Part of the SF Gate series, this week featuring Huston Smith, who introduced scads of us to world religions…

He’s 86 now, God bless him, still a member of the Methodist denomination into which he was born (as the son of Methodist missionaries in China) and has some interesting tidbits:

One of the many hot-button issues dividing scientists and religious people is the debate over evolution and so-called intelligent design. What’s your take on this controversy?

Julius Caesar isn’t known as a great philosopher, but he said one thing that was right on. He said, "People believe what they want to believe." And I think to a very large extent that is true. People in the media want to believe that science has all the answers about how we got here. It doesn’t. I want to believe in science, too, but I also want to believe in religion. I think both have something to contribute on this subject.

What does each have to contribute, in your view?

Science has given us the fossil record, which shows that it took three and a half billion years for life to evolve to our level. The writer George Will — I don’t agree with his politics, but he said something that was right on. He said that six-day creationism is not only nonsense — it’s nonsense on stilts!

However, you are never going to explain in a laboratory what it is we call the divine spark, which every religion has described. You will never get a sense of our divinity, of the image of God. These things cannot be explained by natural selection or chance mutations. For that you need to turn to religion.

"Intelligent design" has been criticized as another way of simply promoting creationism in its literal sense.

That’s wrong. That’s a canard! That’s a deviation. That’s an excuse for not facing the real criticism of science. Excuse me for raising my voice, but these are serious issues and these are serious times. There needs to be a more meaningful discussion about this.