He has a theory for why religion first took root. He thinks human brains evolved to become “belief engines.” Once our ancient ancestors understood cause and effect, they figured out how to manipulate the natural world. In essence, toolmaking made us human. Similarly, early hominids felt compelled to find causes for life’s great mysteries, including illness and death. They came to believe in unseen gods and spirits.

Wolpert sees human credulity all around him — not just religious faith but all sorts of modern superstitions. His book targets astrology, psychics, homeopathy and acupuncture. Wolpert has participated in public debates with maverick scientist Rupert Sheldrake about telepathy and other paranormal experiences. He dismisses Sheldrake’s theory — that “morphic fields” can transmit thoughts through space and time — as nonsense.

There’s no doubt that Wolpert is a provocateur, but unlike some other prominent atheists, he doesn’t come across as a bitter enemy of religion. In conversation, his pronouncements are often punctuated by laughter and mock horror. I spoke with Wolpert by phone about the origins of religion, his doubts about telepathy and acupuncture, and why the debate over religion is so personal for him.

Can you explain the “belief engine” in the human brain?

What makes us different from all other animals is that we have causal beliefs about the physical world. I know that if I throw this glass at the window, it’s probably going to break. Children have this understanding at a very early age. Animals, on the other hand, have a very poor understanding of cause and effect in the physical world. My argument is that causal understanding gave rise to toolmaking; that was the evolutionary advantage. It’s toolmaking that’s really driven human evolution. This is not widely accepted, I’m afraid, but there’s no question about it. It’s tools that really made us human. They may even have given rise to language.

But there is evidence that some animals have a very primitive form of toolmaking.

There’s no question that certain apes are at the edge of causal understanding and they do make some very simple tools. Chimpanzees can break a nut with a stone. They can also take a stick and peel it to get ants out of a tree. But it’s still very primitive. Curiously, some crows show remarkable toolmaking, using sticks to get things out of bottles. But on the whole, it’s primitive compared to us.

And I suppose the radically new thing our ancestors did was to put two objects together — for instance, a piece of stone on a wooden handle.

Precisely. You can’t do that without having a concept of cause and effect. And once you had that concept, you wanted to understand the causes of other things that mattered in your life, like illness. That’s the origin of religion. The most obvious causes were those things caused by humans, so people imagined there was some sort of god with human characteristics. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different gods in different societies.

So once you have an understanding of cause and effect, then ignorance is no longer tolerable? You want to explain everything.

Exactly. You know, we cannot tolerate not knowing the causes of things that affect our lives. If you go to the doctor when you’re ill, the one thing you can’t stand is the doctor saying he or she has no idea what’s wrong with you. And when they do diagnose you, I’m prepared to bet that on your way home, you’ll tell yourself a story as to why you got ill.

But which came first: understanding cause and effect or learning to make tools?

They went together, but you cannot make complex tools without a concept of cause and effect. You must remember that no animal has a basket. If they go away from water, they can’t take any water with them. They can’t carry things. However, we’re driven by interacting with our environment and looking for causes that affect our lives.

Are you saying our brains are hard-wired for belief?

Our brains are absolutely hard-wired for causal belief. And I think they’re a bit soft-wired for religious and mystical belief. Those people who had religious beliefs did better than those who did not, and they were selected for.

Why did they do better?

They were less anxious. They also had someone to pray to. In general, religious people are somewhat healthier than people who don’t have religious beliefs.

Haven’t studies shown that religious believers tend to be more optimistic, and that they’re less prone to strokes and high blood pressure?

Yes, exactly. Therefore, evolution will select them.

So religion gives us a sense of purpose and meaning, even though in your view it’s totally an illusion.

Yes, many people would find it very hard to live without religion. But there is no meaning, I regret to tell you. [Laughs] We don’t understand where the universe came from. But to say God made it, well, you want to say, who made God?

To say there’s no meaning is a pretty depressing assessment, isn’t it?

No, why should there be a meaning? I mean, we want a cause as to why we’re here, but I’m afraid there isn’t one. I don’t find it depressing at all. I think it’s remarkable that evolution has brought us into being. We’re only here for one purpose, from an evolutionary point of view, and that’s to reproduce.

You write that you were once quite a religious child yourself. When did you turn away from religion?

I came from quite a conventional Jewish family — not Orthodox, but conventional — in South Africa. I had to say my prayers every night. And I used to pray to God to help me in various things but found it didn’t help. So I stopped being religious.

Your son became a fundamentalist Christian after a difficult late adolescence. Is he still an evangelical Christian?

No, he’s not. The church he was in broke up. He’s still a believer, but he doesn’t go to church.

Does his faith bother you?

No. I found that religion was helping him a great deal. It gave him someone to pray to. He became a member of a church where they could discuss their problems. And I think the idea that he would eventually go to heaven gave him a great deal of encouragement.

Has your son read the chapter on religion in your book? It’s rather dismissive of religion.

He knows I’m dismissive of it. In fact, I just spoke to him last night on the telephone and asked him, “Did I ever try to dissuade you from being religious?” He said, “No, you never did.” I wouldn’t agree with him, but I never tried to dissuade him not to be.

Do you find yourself wondering about ultimate meaning? Does that matter in your life?

Never. Ultimate meaning has no meaning in my life. I sound a bit shallow, but I think it’s actually quite deep not to be bothered by that sort of thing.

You call David Hume your “hero philosopher.” Why do you like him so much?

First of all, I don’t like any other philosopher. I think philosophers are terribly clever but have absolutely nothing useful to say whatsoever. I avoid philosophy like mad. But David Hume does say such interesting and important things. He’s very good on religion, for example. I like him for that.

Well, he didn’t like religion.

No, it’s not that he didn’t like religion. If you take miracles, for example, there’s a lovely quote from David Hume that you shouldn’t believe in any miracle unless the evidence is so strong that it would be miraculous not to believe in it.

There are various competing theories about the origins of religion. One is the idea that religion evolved because it helped bind people together in social groups. Essentially, it acted like social glue. Why don’t you think that’s right?

I don’t think it’s wrong. There is some evidence that religion does lead to a community with shared views. But you have to ask, Why does religion deal so much with cause and effect? That comes from causal beliefs.

What about Daniel Dennett’s idea that religion is a kind of “meme” — an idea that has infected human cultures and keeps on spreading?

If you could tell me what a meme is, and how useful it is, I’d be very grateful. [Laughs] Please don’t misunderstand, I’m a great admirer of Richard Dawkins [who developed the concept of memes]. But what are memes? How do you decide whether something is a meme or not? And what you really want to understand is, how is it passed on and why does it persist? This is never discussed. So for Daniel Dennett — who’s a philosopher, after all — to get involved with memes, the moment he does that, I just stop reading him.

Virtually all these theories draw on evolutionary psychology. But I wonder if we’re losing the flavor of religious experience, the willingness to live in mystery, embrace imagination and intuition.

Sometimes I’ve thought it must be quite nice to believe in religion. I’m getting quite old. The idea that I might go to heaven — of course, there’s also the possibility, in my case, that I would go to hell — is quite an attractive one. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that for a single second. I mean, the evidence for God is simply nonexistent.

