Physics has very little to say about the conjunction of science and religion, beyond what it has already said: namely, that the entire material universe is ultimately obedient to a small number of physical laws. The origin of those laws remains an open and possibly unanswerable question: whether or not energy and law were designed by a heavenly creator-in other words, a cosmological god or god-equivalent force, as conceived in the world view of deism. This line of reasoning leads back to the problem that interested the Enlightenment philosophers and modern scientists like Einstein, who said that what interested him most is whether God must obey his own laws. This is a fundamental problem, but it is far removed from the ordinary concerns of theology and the practice of religion and our everyday lives. On the other hand, biology and the social sciences have everything to say about the relation of science and religion, because they address with growing clarity the origin of mind and the relation of mind to culture, and thence the origin and meaning of religious belief itself.

It seems to follow that the central question-in the relation of science and religion is something else. It is as follows: are religious doctrines, spiritual enlightenment, and the fundamental ethical precepts that arise from religion and spirituality transcendental? In other words, do they exist apart from human contrivance awaiting discovery, in the way the laws of physics exist and await discovery?

Or, contrary to this transcendental metaphysics, which is the core of traditional theology, are religious doctrines, spiritual enlightenment, and ethical precepts instead contrivances of the human mind and culture arising from millions of years of combined genetic and cultural evolution? This is the empiricist world view of the human condition, and to an increasing degree it is being addressed by biologists and social scientists, as well as some liberal theologians, whose attention has been newly focused on the study of mind and evolution by the advance of science.

There is no doubt that spirituality and religious behavior of some kind are extremely powerful and, it appears, necessary parts of the human condition. We have a compelling instinct for religion and spirituality in some form or other, even if they assume an atheistic or deistic rationale. The inability of secular humanist thinkers to satisfy this instinct, even when evidence and reason are on their side, is surely part of the reason that there are only 5,300 members of the American Humanist Association and sixteen million members of the Southern Baptist Convention.

But truth is not settled by a poll. Our attention is focused back on the important question: does the power and universality of the instinct necessarily mean that religious behavior and spirituality are transcendental-that is, exist outside of human contrivance, waiting to be discovered by human contemplation, grace, and revelation? Or, in contrast, does their strength merely mean that we cannot see the origins of religion and spirituality clearly and directly, just as we cannot understand the mind by introspection alone-that we have to rely on novel analytic methods to grasp how the whole system works? Of the study of mind, Charles Darwin said (and he could have been speaking most relevantly of the religious part of the mind) that the citadel cannot be taken by direct assault. We cannot know how the brain works, much less where it came from, by introspection and the sampling of our own emotions during visionary revelation.

If science-the most efficient means of acquiring and verifying objective knowledge ever devised-cannot take the citadel, if the empiricist worldview fails at this level, where will this failure leave theology and the traditions of the great world religions? Intact, with continued validation by means of authority through alleged divine authorship. But if science can take the citadel and plumb the organic function and origin of religious behavior to its evolutionary roots, as it seems set on doing, where does that leave theology? It leaves it still culturally astride one of the most important domains of human behavior but forced to base its authority more upon empirical evidence and reason than upon claims of divine guidance plainly contradicted by the evidence.

I've just mentioned physics and the cosmological god and the divine author conceived by deism. Now I will mention biology and its relation to the biological god, the author of theism, who has created humanity (or at least the human mind) and watches over our lives today-at least in the tradition of the great Abrahamic religions. What is happening, in my opinion, is that, as much as the great majority of people might wish otherwise, the evidence points increasingly to the correctness of the empiricist world view and away from the existence of a supreme designer who had anything to do with the origin of the human species-except, perhaps, as a bemused spectator of a grand experiment begun twelve billion to fifteen billion years ago when the physical laws of the universe were first manifested, a spectator who makes no response to our travail and prayers.

No doubt the empiricist worldview, taken to its logical conclusion, will be hotly disputed-and it should be. It is located in one of the eternally shifting, creative borderlands between science and religion-our intellectual ring of fire, so to speak, with volcanoes and tsunamis that episodically change the intellectual landscape. It would be foolish to deny its existence and say, as a few scientists have said, pandering to popular opinion it sometimes seems, that science has its domain and that all existence can be divided as the world was cleaved, on paper at least, by Pope Alexander VI in 1493 in his recommendation to the Castilian monarchs.

Meanwhile, as I have urged our many colleagues of different persuasions in the past, there are a number of moral issues on the near side of metaphysics, and we would do very well to bring into concert the most powerful voices in the world today-those of science and organized religion-to achieve what we can readily agree are morally compelling goals. One of the outstanding of these goals is the preservation of the natural environment, and most particularly the fauna and flora-the Creation, if you will, with a capital C. Religious traditionalists believe that the global biota were put here in one way or another by heavenly design, and secularists believe that it was self-assembled through evolution by natural selection. But both will agree, if at all informed, that the Creation is being destroyed by human action-for example, in the rain forests, which alone contain more than half the species on Earth-at the rate of about 0.25 percent per year. And the two sides will agree that, on this one issue at least, ultimate beliefs can be set aside in order to achieve a common goal that can be properly labeled, in one sense or another, as sacred. Whether from a God intimately concerned with the fall of each sparrow or the god of process theology immanent in all existence or a world that was exquisitely self-assembled by natural selection, the salvation of what we have been bequeathed deserves to be a primary precept.

Finally, how are we to assess the contest between the empiricist and transcendentalist views? As the century closes, what is new in our understanding of the world is that these two views are competing hypotheses, and testable hypotheses, and that it is within our power to prove one or the other to be correct but not both. Many thoughtful writers have said no, such an important issue as the meaning of God and of the spirit cannot be that simple. But the time has come to say yes, it can be that simple. Sometimes a seemingly impossible problem can be flanked, especially when it is composed mostly of metaphor, as this one is. That in essence is what science is doing in the case of spiritual and moral authority. This distinction, and the prospect it holds for clear thought, is the central intellectual question of humanism.

I believe that the clear expression of the competition between the two hypotheses-transcendentalism and empiricism--will be the twenty-first century's version of the struggle for human souls. I believe also that the winner of this struggle will be empiricism, with the recognition that, while throughout the genetic history of the human brain we evolved to believe one truth, in the end, with courage and intellect and luck, we have discovered another truth.

We can say to the transcendentalists that there is a thousand times more to the human condition-more history, more complexity, more nobility--than you thought. There is more to being human than dreamt in your philosophy. And having arrived at this position, humanity has opened the way to base spirituality and ethics on a more rational, benign foundation. As a biological species we got where we are alone, we will flourish or die as a species together alone, and our reverence is therefore better directed not to tribal gods and Iron Age mythologies-which were conceived in the brutal Darwinian past and still carry the stench of arrogance and oppression that made them possible-but to each other, our species, our intellect, our planet, and our future, together

Edward O. Wilson is a world authority on biodiversity and the evolution of social behavior A research professor and honorary curator in entomology at Harvard University he is the author and editor of twenty books, two of which received Pulitzer Prizes. This article is adapted from his acceptance speech for the 1999 Humanist of the Year Award, presented by the American Humanist Association. The Humanist September/October 1999