As an astronomer, Adam Frank is used to scanning the sky for nebulae and supernovas. But lately he's turned his focus inward, searching the vast expanse between science and religion for signs of common ground.

Over the past decade the battle lines have been sharply drawn as atheists confront believers and evolutionists challenge creationists. But he believes the two groups are talking past each other.

"These endless debates, where it's always scripture versus the results of science, I've found so off the point," says Frank. The University of Rochester professor has just published "The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate," a book that he hopes will transform the dialog.

Frank believes that religions are rooted in myths that we can all learn from (relating the Bible's flood myth to current global warming, for instance). He compares the awe-inspiring discoveries of science with the wonder of religious experience. And he concludes that human beings will have to learn to respect both areas of inquiry if we are to save civilization.

His book's title, "The Constant Fire," is from a poem by Wallace Stevens. It refers to a quest Frank believes is as old as humanity itself: "the human aspiration to find what is true, what is real, and to then build lives in accord with this understanding."

Since we first interviewed Frank in 2003, he has added Tricycle, a Buddhist publication, to the magazines he writes for (the others are Discover and Astronomy). And, in his spare time, he has started learning blues fiddle to complement his blues harmonica playing. But his major pursuit has been bridging the dichotomy between science and religion.

We recently spoke to Frank about his new book in his South Wedge home. The following is an edited version of our conversation.

City: What led you to write this book?

Adam Frank: I consider myself an evangelist of science. I love science and the perspective it brings. Once you're trained in science you see everything through that filter. The sense that there is more, that there is a sacred quality to experience, came to me through science.

I've always had friends who were religious or spiritual. I was never interested in the idea of believing in a deity, but I could understand what they were talking about even though I didn't link to their particular doctrine. These were people deeply engaged in their spiritual lives.

To have a society that supports science requires democracy and openness. If we, as scientists, bring to this debate the idea that anybody who has a spiritual sensibility in their lives is stupid, we are not meeting people where they're at. We run this great risk of people ignoring the power of science. Far too many people come to meaning in their lives through this sense of the sacred to tell all of them they're just mushy thinkers.

Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins have all written bestsellers condemning religion. They say it's not only wrong, it's dangerous, and they point to troubles around the world. What do you bring to this dialog?

What the "new atheists," as they're called, fail to understand, is that religion has always served many roles in society. There is certainly an aspect of organized religion that is about social control and real estate and who gets to sleep with who. And I agree with much of what they would argue about that aspect of religion. But what I find with Dawkins is a great lack of scholarship in his understanding of religion as a human phenomenon. It's almost like he wants to define away anything that doesn't fit his view.

There is a scientist that I write about, Ursula Goodenough, whose father was one of the leading religious scholars of the last century. After what she calls "playing it straight" as a scientist, she came back to her father's questions. She asked, "the feelings I get from doing science, aren't they similar to the feeling I might get from going to church?" Dawkins says we don't need to deal with her because she's not really religious.

I agree with many of the new atheists' points about the great danger of the religious right, but to say that equals religion when we have a 50,000 year history of encountering these questions is to eliminate what is at the core of individual personal experience.

Myths are central to your book. You discuss Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods; you don't discuss Adam and Eve and their punishment for eating from the tree of knowledge. Both myths are about control - keeping humans ignorant. If that's a basic tenet of religion, doesn't it work against science?

That's true. I'm not interested in any church and its dogma and doctrine. I'm interested in the individual experience that people have of spiritual endeavor. I discuss William James, who was interested not in the people who come to church once a week and have their religion handed to them, but in the experience they have that drives them to what he calls a "strenuous life."

James says, at the core of every religion you'll find someone having one of those experiences - Jesus, Buddha, St. Francis, the Sufis. Later, a political structure gets built onto it, but early on there is this authentic encounter. What I'm interested in is that individuals have this encounter with the world with the sense of the sacred. From that they want to delve deeper into that experience. That leads to an aspiration.

Institutions are about power. Dawkins and [the Bill Maher film] "Religulous," they're quite right about the way religion has been used as a hammer to oppress people. But at the same time, it's pretty hard to ignore the experiences of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Sarah Palin is the latest in a long line of politicians proudly embracing ignorance. Even some bright conservatives, who I believe know better, seem happy to use ignorance for political purposes. I understand what you're saying about meeting people where they are, but isn't it a bit dangerous?