Isn’t there more to religion than belief in supernatural beings?

Certainly not.

But many theologians and scholars, such as historian Karen Armstrong, say religion at its root is not really about a set of beliefs. It’s more about how to live your life and being compassionate in the world.

Well, many people who are atheists can behave quite well. That doesn’t make us religious. No, it doesn’t work like that at all.

I grant that. But do you really think religion comes down to belief in the supernatural?

When I talk about religion, I’m talking about belief in the supernatural. In Western society, we’re talking about God. I don’t believe you can be religious without having some concept of a god.

What about William James? He talked about religion as experience more than belief.

I think “The Varieties of Religious Experience” is one of the best books written about belief. Nothing has really changed since he wrote it a hundred years ago. He did point out that many people become religious because they had a religious experience. And that fits with my idea that we’re partly wired to have religious beliefs. If you take the active component of a magic mushroom and give it to a group of people, quite a few of them will have mystical, almost religious, beliefs. It must mean the circuits are there which are turned on by the drug.

So it all comes down to the chemicals that are firing in the brain?

I’m afraid so. Your neural circuits, yes.

What about paranormal experiences like telepathy or life after death? Are those bogus?

Yes. All bogus. I have a very close friend, an artist, who claims to have seen three ghosts. She knew they were ghosts because they didn’t have legs, and they told her things about the house she was staying in that she didn’t know before. Yes, she had strange experiences. It doesn’t mean they were ghosts. And I don’t believe telepathy. Rupert Sheldrake, who’s an old friend of mine, is a strong promoter of telepathy and things like that. I’m afraid the evidence just isn’t there.

Rupert Sheldrake is a biochemist who used to teach at the University of Cambridge.

Oh, he was a very clever plant cell biologist.

He’s done various controlled experiments trying to figure out whether people know who’s going to phone them, or whether dogs know when their owners are coming home. You’re saying none of that is legitimate science?

It’s legitimate, but I’m unimpressed by all of it.

Let’s talk about one of his experiments. He did a controlled study of what he calls “telephone telepathy.” People were asked to give four phone numbers of friends. The callers were chosen randomly and then asked to guess who was calling. The statistical probability was that 25 percent of the guesses would be right. Sheldrake said the responses were more like 45 percent.

I’d like to see someone else do the experiment and have it confirmed. Remember what David Hume said? In order to believe in miraculous things, the evidence should be so miraculous that you could not but believe it. You can’t just do one experiment like that on such an extraordinary thing like telepathy. Telepathy goes against everything we know about neurophysiology and physics. If telepathy exists, it would be a miracle. That’s why I go back to Hume. The evidence has to be overwhelming.

Listen, almost everybody has a strange, non-normal experience once a year. Many, many people have these. If you take the right drugs, you can have them on order. People taking LSD had the most extraordinary experiences. Those experiences were real, but they had nothing to do with the real world.

Well, telepathy goes against the understanding that the mind is totally the product of the neural processes within the brain, which is certainly the dominant thinking among neuroscientists.

You also have to transmit that message over distances into somebody else’s mind. That’s just nonsense.

What if there are forces out there — perhaps energy fields, as Sheldrake would say — that we just haven’t discovered yet?

[Laughs] OK, when he discovers them, he’ll let us know. I’m saying you really have to have good evidence. And there isn’t any.

When my grandfather was 16 years old, he heard an odd sound, looked up and saw the photograph of his grandfather knocking on the wall in the living room. This was so unusual that he checked the time it happened. Later that day, his family got a telegram saying that his grandfather had died at precisely that time. Is that just coincidence?

Well, that is remarkable and I don’t have an explanation. I’m afraid it probably is coincidence. But it does sound as if it’s some sort of telepathic experience. And we all have that. You’re thinking of someone and suddenly they phone you. You haven’t spoken to them for six months and suddenly the phone rings and there they are. OK, I don’t have a good explanation for that. But to think that there’s some message going across is just most unlikely.

Unlikely yes, but doesn’t this get at the limits of science?

No, it’s not the limits of science. You’ve got to find experiments that will really show it. Science can’t rely on anecdotes, on single, one-off experiences like this. You’ve got to find some way of testing them. Maybe the way Rupert Sheldrake goes about it is the right way to do it. But it has to be done extremely carefully, and single anecdotes tell you nothing.

You have written about alternative medicine and are highly skeptical of various healing practices, including energy healing and even acupuncture, which is now used quite widely in the West.

Yes, I know it’s used. It’s quite tricky because the placebo effect can really confuse these results very significantly. So if you believe the treatment is going to work, you’ve got a much higher chance that it’s going to work. But there’s just no evidence for the idea of energy fields, which acupuncturists use for deciding where to put the needles.

But there are thousands of years of experiential evidence going back to ancient China.

But nothing to do with energy. Energy is a well-defined concept. And I’m terribly sorry, no physiologist has ever detected any of these energy fields.

Maybe the scientific instruments that we have at our disposal just can’t detect anything about qi.

Sorry. When they invented qi, how in the hell did they know what an energy field was? They hardly had a concept of energy. I mean, if you go back and look at their evidence, I’m afraid it was a nice set of ideas, but I’m terribly sorry, evidence matters. And that’s what causal beliefs are really about. If we believe that something has a particular cause, we should be looking for the evidence.

Many people say they’ve been helped by acupuncture. Are you saying the placebo effect is the only explanation?

I have no idea why it works. But it’s extremely unlikely that it’s got anything to do with those energy fields. It could be largely due to the placebo effect. And homeopathy, where there are no molecules in the liquid that you take, is even more bizarre. And many people believe in homeopathic medicine.

Do you have any superstitions yourself?

[Laughs] I touch wood occasionally, I’m ashamed to say. And I don’t ever like to say that I’m really happy because I think the gods may not like it.

Are you joking? Or is there some little part of you that really believes this?

I suppose this is part of the soft-wiring for mysticism. There’s a lovely story — I’ve forgotten the physicist — who had a horseshoe over his door. He said it didn’t do him any harm, but might do him some good.

Pascal’s wager, right? You decide you’re better off believing in God, even though the existence of God seems unlikely.

[Laughs] No, I don’t go as far as that, but I am a little superstitious, yes. A tiny bit.

If you look into your crystal ball, do you think we will always have religion? Or will reason win out at some point?

I believe we will always have religion. Churchgoing has declined in England, but the number of people who believe in God is still quite high. And in America, it’s very high. And you just have to look at the Muslim world. It’s very strong there. I’d be very surprised if it disappeared.

So the project of Richard Dawkins — basically, to try to turn us all into atheists — is just a pipe dream?

I believe it to be a pipe dream. The idea that you could persuade people not to be religious is in my view a hopeless aim. It comes from people’s personal experience, rather than logical arguments.

But isn’t this what you’re doing in your book, arguing for the virtues of reason over religious belief?

Not at all. I’m trying to understand what determines religious belief. I’m not trying to convert people out of religion. Not for a moment. But if they then want to impose some of their religious beliefs onto other people — for example, in relation to abortion or not using contraceptives — then I ask them to look at the evidence. I ask them to be much more careful about their beliefs.

