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 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the 20th-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.

With a series of bestselling books on language and human nature, including “How the Mind Works,” Pinker has emerged as his generation’s most influential cognitive theorist. His work on the evolution of language, and how humans possess an innate capacity for language, revolutionized linguistics. His writing about the nature/nurture debate helped shift prevailing thinking away from seeing human nature as a blank slate.

Pinker and Goldstein share a basic philosophical outlook, but I discovered that their views diverge somewhat when it comes to the “science and religion” debate. In a wide-ranging joint interview, we talked about animals and language, atheism and astrology, Iraq and faith, and their most recent books, Goldstein’s “Betraying Spinoza” and Pinker’s “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature.”

Steve, do you think language is what makes our species unique? Is this the defining trait of human beings?

PINKER: It’s certainly one of the distinctive traits of Homo sapiens. But I don’t think language could have evolved if it was the only distinctive trait. It goes hand in hand with our ability to develop tools and technologies, and also with the fact that we cooperate with nonrelatives. I think this triad — language, social cooperation and technological know-how — is what makes humans unusual. And they probably evolved in tandem, each of them multiplying the value of the other two.

You have a fascinating observation in your new book about causation. You say the way we construct sentences, particularly verbs, has a lot to do with how we understand cause and effect.

PINKER: That’s right. For example, if John grabs the doorknob and pulls the door open, we say, “John opened the door.” If John opens the window and a breeze pushes the door open, we don’t say, “John opened the door.” We say something like, “What John did caused the door to open.” We use that notion of causation in assigning responsibility. So all of those crazy court cases that happen in real life and are depicted on “Law and Order,” where you have to figure out if the person who pulled the trigger was really responsible for the death of the victim, tap into the same model of causation.

I talk about the case of James Garfield, who was felled by an assassin’s bullet, but lingered on his deathbed for three months and eventually succumbed to an infection because of the hare-brained practices of his inept doctors. At the trial of the murderer, the accused assassin said, “I just shot him. The doctors killed him.” The jury disagreed and he went to the gallows. It’s an excellent case of how the notion of direct causation is very much on our minds as we assign moral and legal responsibility.

Rebecca, you’ve written a great deal about competing philosophical theories of language. Do you think our mind can function apart from language? Or does language define our reality?

GOLDSTEIN: Obviously, much of our thinking is being filtered through language. But it’s always seemed to me that there has to be an awful lot of thinking that’s done prior to the acquisition of language. And I often have trouble translating my thoughts into language. I think about that a lot. It often seems to me that the thoughts are there and some words are flitting through my mind when I’m thinking. So there’s something very separate between thinking and language. But that might vary from mind to mind.

As a novelist, this must be something you think about.

GOLDSTEIN: Very much so. My novels begin with a sense of the book, a sense of the place, and then I have to find the language that does justice to it. Strangely, I find that in my philosophical work as well. And in math; I’ve done a lot of math. I have the intuition, I’ll see it, and then I have to translate it into language. So I’ve always had a keen sense that thought does not require language.

What do you make of the language studies of various animals — for instance, the bonobo Kanzi, who’s learned to piece together simple sentences by pressing lexigrams. Is that real language?

PINKER: It isn’t a scientific question whether something is real language. That’s really a question of how far you want to extend the word “language.” I think the scientific question is: Are the chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas who are trained by humans doing something that’s fundamentally the same as what children are doing when they first acquire language? I suspect they are quite different. You need experimenters hell-bent on training chimpanzees, whereas with children, you can’t help but acquire a language if you’re a child in a human community. Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn’t have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other. And while it’s impressive that chimps have been trained to learn a few dozen or even a couple hundred symbols or signs, the ability to combine them is quite rudimentary and forced.

You each dedicated your most recent books to each other, and I’m curious about how your relationship has influenced your work. You’ve both written about language and human nature, about religion and the power of reason. Do you talk about these things around the dinner table?

GOLDSTEIN: [Laughs.] Yes, there’s no way around it. Our work spills over into our lives, and our lives spill over into our work.

PINKER: But that’s not the only thing we talk about.

Would you say your common interests are partly what brought you together?

GOLDSTEIN: Oh yes, completely. Actually, we met through each other’s work. I was a great fan of Steve’s work. And then I discovered that he had cited me in one of his books. It was my unusual use of an irregular verb. So it was completely through our work and my tremendous interest in Steve’s work that we first came to know each other. I don’t know if I should say this, but when I first met Steve in the flesh, I said that the way he thinks had so completely changed the way I think — particularly what I had learned from him about cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology — that I said, “I don’t think I’ve had my mind so shaken up by any thinker since [18th-century philosopher] David Hume.” And he very modestly said, “That can’t be the case.” But it was the case. So I can certainly say that Steve has profoundly influenced the way I think.

PINKER: I’ve certainly been influenced by Rebecca as well. Our connection isn’t just that we met through an irregular verb, which sounds like the ultimate literary romance of two nerds finding each other. [Goldstein laughs.] Rebecca as a philosopher is a strong defender of realism — the idea that there is a real world that we can come to know –which emboldened me to press that theme in my own writings, even though people often say that we just construct reality through language. And the topic of consciousness — how the mind emerges from the body, and what makes the three-pound organ that we call the brain actually experience things subjectively — is a theme that runs through both my nonfiction and Rebecca’s fiction and her philosophical writings.

Do you show each other your articles and books as you’re writing them?

