidential hopefuls during a May 3 Republican presidential debate on MSNBC.

Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) already had said he did.

But when the rest were asked the same question, three hands went up: those of Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Ah, the flood of facile jokes!:

Those Luddite Republicans!

They don't believe in evolution because, in their case, it didn't happen!

Et cetera. Hardy har har.

Three candidates do not a party make. But it was a telling moment for those wondering where the GOP is headed.

Orsay, France. 

With creationism now coming in Christian and Muslim versions, scientists, teachers and theologians in France are debating ways to counteract what they see as growing religious attacks on science.

Bible-based criticism of evolution, once limited to Protestant fundamentalists in the United States, has become an issue in France now that Pope Benedict and some leading Catholic theologians have criticized the neo-Darwinist view of creation.

An Islamist publisher in Turkey mass-mailed a lavishly illustrated Muslim creationist book to schools across France recently, prompting the Education Ministry to proscribe the volume and question the way the story of life is taught here.

Istanbul. 

A lavishly illustrated Atlas of Creation is mysteriously turning up at schools and libraries in Turkey, proclaiming that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is the real root of terrorism.

Arriving unsolicited by post, the large-format tome offers 768 glossy pages of photographs and easy-to-read text to prove that God created the world with all its species.

At first sight, it looks like it could be the work of United States creationists, the Christian fundamentalists who believe the world was created in six days as told in the Bible.

But the author's name, Harun Yahya, reveals the surprise inside. This is Islamic creationism, a richly funded movement based in predominantly Muslim Turkey which has an influence U.S. creationists could only dream of.

It's almost impossible for us to recapture the pre-Darwinian notion of a species or an individual creature as having issued in its final configuration directly from the hand of its maker. We can't escape an awareness of the countless mutations and adaptations that every being, including ourselves, has undergone in the long process of evolution. Poets attempt to recover this lost sense of essence. When Rilke writes about a flamingo, he sees it ‘under the aegis of eternity.’ It would have been interesting and startlingly original had he somehow glimpsed, and been able to convey, the shadowy precursors—all those vanished proto-flamingos—that went to form his transcendental waterfowl, but this would have destroyed the Platonic fiction on which his vision depended.

Ricky Nguyen and Mariama Lowe never really believed in evolution to begin with. But as they took their seats in Room CC-121 at Northern Virginia Community College on November 2, they fully expected to hear what students usually hear in any Biology 101 class: that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was true.

As professor Caroline Crocker took the lectern, Nguyen sat in the back of the class of 60 students, Lowe in the front. Crocker, who wore a light brown sweater and slacks, flashed a slide showing a cartoon of a cheerful monkey eating a banana. An arrow led from the monkey to a photograph of an exceptionally unattractive man sitting in his underwear on a couch. Above the arrow was a question mark.

Crocker was about to establish a small beachhead for an insurgency that ultimately aims to topple Darwin's view that humans and apes are distant cousins. The lecture she was to deliver had caused her to lose a job at a previous university, she told me earlier, and she was taking a risk by delivering it again. As a nontenured professor, she had little institutional protection. But this highly trained biologist wanted students to know what she herself deeply believed: that the scientific establishment was perpetrating fraud, hunting down critics of evolution to ruin them and disguising an atheistic view of life in the garb of science.

The battle between secular defenders of evolution and those who believe in a divine Creator is more than a century old, yet there's no lessening in its emotional and intellectual intensity. The latest wrinkle is intelligent design, a boundary-crossing belief that is the focus of a federal court trial on whether it should be taught in schools. A new USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll sheds light on where Americans stand (53% of respondents say the Bible had it right). And USA TODAY religion writer Cathy Lynn Grossman and science reporter Dan Vergano look at the opposing sides to learn why each believes it cannot be wrong.

In the 1970s, when the big-bang model for the origins of the universe at last seemed firmly established, Christian, Jewish, and even some Muslim preachers and exegetes took heart. Hadn't modern cosmology at long last proved what scripture always claimed? The universe emerged in a single indefinable instant. Creation out of nothing stood confirmed. Genesis had been vindicated.

The troublesome fact that big bang cosmology offers a model of how the cosmos came into being from a dimensionless point of infinite density but says nothing about what—or who—precipitated that primordial explosion (whose effects still determine our world, some 15 billion years later), hardly fazed these eager explicators. But the question nags. How far are we entitled to draw metaphysical inferences from scientific models?