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.

Despite all this religious mayhem, the book also shows a gentler side of the Abrahamic religions, especially when they manage to find common cause with their heathen neighbors and rival monotheists.

At first, “The Evolution of God” reads like another atheistic tract exposing the seamier side of religion. But then I came to Wright’s account of the “moral imagination” and his surprising conclusion: He may not believe in God, but Wright thinks humanity is marching — however wobbly — toward moral truth.

In our interview, we talked about the bloody history of monotheism, what a mature religion would look like, and Wright’s own spiritual awakening at a meditation retreat.

At the very beginning of your book, you describe yourself as a materialist. This raises an interesting question: Can a materialist really explain the history of religion?

I tend to explain things in terms of material causes. So when I see God changing moods, as he does a lot in the Bible and the Quran, I ask, what was going on politically or economically that might explain why the people who wrote this scripture were inclined to depict God as being in a bad mood or a good mood? Sometimes God is advocating horrific things, like annihilating nearby peoples, or sometimes he’s very compassionate and loving. So I wanted to figure out why the mood fluctuates. I do think the answers lie in the facts on the ground. And that’s what I mean by being a materialist.

What do you mean by the facts on the ground?

My basic premise is that when a religious group sees itself as having something to gain through peaceful interaction with another group of people, including a different religion, it will find a basis for tolerance in its scriptures and religion. When groups see each other as being in a non-zero sum relationship — there’s a possibility of a win-win outcome if they play their cards right, or a lose-lose outcome if they don’t — then they tend to warm up to one another. By contrast, if people see themselves in a zero-sum relationship with another group of people — they can only win if the other group loses — that brings out the intolerance and the dark side of religion. You see that in the world today. A lot of Palestinians and Israelis think they’re playing a win-lose game. They think their interests are opposed and inversely correlated. In the long run, I think they’re wrong. They’re either both going to win or both going to lose.

And you’re saying these attitudes keep fluctuating back and forth over the history of religion. It’s not just a gradual movement from less tolerance to more tolerance.

There hasn’t been any smooth progression toward tolerance in any of the religions. If you look at the way human beings treated each other 10,000 years ago, it was not uncommon for members of one hunter-gatherer tribe to consider strangers as subhuman and worthy of death. I try to show that all the Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — are capable of making great moral progress by extending compassion across national and ethnic and religious bounds. But there has not been any kind of smooth progression.

Do you think religions share certain core principles?

Not many. People in the modern world, certainly in America, think of religion as being largely about prescribing moral behavior. But religion wasn’t originally about that at all. To judge by hunter-gatherer religions, religion was not fundamentally about morality before the invention of agriculture. It was trying to figure out why bad things happen and increasing the frequency with which good things happen. Why do you sometimes get earthquakes, storms, disease and get slaughtered? But then sometimes you get nice weather, abundant game and you get to do the slaughtering. Those were the religious questions in the beginning.

And bad things happened because the gods were against you or certain spirits had it out for you?

Yes, you had done something to offend a god or spirit. However, it was not originally a moral lapse. That’s an idea you see as societies get more complex. When you have a small group of hunter-gatherers, a robust moral system is not a big challenge. Everyone knows everybody, so it’s hard to conceal anything you steal. If you mess with somebody too much, there will be payback. Moral regulation is not a big problem in a simple society. But as society got more complex with the invention of agriculture and writing, morality did become a challenge. Religion filled that gap.

But it’s easier to explain why bad things happen in these older religions. You can attribute it to an angry spirit. It’s harder to explain evil if there’s an all-powerful, all-loving God.

The problem of evil is a product of modern religion. If you believe in an omnipotent and infinitely good God, then evil is a problem. If God is really good — and can do anything He or She wants — why do innocent people suffer? If you’ve got a religion in which the gods are not especially good in the first place, or they’re not omnipotent, then evil is not a problem.

Why did monotheism first develop?

My explanation for Abrahamic monotheism is different from the standard one. I believe it emerged later than most people think — in the 6th century BCE, when Israelite elites were exiled by the Babylonians who conquered them. The spirit of monotheism was originally a lot less sunny and benign than people claim. Morally, it got better, but at its birth, monotheism was fundamentally about retribution.

Israel was a small nation in a bad neighborhood that got kicked around. This culminated in the exile, which was humiliating. It dispossessed the Israelites. It’s not crazy to compare the mind-set of the Israelites then to the mind-set of today’s Palestinians, who feel humiliated and dispossessed. This kind of mind-set brings out the belligerence in a religion. You see that in the Book of Isaiah, thought to be written by so-called Second Isaiah. These are the earliest scriptures in the Bible that are clearly monotheistic. You get the sense that monotheism is about punishing the various nations that have persecuted Israel.

So you see a connection between the political power of a people and the god they believed in?

In ancient times, there was always a close association between politics and gods. The victor of a war was always the nation whose god beat the other god. But the specific political dynamic that monotheism reflected at its birth was Israel’s desire to punish other nations by denying the very existence of their gods, and also envisioning a day when Israel’s god, Yahweh, would actually subjugate those nations.

Does Yahweh become a tool for Israelite kings to consolidate power?

You see that especially with King Josiah. Israel was polytheistic for a lot longer than most people think. A lot of things factored into its movement toward monotheism. One was a king who wanted to eliminate domestic political rivals. Those political rivals would have claimed access to various gods other than Yahweh, so King Josiah wanted to eliminate them. He killed some of them and also made it illegal to worship their gods. That gets you to the brink of monotheism. I think the exile pushes you over. You have a very belligerent, exclusive monotheism, whose very purpose is to exclude other nations from this privileged circle of God’s most favored people.

King Josiah comes off rather badly in your book. He’s hugely influential in the development of monotheism, but also a brutal tyrant who tried to wipe out people with competing religious beliefs.

He was an authoritarian. By the standards of the day, maybe not an unusually harsh one. Politics were pretty rough and tumble in those days. He was a nationalist, populist authoritarian — maybe a little bit like Hugo Chavez. It was a rejection of cosmopolitanism and internationalism. By our standards, King Josiah was a bad guy. He kills a bunch of priests who had the misfortune of not focusing their devotion exclusively on Yahweh. He cleans out the temple.

For people who claim that Israel was monotheistic from the get-go and its flirtations with polytheism were rare aberrations, it’s interesting that the Jerusalem temple, according to the Bible’s account, had all these other gods being worshiped in it. Asherah was in the temple. She seemed to be a consort or wife of Yahweh. And there were vessels devoted to Baal, the reviled Canaanite god. So Israel was fundamentally polytheistic at this point. Then King Josiah goes on a rampage as he tries to consolidate his own power by wiping out the other gods.

However, after the exile, monotheism evolves into something much more laudable and inclusive. Now the exiles have returned to Jerusalem and Israel is in a secure neighborhood. It’s part of the Persian empire and so are its neighbors. So you see a much sunnier side of God, with expressions of tolerance and compassion toward other nations. This shows that monotheism isn’t intrinsically good or bad. It depends on the circumstances in which it finds itself.

