Hey, podcast listeners. This is Anne. And today we're remembering the great scholar of world religions, Houston Smith. He died at his home last week at age 97. A lot of people remember Houston Smith because of the Bill Moyers PBS series, The Wisdom of Faith.

But here's some other things to know about him.

Houston Smith started out as a Methodist minister, but he became a world traveler and a student of many religions.

From Christianity and Judaism to Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism,

he believes that the world's great faith traditions are a repository of

deep human wisdom, and he devoted his life to trying to share the best of them. His most

important book was called The World's Religions. It sold more than 3 million copies, but he also went

looking for God in lots of unconventional places as well, including in the 1960s Timothy Leary's living room when he was part of the famous Harvard psilocybin project.

In 2002, Houston Smith sat down to talk with Steve Paulson. Let's listen.

There are a lot of people in the world today, in the modern world who just don't know how to have faith, cannot find faith, because of science.

So many beliefs about the supernatural seem to have been explained away by science over the years.

And what do you make of that argument?

Well, I'm glad you say seemed to have been explained away because actually if there were

anything that science has discovered that showed the religious worldview to be mistaken.

I would go with science.

The fact of the matter is science has not discovered one single thing that shows the religious worldview in its essential outline to be false.

Now, of course, it has shown many subsidiary things. For example, science has retired the traditional religious view of the physical universe permanently.

But when it comes to the big picture, the widest angle lens, when it comes to the essence of the large view, then nothing in science has touched that issue to show that it is wrong.

So even though science has clearly shown that there are, if you look at certain beliefs

in traditional societies, I don't know, what the sun represents or what might cause earthquakes

or thunder or cataclysmic events, the ready explanation to look for gods or supernatural forces.

You're saying even when science comes in with physical explanations, that is not fundamentally

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