Yesterday Salon posted Steve Paulson’s wonderfully readable interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson, founder of sociobiology and author of “On Human Nature.” Wilson may not say what you want to hear about God’s existence–he’s not so sure he buys it–but he is open to the possibility that a larger, cosmic force started the universe before moving on to other things. Here’s an excerpt, but be sure to click over and read the whole thing:

It’s fascinating because everything you’ve said up until now suggests that you should be an atheist. Why hold out the specter that maybe there was some divine presence that got the whole thing going?

Well, because there’s a possibility that a god or gods–I don’t think it would resemble anything of the Judeo-Christian variety–or a super-intelligent force came along and started the universe with a big bang and moved on to the next universe. I can’t discount that.

Let’s just play this out for a minute. If there was this creative … whatever you want to call it…

Intelligence.

This intelligence that got our universe going, what happened to that intelligence? Did it go off to the next universe?

That’s what I mean. That’s exactly what I said. (Laughs)

Thirteen billion years ago, it left and went somewhere else?

Well, they are now either lurking on the outer reaches of the universe, watching with some amusement as the eons passed, to see how the experiment worked out, or they moved on. Who can say?