Maybe the pivotal moment came when a Nobel laureate in physics warned that ‘the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,’ or when a Nobelist in chemistry called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for "progress in spiritual discoveries" to an atheist—Richard Dawkins, whose book The God Delusion is a national best-seller.

Or perhaps the turning point occurred at a more solemn moment, when Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and an adviser to the Bush administration on space exploration, hushed the audience with heartbreaking photographs of newborns misshapen by birth defects—testimony, he suggested, that blind nature, not an intelligent overseer, is in control.

I've been asking a few friends who are neither journalists nor scientists—nor, for that matter, Americans—what they understand by the term ‘intelligent design.’ ‘Isn't that the slogan of that German car company?,’ one said, in a remark typical of what I often hear. In Europe, intelligent design is nowhere near the big issue that it is in North America. Serious newspapers have been giving brief coverage to the Dover, Pennsylvania court case on their inner pages, but in the popular press and on television there is not a mention made.

On Monday, in a round-table discussion with journalists from five Texas newspapers, President Bush said he thought intelligent design should be taught to students alongside evolution.

‘Intelligent design’ is the belief that the universe and the Earth show evidence of a thinking, purposeful plan. That belief is thousands and thousands of years old; the phrase is of fairly recent coinage.

President Bush made his remarks in the broadest, blandest terms: ‘I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought.’

Sounds reasonable, right? No nice person could possibly take exception, right? Ah, but many do. They're afraid intelligent design - especially when it gets capitalized, as in Intelligent Design - is just "warmed-over creationism," anti-scientific Christian fundamentalism looking for a back-door into classrooms. In school districts throughout the land - in Dover, Pa., in Kansas, in Michigan, and elsewhere - debate rages over whether these ideas have any place in the way we teach our children science.

The answer is… yes, they do.

A sublime cosmic mystery unfolds on a mild summer afternoon in Palo Alto, California, where I've come to talk with the visionary physicist Andrei Linde. The day seems ordinary enough. Cyclists maneuver through traffic, and orange poppies bloom on dry brown hills near Linde's office on the Stanford University campus. But everything here, right down to the photons lighting the scene after an eight-minute jaunt from the sun, bears witness to an extraordinary fact about the universe: Its basic properties are uncannily suited for life. Tweak the laws of physics in just about any way and–in this universe, anyway–life as we know it would not exist.

When Paul Butler began hunting for planets beyond our solar system, few people took him seriously, and some, he says, questioned his credentials as a scientist.

That was a decade ago, before Butler helped find some of the first extra-solar planets, and before he and his team identified about half of the 300 discovered since.

Biogeologist Lisa M. Pratt of Indiana University had a similar experience with her early research on ‘extremophiles’, bizarre microbes found in very harsh Earth environments. She and colleagues explored the depths of South African gold mines and, to their great surprise, found bacteria sustained only by the radioactive decay of nearby rocks.

Butler, who discovered some of the first extra-solar planets, will be joining the discussion from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii after a night of sky gazing.

Kaufman notes in his story, Search for Alien Life Gains New Impetus, that there is an explosion taking place in astrobiology, in part because of NASA‘s Phoenix landing on Mars.

‘Few believe that the discovery of extraterrestrial life is imminent,’ writes Kaufman, ‘However, just as scientists long theorized that there were planets orbiting other stars ‘but could not prove it until new technologies and insights broke the field wide open’ many astrobiologists now see their job as to develop new ways to search for the life they are sure is out there.’

President Obama's open-ended order lifting limits on federal funding for stem cell research raises the prospect that taxpayer money could be used for a much broader, much more controversial array of studies than many scientists, officials and activists anticipated.

Although the decision to allow expanded funding had been long expected, many thought Obama would limit federally funded scientists to working with cell lines derived from embryos destined to be discarded at infertility clinics. Instead, he left that key issue open.

The task of deciding what kinds of studies will be supported now falls to the National Institutes of Health, which finds itself confronting far more extensive questions than its officials were contemplating. It has 120 days to do the job.

Among other things, officials will have to decide whether to endorse studies on cells obtained from much more contentious sources, such as embryos created specifically for research or by means of cloning techniques.

