Science And Salvation

Small wonder Wilson decided that scientists need allies wherever they can be found.

'Converted'

" 'God made the Creation, you say. This truth is plainly stated in Holy Scripture.' "

The Rev. Richard Cizik is reading aloud from Wilson's book.

" ' . . . But no, I say, respectfully: Life was self-assembled by random mutation and natural selection of the codifying molecules.' "

Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, is holding forth from a couch in the association's modest Southwest Washington office. Asked about Wilson's decision to be straightforward about the gap between the scientific and evangelical worldviews, the pastor has thumbed quickly through his bound galley of "The Creation" to find a passage that spells them out.

The point he's making is the same as Wilson's: We know we have differences. But that doesn't mean we can't share concerns.

Like Wilson, Cizik used to think political action on the environment "isn't our fight." Then, in 2002 -- at the urging of the Rev. Jim Ball, who heads a group called the Evangelical Environmental Network -- he flew to England to attend a conference on climate change. Absorbing everything he could about the threat of global warming, he "came away converted."

Evangelicals, Cizik says, "have begun to speak out on these issues in our own voice. Which is to say not as environmentalists but as evangelical Christians who care about creation."

Cizik is speaking in his personal voice here, not for the National Association of Evangelicals' roughly 30 million members. Evangelicals are far from united on this topic, and since he threw himself into the climate change issue, he's been attacked -- by the Rev. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, among others -- for what amounts to consorting with the enemy.

Part of the conflict is generational, Cizik says. To the older generation, which identifies "enviros" with the political left, "this is a bridge too far. After all, you could lose your faith or something! Hang out with those guys and you'll slippery-slide your way into evolution!"

But momentum, he believes, is on the side of engagement. In February, for example, 86 influential evangelical leaders joined forces to back what they called the Evangelical Climate Initiative, through which they will work to curtail global warming.

Introduced by a mutual friend, Cizik and Wilson met over lunch at the Cosmos Club last summer. Earlier this month, they exchanged views in an "e-conversation" on the Web site of Audubon magazine. The very idea of a rapprochement between evangelicals and secular scientists, Cizik wrote, "will send lobbyists for the status quo into overtime, if not apoplexy, to stop it from happening."

Still, he believes that an alliance is "achievable" -- and that Wilson's book could not have come at a better time.

A Man's Work

"I will not be a wimp," Wilson is saying.

He's in his office, just down the hall from the Ant Room, shelves lined with copies of his many books, including a stack of "The Creation." He's been asked about his decision -- in a text explicitly designed to elicit cooperation from evangelicals -- to offer a tour through modern biology in which the "fundamental law" of evolution by natural selection seems to crop up on every other page.

Yes, he's trying to reach out. But he won't "betray science or the Enlightenment" in the process.

That said, he thinks he's uniquely positioned to be heard by a group he refers to, only half-joking, as "my people."

He's known from childhood that the evangelical movement "is far more flexible and far more devoted to spiritual searching and open to ideas" than you'd guess from listening to a few of its star performers.

Environmentalism has been stereotyped in its turn, he notes. Emerging as it did amid the revolts of the 1960s, "it got tied in politically and ideologically with the left," which used it as a club "to beat big business and beat the capitalist system" -- creating an anti-environmental backlash on the right.

Wilson doesn't think business and the environment have to be enemies. That's why he flew to Bentonville, Ark., with Conservation International's Seligman a couple of years back to talk environmental protection with the family that owns Wal-Mart.

He'll reach out to anyone if he thinks they can help the natural world -- that many-splendored universe that long ago, as he roamed fields and swamps of the Gulf Coast, replaced religion as a focus for his spiritual impulses.

He summons a favorite saying from Camus that evokes a lifetime's quest: "A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

One more question. What if we turned his bridge-building exercise around? What if Wilson's mythical man of God got to address him about what they share and don't share, and what they can do for the creation? Does he know what the pastor would say?

"I have an idea," he replies. "And that would be: 'Ayed' -- that's how you say Ed in Alabama, two syllables -- 'I appreciate what you're trying to do. I think you're basically right.' "

The scientist is smiling now. It's a prelude to an ecumenical laugh.

" 'And I hope, as we work together, that you're going to come back to Jesus.' "