Quick, get this man a copy of Return of the God Hypothesis. Elon Musk in an interview with Katie Miller:
KATIE MILLER: Who do you look up to the most?
ELON: The Creator.
MILLER: What’s your position on God?
ELON: God is the Creator.
MILLER: You don’t believe in God though, do you?
ELON: Well, I believe this universe came from something. People have different labels.
It’s the season of the unexpected convert, isn’t it? Obviously, I have no privileged information about where if anywhere Musk has landed in any hypothetical spiritual search. But he went out on a limb in saying this. I don’t know that he knows the full weight of the scientific basis for the claim he’s making, but of course it’s laid out in great detail in Stephen Meyer’s book. There should have been obvious follow-up questions for Musk: What do you mean by a Creator and why does the existence of the universe necessarily mean it was “created” purposefully? Plenty of atheists, including smart ones, look at that same fact of existence and shrug.
Unfortunately, Ms. Miller’s follow-up was, “When’s the last time you did something extremely ordinary like go to Target or CVS?”
I remember Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently, an unexpected and public convert in the true sense, citing weak evidence for her own theism in a conversation with Richard Dawkins and being gently chastised for it by Dawkins. He said, “Now, I think that the hypothesis of theism is the most exciting scientific hypothesis you could possibly hold.”
He didn’t mean that he embraces the hypothesis — you would have heard about that! He meant that the design of the cosmos is a scientific idea, whether right or wrong, to be weighed as science.
Musk has more than enough smarts to evaluate that evidence for himself, once he has got it in front of him. I’d much rather hear about the results of such an evaluation by him than I would about the last time he shopped at Target.