"He left it wide open," said Thomas H. Murray, director of the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank. "Now we are going to have to face a host of morally complicated, politically charged questions. There's not an easy path forward for them out of here."

The Obama administration's move to rescind broad new job protections for health workers who refuse to provide care they find objectionable triggered an immediate political storm yesterday, underscoring the difficulties the president faces in his effort to find common ground on anything related to the explosive issue of abortion.

The administration's plans, revealed quietly with a terse posting on a federal Web site, unleashed a flood of heated reaction, with supporters praising the proposal as a crucial victory for women's health and reproductive rights, and opponents condemning it as a devastating setback for freedom of religion.

Perhaps most tellingly, the move drew deep disappointment from some conservatives who have been hopeful about working with the administration to try to defuse the debate on abortion, long one of the most divisive political issues.

"This is going to be a political hit for the administration," said Joel Hunter, senior pastor of the Northland Church in Longwood, Fla., whom Obama recently named to his Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. "This will be one of those things that kind of says, 'I knew it. They talk about common ground, but really what they want is their own way.' "

The Bush administration yesterday granted sweeping new protections to health workers who refuse to provide care that violates their personal beliefs, setting off an intense battle over opponents' plans to try to repeal the measure.

Critics began consulting with the incoming Obama administration on strategies to reverse the regulation as quickly as possible while supporters started mobilizing to fight such efforts.

The far-reaching regulation cuts off federal funding for any state or local government, hospital, health plan, clinic or other entity that does not accommodate doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other employees who refuse to participate in care they find ethically, morally or religiously objectionable. It was sought by conservative groups, abortion opponents and others to safeguard workers from being fired, disciplined or penalized in other ways.

But women's health advocates, family planning proponents, abortion rights activists and some members of Congress condemned the regulation, saying it will be a major obstacle to providing many health services, including abortion, family planning, infertility treatment, and end-of-life care, as well as possibly a wide range of scientific research.

IT'S THE BRAIN THAT SETS US APART from other creatures. That's why its decline fills us with dread - it foreshadows not just death, but also a shuffling toward being something less than human. We fear devolution. * My brain is my bond to the baby boom, to which I belong only demographically. I was born in 1964, the last year of the boom, so I feel like a Generation Xer. But I'm a boomer about my brain. * Baby boomers like to try to stave off the inevitable - inventor Ray Kurzweil even thinks he can beat death. So why should my brain slip? I regularly play Brain Age or Big Brain Academy, games that claim to keep my neurons firing. I try to drive different routes, to keep my brain from falling into a routine (it's never boring to get lost). I force myself to read things like Paradise Lost (a better exercise when my brain was younger). And, recently, I attended One Day University - after all, what could be better for my brain than a little schooling?

Cambridge, England.

In Gary Larson's wacky Far Side world, cows and humans swap traits with hilarious results.

Nobody is laughing, though, over a real-world bid to mix cow and human DNA, something scientists here say they must do in order to advance stem cell studies.

Debate over this step in the exploration of stem cells already has reverberated across the Atlantic. Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., is a co-sponsor of a bill that would ban the research in the United States.

From the first test-tube baby to the first cloned animal, scientists in this part of the world have led a biological revolution that set off an uproar in the United States but met relative calm here.

Now, though, the research is crossing a line that has shattered the calm and ignited fiery debate all the way up to Prime Minister Gordon Brown's cabinet.

September 25, 1974. I am on the delivery table at a maternity hospital run by Swiss-German midwives in Bafut, Cameroon. My daughter, Abi, arrives at 1:30 a.m. but because no bed is available, I lie awake in the kerosene lamplight waiting for the dawn.

Mornings in this West African highland are chilly and calm. Swirls of woodsmoke carpet the ground. On a nearby veranda, the peace is shattered by the high-pitched ululations of a young woman. Her arms are raised above her head, bearing a tiny bundle. It is her dead infant. As she paces up and down, grieving, I reach for my sleeping newborn and hold her to my body, shaking.

The next morning, as dawn breaks, I am in a private room and again the ululations pierce the stillness. But this time the sounds convey elation. A grandmother walks the veranda, holding newborn twins—male firstborns—in her arms.