Basically, we have about 100 years to figure out how to manage the project of civilization. Between climate change, the end of cheap oil and, most importantly, overpopulation, our global society faces challenges we have never faced before. Science is going to be part of the solution, but science alone is not going to be the answer.

What comes into play is what we value. If we can't find a way to educate people, to allow them to have this innate feeling that they come into the world with, and see how that can be embraced by what happens in science, then the greater danger is we push them off. Then the only people they listen to are the people who are happy to use ignorance for political ends.

What I'm trying to do is show people they can have their religious sensibilities, but those sensibilities also have a place within a scientific culture. If we keep telling people they can't have that, it makes it easier for the Sarah Palins of the world to say, "climate change - you don't need to worry about it."

Philosopher Daniel Dennett has pointed out that the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul has been a church and mosque over its long history, and now it's a museum. Would we be better off if we regarded religions as collections of myths we believed in in the past instead of treating them as current guides to life?

Yes. I'm trying to start a dialog where people can have spiritual sensibilities and engage in spiritual endeavor without having to hold to literalist interpretations of one doctrine or another. That has been the problem, when you couple spiritual sensibilities with the need to have one interpretation of what to do with them. Given the pressures we face, we will either learn to have a more open and less literal view of these traditions or we're not going to make it.

I have experiences where the person next to me on a plane asks what I do. I say I'm an astronomer. I can do two things when they tell me they're fundamentalist. I can have my back up and say, "How can you believe those crazy things?" or I can show them that science has incredible power to reveal the mechanisms by which the world came to be and has a place for their feelings of rapture, awe, and wonder.

Your book is interspersed with your personal experiences combining the scientific with those kinds of feelings. A striking one was your visit to the ancient archeological site, Newgrange.

I was with an Irish astronomer whose job it is to look at archeological sites and see if there are astrological alignments. You can say the people who built Newgrange were proto-astronomers - they were building a giant calendar to figure out when to plant seeds - and all the mythic stuff wasn't really going on. This happens with Stonehenge too.

That part is true, but if that's all you see, you're missing a huge part of what these people were doing. When I went through the narrow passageway that the summer solstice is aligned with at Newgrange and got into the center chamber, it was so apparent to me that not only were these people acting as astronomers, but that central chamber was also a womb. This is the world's womb.

So they were operating on logos - on logic and reason - to build this thing, but they were responding to it on some much deeper level, a mythic level. An experience like that shows that science never exists alone; we always have underlying currents of deeper stories we respond to, calling us to a sense of the beauty of the world's unseen order.

Someone like Dennett would say it doesn't go beyond that. I'm saying it does go beyond that. Where it goes is for the individual to decide. If you want to call it God, go ahead; I'm not going to go there. If you want to call it a mystery, on some level existence is mysterious. No equation I write down is going to end the mystery of my own existence.

Some of the parallels you show between ancient myths and scientific theories are fascinating, particularly the flood myth and global warming and the Hindu god Indra and the concept of multiple universes.

Science is thought of as just a bunch of facts, but it's not. The facts are the world speaking to us. In the end, we always demur to the data, but those facts have to be interpreted. We have to find scientific narratives to place those facts into. The small narratives, like Russian dolls, get put into larger and larger narratives until you get to the point of climate change and how human beings affect the world.

A cosmologist, Marcelo Gleiser, said if you look at the world's mythological heritage you'll find every scientific possibility for cosmology, [including] the universe is infinite or it got started from nothing. In the Indra story, it's not that science is now finding that the Hindus were right [about multiple universes], but that we were, imaginatively, already telling many of the narratives. We'll now see if the data support them.

But science is happy to investigate the mystery and see how far it can get. Religion makes up answers. Are they really compatible?

Every religion has its mysticism, but I was told by one of the scholars in the [UR] religion department that the word mysticism means "hand over mouth," "can't say any more," "can't put it into words." If you look at what mystics were doing, they weren't looking for easy answers and they weren't necessarily describing the world. They were interested in going inward and having this internal exploration of their experience. They described a sense of unity, a fundamental oneness.

That aspect of religion is often not looked at. We tend to see its social control side. The debate can't focus on the stories about the physical world that individual religions make up. We have to go beyond it and below it and before it to see where the roots of both science and religion emanated from. That's why mythology is so important.

In the book, you make it clear that you are not fond of the New Age movement.

I would love to get Deepak Chopra alone in a dark alley, because it's such crap. It's wishful thinking that doesn't contribute anything to the debate. It's the complement of what happens with the religious right.