This gets pretty confusing for today’s religious believer. There’s a vengeful God in some of these early books of the Old Testament — a God who at times says you need to wipe out people with different religious beliefs. But within this same sacred text, you can also read about a very compassionate God.

You’re right, the contrasts are extreme. At one point in the Hebrew Bible, God is saying, “I want you to annihilate nearby peoples who worship the wrong gods.” He says do not leave anything alive that breathes — not livestock, women or children. Then other times you have Israelites not only tolerating a neighbor who worships another god but using that other god to validate their desire for tolerance. So they’ll say to the Ammonites, “Look, you’ve got your god, Chemosh. He gave you your land. We’ve got our god, Yahweh, who gave us our land. Can’t we just get along?”

You see this kind of vacillation in the Bible and also in the Quran. In both cases, it’s a question of whether people think they can gain through peaceful interaction with other people. That’s also the challenge in the modern world. Barack Obama gets this. So long as Israeli settlements are expanding, you’re not going to convince Palestinians that they’re playing anything other than a zero-sum game with the Israelis. Obama understands it’s partly a question of perception. Muslims who feel disrespected — whether or not they really are — will fuel religious extremism.

Let’s skip ahead to the next great monotheistic religion. Why did Christianity take root?

The doctrines we associate with Christianity probably took root a little later than most people think. There’s reason to doubt that Jesus is the source of the stuff we consider most laudable in Christianity: universal, transnational, transethnic love. I think that is a product of people like the Apostle Paul, who, after the crucifixion, carried the Jesus movement into the Roman Empire. Paul wanted to build a network of churches. He was a true believer, but he went about this in a very pragmatic, businesslike way. In many ways, the church served as a networking service. That was part of its appeal. The network of Christian churches made it easier for merchants to travel from city to city in the Roman empire and do business.

Paul also made some good strategic choices. There were followers of Jesus who dictated that any non-Jews who became part of the Jesus movement had to be circumcised. Adult men had to be circumcised to join the church. This was before modern anesthesia, so you can see this would be a disincentive. Paul said no, and they don’t have to follow the dietary laws either. They also developed an attractive doctrine of an afterlife. The Roman empire was in a way waiting for a church to dominate it. The more Christians there were, the more valuable it was to join that network. When Christianity reached critical mass, then its dominance of the Roman Empire became almost inevitable.

So later Christians, Paul among others, really institutionalized Christianity. What about the historical Jesus? What do we know about him?

It’s popular to say he said the good stuff and not the less good stuff. I think it’s the opposite.

He’s typically seen as the great prophet of peace and love.

Yeah. But the fact is, the Sermon on the Mount, which is a beautiful thing, does not appear in Mark, which was the first written gospel. And these views are not attributed to Jesus in the letters of Paul, which are the earliest post-crucifixion documents we have. You see Paul develop a doctrine of universal love, but he’s not, by and large, attributing this stuff to Jesus. So, too, with “love your enemies.” Paul says something like love your enemies, but he doesn’t say Jesus said it. It’s only in later gospels that this stuff gets attributed to Jesus. This will seem dispiriting to some people to hear that Jesus wasn’t the great guy we thought he was. But to me, it’s actually more inspiring to think that the doctrines of transnational, transethnic love were products of a multinational, imperial platform. Throughout human history, as social organization grows beyond ethnic bounds, it comes to encompass diverse ethnicities and nations. And if it develops doctrines that bring us closer to moral truth, like universal love, that is encouraging. I think you see it in all three religions.

If Jesus was not the prophet of love and tolerance that he’s commonly thought to be, what kind of person was he?

I think he was your typical Jewish apocalyptic preacher. I’m not the first to say that. Bart Ehrman makes these kinds of arguments, and it goes back to Albert Schweitzer. Jesus was preaching that the kingdom of God was about to come. He didn’t mean in heaven. He meant God’s going to come down and straighten things out on Earth. And he had the biases that you’d expect a Jewish apocalyptic preacher to have. He doesn’t seem to have been all that enthusiastic about non-Jews. There’s one episode where a woman who’s not from Israel wants him to use his healing powers on her daughter. He’s pretty mean and basically says, no, we don’t serve dogs here. He compares her to a dog. In the later gospels, that conversation unfolds so you can interpret it as a lesson in the value of faith. But in the earliest treatment, in Mark, it’s an ugly story. It’s only because she accepts her inferior status that Jesus says, OK, I will heal your daughter.

But wasn’t Jesus revolutionary because he made no distinctions between social classes? The poor were just as worthy as the rich.

It’s certainly plausible that his following included poor people. But I don’t think it extended beyond ethnic bounds. And I don’t think it was that original. In the Hebrew Bible, you see a number of prophets who were crying out for justice on behalf of the poor. So it wasn’t new that someone would have a constituency that includes the dispossessed. I’m sure in many ways Jesus was a laudable person. But I think more good things are attributed to him than really bear weight.

So you are distinguishing between Jesus and Christ — Jesus the flesh and blood historical figure as opposed to how he was later represented as Christ, the son of God.

That’s right. There’s no evidence that Jesus thought he should be equated with God. He may have thought he was a messiah, but “messiah” in those days didn’t mean what it’s come to mean to Christians. It meant a powerful figure who leads his people to victory, perhaps a successful revolt against the Romans. But Christ as we think of Christ — the son of God — that’s something that emerges in the later gospels and reaches its climax in John, which is the last of the four Gospels to be written. So the story of what Jesus represents in theology did not take shape during his lifetime.

Do you see Islam as essentially an offshoot of the Judeo-Christian tradition or as something fundamentally new?

Muhammad was trying to create a synthetic religion, drawing on the existing traditions of Judaism and Christianity. He says very nice things in the Quran about Christians and Jesus, though he can’t quite accept the idea that Jesus was the son of God. He also made great overtures toward Jews. He established a fast that was essentially Yom Kippur. The ban on eating pork probably comes as a reflection of Judaism. There’s every indication that he hoped to play a successful non-zero-sum game with Christians and Jews and draw them into a larger religion. He insisted that his God was their God. But it didn’t work out. Apparently, not that many Jews bought into his mission.

In the standard telling, once Muhammad was ruling the city of Medina and he’d become a statesman as well as a prophet, some Jewish tribes betrayed him and were collaborating with the enemy. So there was a very violent falling out. And he expelled Jewish tribes and in one case killed the adult males. But there’s no doubt that the origins of Islam are rooted in the existing traditions of Christianity and Judaism.

You make the point that the Quran is a different kind of sacred text than the Bible. It was probably written over the course of two decades, while the stories collected in the Bible were written over centuries. That’s why the Bible is such a diverse document.

We think of the Bible as a book, but in ancient times it would have been thought of as a library. There were books written by lots of different people, including a lot of cosmopolitan elites. You also see elements of Greek philosophy. The Quran is just one guy talking. In the Muslim view, he’s mediating the word of God. He’s not especially cosmopolitan. He is, according to Islamic tradition, illiterate. So it’s not surprising that the Quran didn’t have the intellectual diversity and, in some cases, the philosophical depth that you find in the Bible. I do think he was actually a very modern thinker. Muhammad’s argument for why you should be devoted exclusively to this one God is very modern.