William Hurlbut, a physician and ethicist, is best known as a member of the President's Council on Bioethics. Though he has spoken out against the destruction of embryos for research purposes, he is nonetheless a supporter of embryonic-stem-cell research. He avoids what would otherwise be a terminal paradox through a proposal that he calls "altered nuclear transfer," or ANT. His goal: to create embryonic stem cells without destroying human embryos.

One of the most promising methods for creating embryonic stem cells is cloning: the nucleus of an egg cell is replaced by the nucleus of an adult cell, a process called somatic-cell nuclear transfer. The egg is then induced to divide, and the stem cells harvested from the resulting embryo are pluripotent, meaning they can form any sort of tissue in the body. But harvesting the stem cells destroys the embryo. By contrast, ANT (which has been shown to work in mice, if not humans) switches off vital genes--through alteration of the somatic-cell nucleus, the cytoplasm of the egg, or both--before the transfer takes place. Hurlbut says the resulting cell mass could not become an embryo but could produce pluripotent stem cells.

Hurlbut recently spoke with Michael Fitzgerald about ANT.

TR: What compelled you to come up with altered nuclear transfer?

William Hurlbut: When the President's Council met [to debate the ethics of stem-cell research, in 2002], it was clear that both sides of this debate are promoting important positive goods: that on the one hand you have people trying to defend human dignity from its earliest stages, and on the other hand you have people trying to promote advances in science and medicine. And as I sat there and listened to this debate, I thought, "Isn't there an answer to this? Isn't there some third option, some way that both of these goals can be achieved?"

The e-mail came from the next room.

‘You gotta see this!’ Jorge Moll had written. Moll and Jordan Grafman, neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health, had been scanning the brains of volunteers as they were asked to think about a scenario involving either donating a sum of money to charity or keeping it for themselves.

As Grafman read the e-mail, Moll came bursting in. The scientists stared at each other. Grafman was thinking, ‘Whoa—wait a minute!’

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

Looking back, it was the intellectual high point of my summer: Ten science and religion reporters sitting inside the divinity building at Cambridge University, contemplating the essence of a raisin. As the hypnotic voice of the speaker, an expert on Buddhist meditation, lulled us from the here and now, I placed the wrinkly thing on my tongue, exploring its peaks and valleys until, all of a sudden, I broke through the linguistic cellophane. The raisin ceased to be a raisin or anything with a name. It had no history as a fruit grown on a vine and shipped to market; it evoked no memories of the little Sun-Maid boxes my mother packed in my lunch pail or of a particularly good glass of cabernet sauvignon. It just was.

A mind is a tough thing to think about. Consciousness is the defining feature of the human species. But is it possible that it is also no more than an extravagant biological add-on, something not really essential to our survival? That intriguing possibility plays on my mind as I cross the plaza of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, a breathtaking temple of science perched on a high bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla, Calif. I have just visited the office of Terry Sejnowski, the director of Salk's Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, whose recent research suggests that our conscious minds play less of a role in making decisions than many people have long assumed. ‘The dopamine neurons are responsible for telling the rest of the brain what stimuli to pay attention to,’ Sejnowski says, referring to the cluster of brain cells that produce one of the many chemical elixirs that activate, deactivate, or otherwise alter our mental state. In a deeper way, he explains, evolutionary factors—the need for individual organisms to survive, find food or a mate, and avoid predators—are at work behind the mechanisms of unconscious decision making. ‘Consciousness explains things that have already been decided for you,’ Sejnowski says. Asked whether that means that consciousness is only a bit player in the overarching drama of our lives, he admits that it's hard to separate rationalizing from decision making. ‘But,’ he adds, ‘we might overrate the role of our consciousness in making decisions.’

Can we actually see God in the brain? Well, not exactly. But a few enterprising neuroscientists have found ways to detect and measure the varieties of our religious experience. Using brain scanning technology, researchers have been able to pinpoint which parts of the brain are activated during prayer and meditation. While they can't answer the biggest question of all—does God exist?—they are probing one of the deepest mysteries in science: the nature of consciousness.

They're also wading into a thorny issue in the science and religion debate: the connection between brain and mind. Most neuroscientists assume the mind is nothing more than electrochemical surges among nerve cells in the brain. But neuroscientists who study spirituality tend to be open to the possibility that the mind could exist independently of the brain. Some even question the materialist paradigm of science—the idea that the only reality worth studying is what can be tested, quantified and reproduced. They wonder whether current scientific methods will ever be able to explain consciousness. But others are skeptical. Stephen Heinemann, president of the Society for Neuroscience, recently told the Chronicle of Higher Education, ‘I think the concept of the mind outside the brain is absurd.’