GOLDSTEIN: Yes, we’ve each seen each other’s work in early drafts and in the final work. But this is the first time I’ve ever shared my work with anybody while it’s happening. I’m very private about my work. So this has been a very new experience for me. Now I’m wondering how I ever wrote any books without having Steve read them.

Are you very open in your criticisms and suggestions about each other’s work?

PINKER: Very much. But we’re not brutal.

GOLDSTEIN: We can be brutal. [Laughs.] Sweetly brutal.

PINKER: But yes, we each say, “This isn’t working. This joke isn’t funny. I don’t think your readers are going to understand what you’re trying to get at here.”

Rebecca, the dedication in your Spinoza book reads, “For Steve, despite Spinoza.” Can you explain that?

GOLDSTEIN: Spinoza wasn’t a great fan of romantic love. He didn’t think that the life of reason had any place for romantic love. And Spinoza’s methodology is strictly reductive. He tries to prove everything, starting with definitions and axioms. And he has this rigorous proof that romantic love will always end badly.

Does that mean he did not experience romantic love himself?

GOLDSTEIN: He didn’t, as far as we know. There are some rumors about his landlady’s daughter, who went to another young man when he gave her a pearl necklace. But no, Spinoza’s view about love is all directed toward love of truth and God and nature. It’s not directed toward another person. To love another person is to want desperately for them to reciprocate. And that’s not something we have complete control over. Therefore, it’s irrational. He argues that romantic love just increases your fragility and vulnerability and therefore you ought not to do it.

In your book on Spinoza, you talk about your own religious education in an orthodox Jewish school, and how Spinoza was trotted out by one of your teachers as precisely the kind of heretical thinker that good Jewish girls should avoid. But this seemed to make you especially interested in him. Why do you still like Spinoza so much?

GOLDSTEIN: It’s interesting. It’s almost like there are two different Spinozas. And I really didn’t bring them together until I wrote the book. At my very orthodox all-girls high school, Spinoza was presented to us as a kind of cautionary tale: This is what can go wrong if you ask the wrong questions. I was in a school that discouraged one from even going on to college. And philosophy was absolutely the worst thing you could study because it does ask you to question everything. Then there was the Spinoza I came in contact with when I was a professional philosopher. Spinoza is a metaphysician of a very extravagant sort. He wants to deduce everything through pure reason. And that was a kind of philosopher that I was also taught to dismiss and disdain. So both sides of my training — the orthodox Jewish training, the analytic philosophy training — pushed me to dismiss Spinoza.

I also like the grandeur of his ambition. He really does believe that we can save ourselves through being rational. And I believe in that. I believe that if we have any hope at all, it’s through trying to be rigorously objective about ourselves and our place in the world. We have to do that. We have to submit ourselves to objectivity, to rationality. I think that’s what it is about Spinoza. He’s just such a rationalist.

Spinoza certainly dismissed the religion he’d been exposed to. Do both of you consider yourselves atheists?

[pause] GOLDSTEIN: Yes.

PINKER: Yes.

GOLDSTEIN: Proud atheists.

PINKER: There, we said it. [Laughs.]

So you have to hesitate for a moment before you use that dirty word?

PINKER: Atheists are the most reviled minority in the United States, so it’s no small matter to come out and say it.

I find it puzzling how the recent atheist manifestos by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have all turned into bestsellers in a country that’s overwhelmingly religious. According to various polls, half of all Americans believe the Bible is the literal truth. A recent Newsweek poll found that 91 percent believe in God. How do you explain the enormous popularity of these books?

PINKER: Part of it is that the people who buy books — at least that kind of highbrow trade book — are not a random sample of the population. The opinions sampled by these polls are probably soft. When people are asked a question, they don’t just turn a flashlight into their data bank of beliefs and read out what they see. When people say, “Yes, I believe in God and the Bible,” they’re kind of saying, “I’m a moral person. I have solidarity with the community of churchgoers that I was brought up in and that I currently belong to.” I think that if you were to probe a lot of people’s religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest.

GOLDSTEIN: It would be fascinating, though, to see a poll of the people who are buying the new atheist books and see how they are answering these questions.

PINKER: Well, the question often arises whether these authors are preaching to the choir. Especially since these books make no concessions toward religious sensibilities. It’s a full-throated intellectual assault on the concept of God. My sense is that the books are really not aimed at the 91 percent of the people you cited who believe in God, but rather at some minority of people who are wavering, who’ve been brought up in a religious way but now have some private doubts. They perhaps think that confessing to being an atheist is like confessing to being a child molester. So they’re not willing to even think those thoughts. Then they come across a book that seems to vindicate all of their doubts. And that tortured minority of reflective, analytic people from a religious background — perhaps like Rebecca from her religious background — are who the books are aimed at. Julia Sweeney’s one-woman show, “Letting Go of God,” would be representative of the kind of person whose mind could be changed by a book like that.

Steve, you recently waded into the controversy over Harvard’s proposal to require all undergraduates to take a course called “Reason and Faith.” The plan was dropped after you and other critics strongly opposed it. But the people who supported it say that every college graduate should have a basic understanding of religion because it’s such a powerful cultural and political force around the world. Don’t they have a point?

PINKER: I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events. I didn’t like the idea of privileging religion above other ideologies that were also historically influential, like socialism and capitalism. I also didn’t like the euphemism “faith.” Nor did I like the juxtaposition of “faith” and “reason,” as if they were just two alternative ways of knowing.