What the New Age tries to do is find confirmation of their cherished beliefs in science. What it doesn't do is honor the hard work that it will take to discover where parallels might exist. You can't just say, "Oh look, quantum mechanics shows us that Buddhism is true." Not at all. Quantum mechanics raises profound questions, but it doesn't answer them.

The movie "What the Bleep Do We Know?" is crap. People expect science to be complicated. If I showed someone a cell phone and said there are magic fairies that make this work, they'd say no, it must be something with electro-magnetic fields. It's complicated. But when it comes to their spiritual lives, many people want it to be simple. You should expect the same level of subtlety in that part of your life as you expect from science.

Your book also examines the dichotomy of science vs. religion in the lives of scientists like Kepler, Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein.

One of the paradoxes of the science/religion debate is that many of the men and women who were the founders of science in its current form, which began about 400 years ago, were deeply religious or deeply spiritual. They may have been in conflict with the religious powers of the time, but they were all pursuing these investigations as an act of reverence.

When Kepler first discovered that the shape of orbits were ellipses, his writings show that he was clearly having religious experiences about this. If Einstein met Dawkins, he'd be like, "What is your problem?" Einstein said, anybody who doesn't have a sense of the mystery is a snuffed out candle.

But, surely you can have a sense of mystery without believing in a god?

This book is a-theistic. I'm not interested in arguing God vs. the laws of physics, because there are religions that don't have that sort of deity. Are we going to say they're not religions? To say that the science and religion debate has to be about an omnipotent supreme being who decides on Thursday that the Mets are going to win and on Friday it's the Yankees - there's a lot more to this discussion.

People like Dennett ignore the line of scholarship about religion and mythology that has been quite vibrant in the last century. William James, Mircea Eliade, and Friedrich Schleiermacher pointed to a different aspect of what religion does and what its history is, going back not 1000 or 2000 years, but 10,000, 20,000 or 50,000 years. To ignore that is like going to a physics class and saying, "I took mechanics, I wasn't really interested in it, so there's nothing to it."

You look at pictures from the Hubble telescope and get a feeling of awe. Scientists say don't try and connect it to anything spiritual. But Rudolf Otto, one of the great scholars of religion at the turn of the last century, identified awe as defining what he would call the experience of the holy or sacred. He said that's what you could point to if you want to understand religious feeling. That's exactly what happens when you encounter the scientific narratives.

Near the end of the book you portray Earth as a planetary version of Easter Island, where a civilization depleted its resources. What can we learn from these myths?

We live in a scientific society and we are experiencing both the fruits and poisons of that society. Our reactions to it are going to have to be to one part mythological.

When we choose the technologies we're going to bring to dealing with climate change, they're going to have to be motivated by our deepest values. That is not purely the domain of science. To get the entire world to change energy modalities, you're not just going to be able to hit people over the head and say, "Do it!" You're going to have to call something deeper from them.

Do you believe your ideas can impact the current state of us-verses-them that organized religion sets up? Is it possible for people of different faiths - and no faith - to come together through myths?

I think it's not just possible, it's necessary. It's the only way we're going to make it past this bottleneck we're moving through in the next century. Jared Diamond's book, "Collapse," lays out examples of societies that were flourishing and then, within decades, their numbers plummeted. The last stage is when they know the crisis is happening but they're not able to change their value system in order to deal with it.

That's exactly where we are today. I have two kids that I love. I would like to see them move into a world that is sustainable and has a long future. But from the part of me that evaluates it dispassionately, we're in deep, deep trouble. I don't think human beings are going to be eliminated from the planet, but I think there is a real possibility that we could see a global collapse of catastrophic proportions, so that the project of civilization will be fundamentally threatened. Either we figure out how to do this or we don't make it.

As an astronomer, I look at 100 billion stars in the galaxy. It's quite possible that many of the planets with those stars evolved life and some of that life moved towards intelligence. Every species comes to this juncture.

I have this metaphor of the global teenager: you've got the keys to the planet; you either drive around like a nut job and drive off a cliff and die, or you marshal your sense of responsibility and pass into adulthood. That's exactly the moment in history where we are. So the people who want to have my religion vs. your religion - if that viewpoint wins, then it's hard for me to see us making it through. We really have to evolve another set of myths.

"The Constant Fire," 304 pages, from University of California Press, is available now. For more information visit constantfire.com.