Brother, have you heard the bad news?

It was supposed to be good news, like the kind in the Bible. After three years, $2.4 million, and 1.7 million prayers, the biggest and best study ever was supposed to show that the prayers of faraway strangers help patients recover after heart surgery. But things didn't go as ordained. Patients who knowingly received prayers developed more post-surgery complications than did patients who unknowingly received prayers—and patients who were prayed for did no better than patients who weren't prayed for. In fact, patients who received prayers without their knowledge ended up with more major complications than did patients who received no prayers at all.

At the Fairfax Community Church in Virginia, the faithful regularly pray for ailing strangers. Same goes at the Adas Israel synagogue in Washington and the Islamic Center of Maryland in Gaithersburg.

In churches, mosques, ashrams, ‘healing rooms,’ prayer groups and homes nationwide, millions of Americans offer prayers daily to heal themselves, family, friends, co-workers and even people found through the Internet. Fueled by the upsurge in religious expression in the United States, prayer is the most common complement to mainstream medicine, far outpacing acupuncture, herbs, vitamins and other alternative remedies.

Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism—every religion believes in prayer for healing, said Paul Parker, a professor of theology and religion at Elmhurst College outside Chicago. Some call it prayer, some call it cleansing the mind. The words or posture may vary. But in times of illness, all religions look towards their source of authority.

The outpouring of spiritual healing has inspired a small group of researchers to attempt to use the tools of modern science to test the power of prayer to cure others. The results have been mixed and highly controversial. Skeptics say the work is a deeply flawed and misguided waste of money that irresponsibly attempts to validate the supernatural with science. And some believers say it is pointless to try to divine the workings of God with experiments devised by mortals.

My hiking companion and I have lost our way on this damp late-summer morning. We're on a treeless, mist-shrouded hilltop in Snowdonia National Park, 1,000 feet or so above the Irish Sea along the coast of northern Wales. The bleating of sheep drifts up from the slopes below, muffled by fog that hides the lay of the land. We're trying to reach a village called -- by those able to pronounce its name -- Abergynolwyn, which lies in a nearby valley. But with the murk, we can't find the way down. Sir John Houghton pulls a topographic map and a compass from his backpack. After a few moments of thought he says, "We want to head north. That should take us downhill." So we follow a sheep trail, and a bit later I watch Houghton, who is 76, nimbly hoist himself over a chest-high wire fence.

Charting a path through difficult terrain is nothing new for Houghton, who may be the most important scientist you've never heard of.

Dear Prudence, I'm in my early 30s and the married mother of two young children. I have a good job, and my husband and I get along well. My problem lies within myself. I suffer from something I can only describe as "self-loathing." It started as a teenager (with cutting my arms, drinking, smoking, running with the wrong people). Now I try to keep it all neatly tucked away in my psyche. I've been to therapists and take antidepressants, but this lingering self-hate always surfaces. My symptoms cause me to withdraw, hit myself with hangers, and say and think the most horrible thoughts about myself. Even with my accomplishments, I don't think much of myself. I'm not suicidal, but I frequently entertain thoughts of cutting my arms and legs or having someone else beat me until I'm black and blue, as though I deserve punishment for being who I am.

Rarely has it been thought that the way to show you deserve to be the most powerful person on earth is to demonstrate you're also the touchiest. This presidential campaign has been an offense fest. From the indignation over a fashion writer's observation about Hillary Clinton's cleavage, to the outraged response to the infamous Obama New Yorker cover, to the histrionics over "lipstick on a pig," taking offense has been a political leitmotif. Slate's John Dickerson observed that umbrage is this year's hottest campaign tactic. And we can assume it will reach an operatic crescendo in these final weeks before Election Day.

It's often the pettiest–seeming things that drive people mad. Or worse. Jostling our way through the world can have violent consequences. A significant percentage of murders occur between acquaintances with the flash point being a trivial insult. Sometimes it seems we live in a culture devoted to retribution on behalf of the thin–skinned –just think of university speech codes. Comedian Larry David even celebrates his skill at giving and taking offense on his television show Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Feeling affronted has global implications: Islamic organizations and countries seek to ban speech anywhere they decide is insulting to Islam, asserting that a perceived insult can justify a deadly response.