Do you think it’s been harder for today’s Muslims to accept liberal interpretations of the Quran because it’s linked so directly to Muhammad, while the Bible isn’t so closely associated with Moses or Jesus?

Yes, and also because Muhammad spent a certain amount of his career as a politician and a military leader. There are parts of the Quran that are a military manual, which advocate killing the enemy. Of course, the Bible has these things too, but they’re a smaller portion of the overall Bible. But when you look at that part of the Quran, it’s much more subtle than a lot of people think.

Take the famous verse “Kill the infidels wherever you find them.” Actually, it’s a mistranslation. It’s “Kill the polytheists.” So it probably wouldn’t include Christians and Jews. If you look at the verse in context, it seems that he exempts those polytheists who are on the side of the Muslims in this particular war. So all that passage says is “Kill the people who are enemies in this war.” It’s not fundamentally about religion. In this case and others, it complies with my basic argument: When people see themselves in a non-zero-sum relationship with other people, they will be tolerant of them and of their religion. Muhammad probably exemplifies that better than any single figure in ancient Abrahamic history.

Your book focuses on the Abrahamic religions. But aren’t Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism actually more open to the idea that other religions can also be the path to truth and salvation?

Yes, it’s not uncommon in Asia for somebody to be a little bit of a Buddhist and a little bit of a Taoist. It’s certainly possible for religion to be non-exclusive. Parts of Buddhism are exemplary. In some ways it was the earliest religion to recognize the fundamental problem of being human. The challenge is to change the already existing character of a religion. The world is not full of Buddhists. And even Buddhist monks have gone on rampages. There is no religion that is always a religion of peace. But in Buddhism, you’re seeing some very interesting developments. The Western, quasi-secular Buddhism is an interesting adaptation to a scientific age because it makes relatively few claims about the supernatural.

You’ve written a secular history of how religion has been used by various political movements to consolidate power. But you’re ignoring the power of personal spiritual experience — what some people would call revelation. Can you explain religion without acknowledging the importance of actual religious experience?

I do think religious experience has played an important part in religion. I think the Apostle Paul felt genuinely inspired. I myself have had profound experiences that could be characterized as religious. I certainly had some when I was young and a believing Christian. And I’ve had some since then. I did a one-week silent meditation retreat and had very profound experiences.

What kinds of experiences?

As the week wore on, the walls between me and other people and the rest of reality broke down a little. I became much less judgmental. I remember at one point looking at a weed and thinking, I can’t believe I’ve been killing weeds because they’re as pretty as anything else. Who put this label on weeds? And that’s just a metaphor for what was changing in my consciousness. It was completely profound by the end of the week. Of course, a week later it wore off and I was a jerk again. But I think it was a movement toward moral truth. The truth is that I’m not special, and you’re not special.

That is the key adaptation that religions have to make in the modern world — to make people appreciate the moral value of people in circumstances very different from their own. That is a move toward moral truth. It’s a fascinating feature of the world we live in that as technology expands the realm of social organization, its coherence and integrity depends on moral progress.

There is another way to understand religion. Certain influential people have intense and profound spiritual experiences, which are later codified and turned into systems of belief for their followers. Do you accept this distinction between spiritual experience and organized religion?

I’m against the idea that there was a golden age of spiritual experience, but then at some point organized religion corrupted everything. I try to show that shamans are as political as anyone and were as self-serving as modern religious leaders. At the same time, there are valid spiritual experiences. I’ve had them.

But you don’t acknowledge that there’s anything transcendent about spiritual experience — any communication with a deeper, alternative reality.

No, I do think the experience I had at that meditation retreat was transcendent. It removed me from the ordinary trappings of mundane consciousness. There is a moral axis to the universe. If we don’t make moral progress, chaos ensues. If only in that sense, we are tethered to a moral axis. It raises legitimate questions as to whether the whole system was in fact set up by some being, something you could call a divinity.

It’s really interesting to hear you say there’s moral truth. That’s not the kind of thing we usually hear from someone who calls himself a materialist.

Maybe not, but materialism has gotten a bad name. You can be a materialist and still believe that some larger purpose is unfolding through the history of life on this planet. And you can think of the source of that purpose — however hard it is to conceive of that source — in favorable terms. You can use the term “divine,” if you want. I do believe there’s evidence of some larger purpose unfolding; you’d think religious people would like that. On the other hand, I take a very skeptical view of the claims to special revelation that religions make. You would think my account of religious history would be to the liking of atheists and agnostics.

So we can believe there’s an underlying moral truth without believing in God.

The phrase that philosophers use is “moral realism.” Do you think morality is in some sense a real thing out there? It’s a very elusive question. What I feel sure of is that there’s a moral axis to the universe, a moral order, without believing in God.

Are you also saying we can be religious without believing in God?

By some definitions, yes. It’s hard to find a definition of religion that encompasses everything we call religion. The definition I like comes from William James. He said, “Religious belief consists of the belief that there is an unseen order and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting to that order.” In that sense, you can be religious without believing in God. In that sense, I’m religious. On the God question, I’m not sure. But I can call myself religious and have a fully scientific worldview.

You write, “Religion needs to mature more if the world is going to survive in good shape — and for that matter, if religion is going to hold the respect of intellectually critical people.” How does it need to mature?

You can’t believe the Earth was created 6,000 years ago. There’s a whole list of things that are not compatible with modern science.

That’s obvious. But some people would also say the idea of a personal God does not square with the scientific worldview today.

It’s not a logical impossibility that there’s a personal God out there. It’s not even quite impossible that God intervenes when the scientists are not measuring stuff, when nobody’s watching. But if you’re going to have a religion that’s broadly reconcilable with a scientific worldview and going to win acceptance among intellectual elites, then it’s not going to involve an interventionist God. There are certainly people who find tremendous reassurance and guidance from religions that don’t involve a god of any kind, and here I’m thinking about secular Buddhism.

Or you have a Christian theologian like Paul Tillich who tried to get away from an anthropomorphic God. He talked about God as “the ground of being.”

Of course, he got accused of sugarcoating what was in fact something like agnosticism or atheism. It’s easier to get reassurance by thinking there’s some powerful being looking out for you than for something called “the ground of being.” But for my money, if you’re interested in hanging on to some kind of religious worldview that’s viable in the modern world, you have to make that effort. I haven’t tried to work out any detailed program here. It’s something I’d like to think about in the future.

At the end of your book, you say the great divide in modern thinking is between people who think there is some divine source of meaning — a higher purpose in the universe — and those people who don’t. Is this different than the usual dichotomy between believers and atheists?

It’s a little different. I’m trying to get members of the different Abrahamic religions to realize that if they want to have an enemy, there’s a bigger one than each other. I don’t want them to declare jihad on atheists, but it might be good for them to realize, in the modern intellectual battle, they all have something in common: not only a specific Abrahamic God, but belief in a transcendent source of meaning. And I’d like to add that there are a lot of other people who don’t subscribe to your notion of God, maybe not to any notion of God, who do believe in a transcendent source of meaning and a larger purpose that’s unfolding.

