In 1988 Isaac Asimov sat down for a lengthy interview with Bill Moyers. Inevitably, the subject got around to religion.

Read the transcript or watch the video clip. Or read along as you watch. The transcript has been lightly edited.

Bill Moyers: Are you an enemy of religion?

Isaac Asimov: No, I’m not. I feel, as it seems to me any civilized, humane person should feel, that every person has the right to his own beliefs and his own securities and his own likings. What I’m against is attempting to place a person’s belief system onto the nation or the world generally. You know, we object because we say constantly that the Soviet Union is trying to dominate the world, communize the world. But I certainly would be very much against trying to Christianize the world or to Islamize it or to Judaize it or anything of the sort. And my objection to fundamentalism is not that they are fundamentalists but that essentially they want me to be a fundamentalist, too.

Now, I can imagine they object. They say I believe that evolution is true, and I want everyone to believe that evolution is true. But I don’t want everyone to believe that evolution is true. I want them to study what we say about evolution and decide for themselves. Now, they say they want to teach creationism on an equal basis. But they can’t. It’s not a science. You can create creationism in the churches, in the courses on religion. I mean, they would be horrified if I would suggest that in the churches they teach secular humanism as an alternate way of looking at the universe or that they teach evolution as an alternate way of considering how life may have started.

In the church, they teach only what they believe. And rightly so, I suppose. But on the other hand, in schools, in science classes, we’ve got to teach what scientists think is the way the universe works.

BM: But, of course, this is what frightens many, many believers. They see science as uncertain, always tentative, always subject to revisionism. They see science as a complex, chilling, and enormous universe, ruled by chance and impersonal laws. They see science as dangerous.

IA: That is really the glory of science—that science is tentative, that it is not certain, that it is subject to change. What is really, in my way of thinking, disgraceful is to have a set of beliefs that you think is absolute and has been so from the start and can’t change—where you simply won’t listen to evidence. You say, “If the evidence agrees with me, it’s not necessary. If it doesn’t agree with me, it’s false.”

This is the legendary remark of Omar when they captured Alexandria and asked what to do with the library. He said, if the books agree with the Koran, they are not necessary and may be burned. If they disagree with the Koran, they are pernicious and must be burned.

Well, there are still these Omar-like thinkers who think that all of knowledge will fit into one book called the Bible and refuse to allow that there is even the conceivability of an error in there. That, to my way of thinking, is much more dangerous than a system of knowledge which is tentative and uncertain.

BM: Do you see any room for reconciling the two world views: the religious, the biblical view, the universe as God’s drama, constantly interrupted and rewritten by divine intervention; and the universe as scientists hold it, always having to be subjected to the test of observation and experimentation? Is there any room for reconciling?

IA: Well, there is if people are reasonable about this. There are many scientists who are honestly religious. You can rattle off the names of them, Milliken was a truly religious man; Morley, of the Michelson and Morley experiment, was truly religious. There are hundreds of others who did great scientific work, good scientific work, and at the same time were religious.

But they did not mix their religion and science. In other words, they did not presume that if something they didn’t understand took place in science they could dismiss it by saying, “Well, that’s what God wants,” or, “at this point a miracle took place.” No, they know that science is strictly a construct of the human mind working according to the laws of nature and that religion is something that lies outside and may embrace science.

On the one hand, you know, if there were some need to arise evidence—scientific, confirmable evidence—that God exists, then we’d have no choice; scientists would have no choice but to accept that fact. On the other hand, the fundamentalists don’t admit the possibility of evidence, let us say, that would show that evolution exists, because any evidence you present they will deny if it conflicts with the word of God as they think it to be. Therefore, the chances of compromise are only on one side, and I doubt that it will take place.

BM: If God is dead, everything is permitted. That’s what scares them.

IA: Well, on the contrary. They assume that human beings have no feeling about what is right and wrong. Is the only reason you are virtuous because that’s your ticket to heaven? Is the only reason you don’t beat your children to death because you don’t want to go to hell? It seems to me that it’s insulting to human beings to imply that only a system of rewards and punishments can keep you a decent human being. Isn’t it conceivable that a person wants to be a decent human being because that way he feels better? Because that way the world is better?

I don’t believe that I’m ever going to heaven or hell. I think that when I die there will be nothingness. That’s what I firmly believe. That does not mean that I have the impulse to go out and rob and steal and rape and everything else because I don’t fear punishment. For one thing, I fear worldly punishment. And for a second thing, I fear the punishment of my own conscience. I have a conscience. It doesn’t depend on religion. And I think it’s so with other people, too.

Besides, even in societies in which religion is very powerful, there’s no shortage of crime and sin and misery and terrible things happening—despite heaven and hell. I imagine if you go down death row where a bunch of murderers may be waiting for execution and ask them if they believe in God, they’ll tell you yes.