Study the topic of "taking offense" and you realize people are like tuning forks, ready to vibrate with indignation. So why do humans seem equipped with a thrumming tabulator, incessantly calculating whether we are getting proper due and deference?

In an upstairs classroom at Stanford University, 35 men and women from the surrounding community silently focus on their breathing, learning the rudimentary steps of meditation as part of an evening continuing-education class on forgiveness.

Fred Luskin, co-founder of the Stanford Forgiveness Project in Palo Alto, has abandoned the research laboratory for another calling. Instead of studying the effects of forgiveness, Luskin now devotes much of his time to teaching people how to forgive. He works in classrooms and businesses, nationally and internationally.

It is a new frontier for a new science: how to actually teach forgiveness. Don’t look for a national curriculum anytime soon. Even in the growing library of self-help books, there is a wide array of approaches. Most settle on a process generally ranging from acknowledging the hurt, trying to understand it, perhaps feeling some compassion and then letting go and moving on. Some experts suggest journaling throughout the process; many suggest a group setting or one-to-one coaching to work through it.

The contemporary version of forgiveness may be difficult to embrace, because the concept is still evolving.

…each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom

W.H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’

Do we have free will or not?

A huge question, not to be dismissed. There's a reason people have worried it so. Our default belief that we are not compelled in our choices, that we are freely responsible for our lives—this belief is central to our sense of self, of the universe, our sense (if we have one) of the purpose of life.

Experiments in neuroscience seem (to some) to threaten all that. And a recent surge of books and articles has frothed the waters. Most visible, perhaps, was New York Times columnist Dennis Overbye's column in January titled "Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don't". Overbye largely accepts that free will—at least, as it's often and traditionally defined—is an illusion. An invigorating and necessary debate.

Will free will survive? As we forge into the future and encounter more and more new, hard dilemmas, what we think of human choice and responsibility could affect public policy. Suppose it's determined we really are not in control. That might change our notions of justice, human rights, reward and punishment. And much else.

Sometimes dumb sounds cute: Sixty percent of Americans can't name five of the Ten Commandments, and 50% of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married.

Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, isn't laughing. Americans' deep ignorance of world religions—their own, their neighbors' or the combatants in Iraq, Darfur or Kashmir—is dangerous, he says.

His new book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn't, argues that everyone needs to grasp Bible basics, as well as the core beliefs, stories, symbols and heroes of other faiths.

St. Giles on the Heath, England. 

Through a deep and tangled wood lies a glade so lovely and wet and lush as to call to mind a hobbit's sanctuary. A lichen-covered statue rises in a garden of native grasses, and a misting rain drips off a slate roof. At the yard's edge a plump muskrat waddles into the brush.

‘Hello!’

A lean, white-haired gentleman in a blue wool sweater and khakis beckons you inside his whitewashed cottage. We sit beside a stone hearth as his wife, Sandy, an elegant blonde, sets out scones and tea. James Lovelock fixes his mind's eye on what's to come.

‘It's going too fast,’ he says softly. ‘We will burn.’

Why is that?

‘Our global furnace is out of control. By 2020, 2025, you will be able to sail a sailboat to the North Pole. The Amazon will become a desert, and the forests of Siberia will burn and release more methane and plagues will return.’

Scott Atran knows a thing or two about fundamentalists, and as far as he's concerned, they are nice people. ‘I certainly find very little hatred; they act out of love,’ he says. ‘These people are very compassionate.’ Atran, who studies group dynamics at the University of Michigan, is talking about suicide bombers, extremists by anyone's standards and not representative of fundamentalist ideology in general (New Scientist, 23 July, page 18). But surprisingly, much of what Atran has discovered about suicide bombers helps to explain the psychology of all fundamentalist movements.

Americans talk endlessly about death.

We want a "good death," a "natural death," a "death with dignity," researchers say.

We'd like to say all farewells, repent all sins—or accept our karmic consequences—and then blink out like a candle.

We just can't agree on what that looks like, how it happens, even the very definition of "death."

Our society is splintered on when—or whether—to begin or end a bewildering array of life-support technologies that didn't exist 50 years ago. When the end is near, must we leave the timing to God or nature?