As opposed to the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg, who famously said, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

I think he’s wrong. But it’s not surprising. Physicists don’t think much about the animate world. So he probably hasn’t given a lot of thought to the human condition and the direction of human history. But I’d say even the realm of physics — just the weirdness of quantum physics — should instill in all of us a little humility. It should make us aware that human consciousness, designed by natural selection to do really mundane things, is clearly not capable of grasping some ultimate things that are probably out there.

 Goodall’s appeal, though, has always stretched beyond her scientific accomplishments. Partly it stems from those old National Geographic shows of the lone white woman out in the bush with these wild apes. The cultural critic Donna Haraway once wrote, “There could be no better story than that of Jane Goodall and the chimpanzees for narrating the healing touch between nature and society,” though Haraway went on to say that our fascination with Goodall also played on Western stereotypes about Africa: “It is impossible to picture the entwined hands of a white woman and an African ape without evoking the history of racist iconography.”

Goodall has remained a fascinating figure partly because she’s kept one foot outside of mainstream science. She’s an outspoken advocate of animal rights and also the rare scientist who talks openly about mystical experiences — from her transformative encounters in the wild to a ghostly vision she once had of her dead husband. Now 75, Goodall is a larger-than-life figure who looms over the field of primatology. Today she spends less time with her beloved Gombe chimps than traveling the world as a U.N. messenger of peace, campaigning for environmental causes and promoting her Roots and Shoots program for young nature lovers.

 I caught up with Goodall after she received the Leakey Prize, awarded to “scientists who transcend the boundaries of their disciplines.” The prize was fitting since it was famed paleontologist Louis Leakey who first asked Goodall to conduct a field study of chimpanzees. Leakey’s choice was remarkable, as Goodall had not been to college and had no scientific training. As she explains, Leakey picked her “because he wanted to send somebody into the field with an unbiased mind.”

As I’ve read the accounts of your early field work at Gombe, I’m struck by how much time you were out in the field, alone with the chimpanzees.

It was absolutely amazing. It wasn’t only a beautiful place, surrounded by this timeless world, but also, everything I saw with the chimpanzees was new. I mean, how lucky can you get?

Didn’t they just run away from you when you first approached them?

Oh yeah. They’d never seen a white ape before and they were horrified. They vanished into the bushes. Fortunately, one of them — I named him David Greybeard — lost his fear before the others and came to my camp, where he found some bananas. And it was because of him that the others gradually began to lose their fear. So it was as though he helped me open a door into a magic world.

Some of your early discoveries — that chimps can use tools — involved David Greybeard. Can you describe the first day you saw this?

It had been raining. I was pushing through some tall grass and suddenly I saw this dark shape hunched over the golden soil of a termite mound. I peered through the bushes with my binoculars and saw a hand reach out and pick a piece of grass. I could see him pushing it down into the termite mound. After he left, I went over there and saw termites crawling over the surface of the mound. There were stems lying around, so I poked them down and the termites bit on them. A couple of days later, not only did I see David Greybeard using the tools but stripping leaves from a twig, therefore making a tool. That was the exciting thing. Up until then, it was thought that only humans used and made tools. We were defined as man the tool-maker.

You discovered that chimpanzees hunt. Did anyone know this before you saw it?

 No Western scientist knew. I think the local people knew. But it was very exciting the first time I saw it. They hunt young pigs, young bushbuck, and they share the prey after they’ve had a successful hunt. They beg, with gestures like we use. And the meat is shared.

Some years later, you found that chimpanzees can be a lot more aggressive than people had known. Some of your colleagues saw that chimpanzees will even hunt and kill other chimpanzees.

That was disappointing to find that, just like us, they have a dark side. The first accounts were of male chimpanzees patrolling the boundary of their territory and catching a female from a neighboring social group — a stranger — and subjecting her to such a violent attack that she later died of her wounds, and taking her baby and killing it. It was a total shock. Soon after that, the community divided. The smaller group took up residence in the south of the range. And four years later, the males of the larger community systematically hunted down, attacked and killed all of the breakaway males — seven of them, and two females.

These were all chimpanzees that had once lived together. They had been intimate with each other.

It’s like a civil war. And civil wars in human society are the worst. This was horrible.

 How do you explain what happened?

I think it was territorial. The southern community had taken over part of what had once been shared range. As soon as the southern community was annihilated, the northerners moved back into the territory with their females and young. It’s very human, isn’t it?

It must have made you wonder about how violent humans can be. What conclusions did you come to?

When I first started publishing those attacks — that four-year war — various scientists suggested that I didn’t need to publish it. They said that if you publish this, certain people will use this information to show that aggression is hard-wired. Certainly, if you look at human behavior around the world, you have to admit that we can be very aggressive. So it goes back to Louis Leakey’s premise when he sent me: If we find behavior common to chimpanzees and humans today, perhaps it was present in our common ancestor 6 million years ago. If that’s so, perhaps violence has been with us all the way through human evolution.

But does that mean that war and violence are inevitable? I would argue not because we have also evolved this amazingly sophisticated intellect, and we are capable of controlling our innate behavior a lot of the time. Chimpanzees equally show tendencies of love, compassion and altruism, so we have these from our ancient past as well.

It’s striking that Louis Leakey picked three women to lead pioneering primate studies: you with chimpanzees, Dian Fossey with gorillas, and Birute Galdikas with orangutans. Was that just coincidence?

No, not at all. He felt that women made better observers, and he liked working better with women. So he deliberately chose women.

Do you think he was right?

If you look at women in an evolutionary perspective — and I compare chimp mothers with human mothers — you find that a mother needs to be patient. Otherwise her children won’t do very well. A woman needed to understand the needs of a nonverbal creature, or our children before they can speak. And women, even if they’ve been subjugated, have been quick to recognize the little communication signals in a household to prevent arguments before they blow up — all to keep children out of the way of irritable men. So all those characteristics would be useful.

And when I began, most women didn’t have careers. So you could afford to go sit in a forest and expect that a white knight would come along with shining armor and gather you up and look after you for the rest of your life. Whereas men, they were the breadwinners. They had to finish their field research, get a PhD and get a job.

There was another convention back in the ’60s. Scientists were not supposed to get emotionally involved with the subjects they studied. It seems that you violated that rule in your study of chimpanzees.

I didn’t know about that when I began. I’d just done biology in high school. But I’d watched animals all my life, long before I watched chimpanzees. And I think having empathy with the creature you’re watching is an immensely powerful tool. It gives you a platform from which you can start asking questions. Especially with chimpanzees, our nervous system is almost identical. Their brain is just a little bit smaller.

You were studying mother-infant interactions of chimpanzees, and then you had a child of your own. You raised him at Gombe while you were doing these field studies. Did you learn anything about raising your own son from the chimpanzees you studied?

I’m quite sure I did. I looked on Flo as a role model. She was patient and supportive. She was protective but not overprotective. She could impose discipline when she wanted. She provided a nice secure base for her kids. And she supported them when they got into difficulties. That’s a hallmark of a good mother. But looking back on it, my own mother raised me much the same way, so I don’t know if I really learned from Flo.

You’ve written about the death of Flo and the impact it had on some of her family members. How did it affect her son Flint?

Flo, at the time of her death, looked older than any other individual we’ve observed at Gombe. She was probably close to 50. Chimpanzees don’t have a menopause, and it’s interesting to consider how useful menopause is in a long-lived species. Because Flo gave birth to an infant when her previous child, Flint, was only 4 and a half, she didn’t have the strength to wean Flint. She didn’t have the strength to nurture this embryo inside her and push Flint toward independence. So when he threw violent tantrums, she allowed him to suckle and ride on her back. And then, when the infant died at 6 months, Flint was still sleeping with her, and she just took him back and treated him as though he was an infant. So he developed this strange, abnormal dependency on his old mother.

When she died, he was 8 and half years old, but it seemed he simply couldn’t cope without her. And he showed signs of clinical depression. He rejected food, he rejected the approaches of other chimps. And in this state, which I can only describe as grief, his immune system weakened. He fell sick and was dead within a month of losing Flo.

He was simply too sad to live anymore.

He was too sad. I’ll never forget seeing him about five or six days after she died. He climbed very slowly up a tree. He was already a little sick, and he got to a nest, which he’d shared with his mother about two weeks earlier. He just stood there looking at that nest. You can only wonder what was going on in his mind. Then he turned around and walked very, very slowly along the branch, climbed down to the ground and curled up in a little heap. It was heartbreaking. We sat with him, we offered him food, but he did get some sickness and we couldn’t help him.

You had known Flo for many years. How did her death affect you?

I sat with her body. We found it at the edge of the stream, and I sat there during the day and also during most of the following night — to see the reaction of other chimpanzees and also, I didn’t want the pigs to eat her. It was like losing an old friend.

Your research showed that chimpanzees have sophisticated emotional and mental capacities, which raises a big question: How unique are human beings?

 It’s the explosive development of our intellect that sets us apart. I personally believe that this happened because we, and only we, have developed the kind of language that enables us to teach about things that are not present, to tell stories, learn from the past, plan the distant future and perhaps most important of all, gather together a group of people to discuss a new idea. That has really stimulated the growth of the intellect.

So if this is what makes us more human than anything else, makes us the most intellectual being that’s ever walked the planet — able to arrange the environment to suit our needs, able to create technology to go to the moon — then why are we destroying our only home? That is so unintelligent of us.

 Do we need to revise our definition of consciousness so that it includes the great apes?

Maybe we should include the great apes. Maybe we should extend certain rights to them that we agree are human rights. I’m always pushing for human responsibility. Given that chimpanzees and many other animals are sentient and sapient, then we should treat them with respect. But we don’t even treat each other with respect. We have all these barriers between cultures and religions and nations, and between us and the natural world.

What are the moral implications of treating other animals with more respect — especially sentient beings like the great apes?

We should not be torturing them in medical research labs in five-foot by five-foot prison cages. We should not be taking them from their mothers and dressing them up for circuses of entertainment. We should not be buying and selling them like slaves for pets. And we shouldn’t be killing them for food or for the live animal trade in the African forests. But we’re doing many of those things to our own species as well. It doesn’t make either of those things better.

When you were at Gombe, did you find yourself wondering what was going on inside the minds of chimpanzees?

Constantly. We can guess what they’re thinking, but how do they think? Are they thinking in pictures? How do you think without words? I spent ages wondering about that.

Were there any particular moments when you felt like you got a better understanding of that?

One moment was very special. That was when I was sitting in the forest with David Greybeard and I picked up a fruit and held it out to him. He turned his head away and I put my hand closer. He turned, looking directly into my eyes, and reached out, took the fruit and dropped it. He didn’t want it. He then very gently squeezed my hand, which is how chimpanzees reassure each other. So in that moment, we communicated with a language — or in a way — that seems to pre-date words, perhaps in a way that was used by our own common ancestor millions of years ago. It was an extraordinary feeling. It was bridging these two worlds.

You seem drawn to the idea of knowing the world without language or words.

I am fascinated by it. I always have been. We think with words. But when we don’t think with words, I think we come close to what mystics might describe as a mystical experience. I don’t think words would come into that.

Did you have mystical experiences at Gombe?

Yeah, sometimes. But it’s awfully hard to describe because words aren’t there. It’s a feeling of complete oneness with the natural world, and being able to hear it better and sense it better and smell it better and be better.

Can you tell me about one of those moments?

One was when I’d been following a little group of chimpanzees and I was wet. In the evening, they climbed up into this tree, which had beautiful lime green shoots. The sun behind them was making them shine and the trunks of the trees were still wet and shining black ebony. And the chimpanzees’ coats were black ebony shot with little gleams of chestnut. The smell of ripe figs was strong in the air. Then this beautiful male bushbuck appeared with his coat dark with the rain, his spiraled horns gleaming, and just stood there. It seemed I could hear the insects loud and clear, much differently than usual. And the birds. And each leaf with its pattern of veins. It was incredibly vivid, being at one with that beautiful world.

It sounds like you lost your sense of your own self.

That’s it. Totally losing sense of one’s own self. That’s the only way I can study animals. Because if I’m on my own, I forget that I’m there. I’m with them. I’m not considering that I’m there. I’m just considering them.

In your book “Reason for Hope,” you speculate that chimpanzees might also have spiritual lives of their own. You’ve written, for instance, about a beautiful waterfall they go to. You suggest that they may even have some experience of awe.

 Well, they sometimes pass there when they go from A to B, but it’s what happens when they’re near that. You can hear the roar of the falling water. It falls about 80 feet. The chimpanzees, usually the males, will bristle a little bit with excitement. And as they get near, they start these rhythmic displays, swaying from foot to foot, often upright. They may climb the vines and push out into the spray. And afterward, they may sit watching the water as it falls, watching as it flows past them. What is it? What is this strange substance which is always coming and always going and always here? You can’t help feeling that if they had a language like ours, they could discuss whatever feeling it was that led them to these dramatic displays, which would turn into some kind of animistic religion. Watching these displays, you can’t help feeling that it must be something that we would describe as awe or wonder or amazement, which can turn into the worship of things that we don’t understand.

It makes you wonder if our own ancestors millions of years ago had similar experiences.

I would bet they did. I think we still do. But we immediately describe them with words.

Has that made you wonder about the origins of religion?

Yes, it probably originated with something like that. Because we have language, because we like to explain everything, we describe experiences in terms of a spiritual or religious experience. Whatever is inside us that makes who we are feel different from our mind, we call a soul or a spirit. And if we have souls or spirits, then I suspect that chimpanzees do too. I’ve always felt that if I had to describe what it is, I would say it’s a little spark of a great spiritual power that I felt so strongly around me when I was out in the forest alone. Probably that little spark is in all living things. And it’s we, with our passion for describing everything, who decided to call it a soul or a spirit.

It’s unusual for a scientist of your stature to be upfront about your own spiritual views. You’ve written about how you were raised in an open-minded Christian family. How has your sense of spirituality evolved over the years?

I don’t spend that much time being introspective, believe it or not. All I know is that I grew up not questioning God because that’s how you are. God was there like the birds and the wind. Then I was in Gombe, spending all that time alone out there with nature, and just feeling a strong sense of something other than me that was out there.

You’ve also written about a transformative experience you once had at Notre Dame in Paris. What happened there?

It was not a peaceful time of my life. I went there early in the morning, just as the sun was coming in the great rose window. And it was Bach’s Tocata and Fugue in D Minor from the organ that suddenly filled the cathedral. There was a wedding, though I just heard this music. I can’t accept that the humans who built that amazing cathedral and wrote that music, and the people who’d prayed there for hundreds of years, I couldn’t accept that it was all chance — little bits of matter dancing around that suddenly somehow turned into this amazing experience. Therefore, if it wasn’t chance, then it was anti-chance, which means something like God. But as I’m not a theologian or a philosopher, I don’t have the words to explain what I mean.

 You seem to be convinced that there’s some underlying purpose to our existence and to the universe.

That’s what I strongly feel. And I feel that for some extraordinary and peculiar reason, I have been almost pushed to do what I’ve done. I look back over my life and see the stages that led seamlessly from one to another to another. I suppose I could have said “no” and chosen a different way. But it just seemed inevitable to bring me to what I’m doing now, which is crazy, really.

 What do you say to all those biologists who think it’s just an evolutionary accident that human beings ever evolved?

I don’t get into discussions with them because I don’t care. I just feel this way myself. It helps me to believe there’s a purpose. I don’t want to argue with them. I don’t mind what they believe.

But you’re taking me away from everything I’m trying to do now, which is trying to get people to roll up their sleeves. People often ask me, “OK, do you believe in creation or God?” And I always say quite honestly, how we got to be who we are is so much less important than getting together to get ourselves out of this horrendous mess that we have put the planet in. We’re reaching the point of no return. We’ve got to roll up our sleeves. We’ve got to take action. We can’t afford to sit back and philosophize too long about how we got to be the way we are.

Well, you’ve written, for instance, about a remarkable experience you had, a vision of your husband Derek after he died. Can you describe what happened?

Yes, it was extremely strange. I’d gone back to Gombe because it’s very peaceful to be out in nature with chimpanzees who aren’t questioning you or sympathizing with you. They’re just getting on and being and doing. You get this feeling of the cycles of life and death. But I was woken up at night and there was Derek talking to me, very happy. I couldn’t see him. At least I don’t know if I could, because all I remember is waking and thinking, “I’ve got to write this down. It’s fantastic.” And then this feeling that you get when you’re about to faint, this roaring in the ears. And then, I don’t know if I fell asleep again or what, but I started remembering. And when I started remembering, the roaring came back. So I went to sleep again, and I couldn’t remember anything he’d said. I’d vividly remembered what happened, but I couldn’t remember any words.

I talked to a very strange lady — a medium — who said exactly the same had happened to her when her husband died. She had tried to get out of bed to write it down, and had gone into a coma and nearly died. So I said, “Goodness, don’t get out of bed if it happens again!” And I asked, “What do you think it was?” She said, “I don’t know, but maybe I was trying to move from one plane to another.” You know, I’m not going to go deeply into exactly what happened. I don’t know. All I know is that something happened that gave me this strong feeling that there is something that continues after we die.

And you’re convinced that wasn’t just a dream you had?

No, it wasn’t a dream. And it was strange that she had exactly the same feeling. Of course, we read these books about lights at the end of tunnels, and the “Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.” I’ve been with so many people who accept this absolutely as a matter of fact.

I’m willing to bet that you get a lot of flak from scientists for talking publicly about this kind of thing. Do you worry about that?

No, I don’t care. I never have. And I think it’s very helpful for a lot of people who do have a religion that they find my books extremely helpful.

Today, you are more an activist than a scientist. You travel constantly, talking about environmental concerns and animal rights issues. What do you see as the biggest impact you can have right now?

I always think there are two. One is going back to my roots. Because I had this opportunity to work with chimpanzees, it has given people a different way of looking at animals and understanding them better. And the other one is working with youth and giving people hope. There’s hope when we realize that every one of us makes an impact on this planet every single day. We have a choice as to what we buy, what we eat, what we drink, what we wear, how we get from A to B, how we interact with people and animals. These small changes in lifestyle can add up to the kind of change that we need.

How have some of these issues played out in your own life — what you eat, what you buy, what you wear?

In the early 70s, I read Peter Singer’s book “Animal Liberation.” Once I learned what factory farms did to cows and pigs and hens, I was totally horrified. I looked at the piece of meat on my plate and I thought this is symbolic of fear and pain and death. I never ate another piece of meat. I’m not a vegan. I’m a vegetarian. And try to think about buying a cheap garment. Was it cheap because it involved child slave labor? Have products that you just pick up off a shelf caused destruction to the environment? If we would try to think about the consequences of our actions, it would make a big difference.

How are the chimpanzees at Gombe doing now?

Not that well. There were 150 in three communities when I arrived. The main study community is in the middle of a long, thin strip of forest, and it’s about the same as it always was. But to the north and the south, where chimps have come up against cultivated fields, which now completely surround the tiny 30-square mile park, those communities have dwindled. So there are only a total of about 100 chimpanzees at Gombe today.

We’re trying to ensure their future by working with the people living around the park. They are very poor people. They can’t afford to pay for food elsewhere, so they’ve degraded the land. We can’t really hope to save the chimps unless we can improve the lives of these people. So now we’re in 32 villages with our Take Care program. We provide information about farming practices most suitable to this degraded land, information and help for water systems and sanitation, we provide microcredit for groups of women so they can start their own small environmentally sustainable projects, scholarships for girls so they can stay in school — concentrating on women because all around the world, family size drops as women’s education improves.

The final piece in all of this is that up in the high hills a very good coffee is grown. I was able to persuade some coffee roasters — primarily Green Mountain coffee roasters — to come and test the coffee, buy it, help to improve the farming practices for harvesting and storing the coffee, and provide a good price for the first time. As a result, the villagers are setting aside between 10 and 20 percent of their village land for regeneration of forest or protection of the last little patches. We’ve done it by deliberately helping them in the way that they wish, not going in and telling them what a bunch of white people want to do, but with our Tanzanian team listening and asking, what would make your lives better? It didn’t start with conservation at all. It was health and their children’s education. That’s where we began. Now, these people are our partners. They’re fascinated by the chimpanzees. They realize it’s part of their heritage. They realize it’s because of the chimpanzees that we’re there in the first place. They’re grateful and they’re putting land aside for the chimps.

What advice do you have for kids who would like to do what you did — to become a naturalist and study animals?

Don’t just learn virtually. Don’t just learn from your TV screen. Go out and watch. Even if you’re in the middle of an inner city, you can grow things and watch how they grow. You can study pigeons or trees out in the streets. There’s always a way of getting out there and feeling the earth, and learning something about the natural world. It’s so important.