E. O. Wilson has long been my favorite smart old guy.  But I found this
Q & A with him about why he is a secular humanist and this prattle
about "deism" that seems a bit odd.  Here it is and if you have a good
explanation for it, I'd love to hear it.

EDWARD O. WILSON

Emeritus Professor of Entomology at Harvard University and author of
numerous widely acclaimed books including Sociobiology.

I was raised a Southern Baptist in a religious environment that favored
a literal interpretation of the Bible. But it happened that I also
became fascinated by natural history at an early age, and, as a biology
concentrator at the University of Alabama, discovered evolution. All
that I had learned of the living world to that point fell into place in
a wholly new and intellectually compelling way. It was apparent to me
that life is connected not by supernatural design but by kinship, with
species having multiplied out of other species to create, over hundreds
of millions of years, the great panoply of biodiversity around us
today. If a Divine Creator put it all here several thousand years ago,
he also salted Earth from pole to pole with falsified massive,
interlocking evidence to make scientists believe life evolved
autonomously. I realized that something was terribly wrong in this
dissonance. The God depicted in Holy Scripture is variously benevolent,
didactic, loving, angry, and vengeful, but never tricky.

As time passed, I learned that scientific materialism explains vastly
more of the tangible world, physical and biological, in precise and
useful detail, than the Iron-Age theology and mysticism bequeathed us
by the modern great religions ever dreamed. It offers an epic view of
the origin and meaning of humanity far greater, and I believe more
noble, than conceived by all the prophets of old combined. Its
discoveries suggest that, like it or not, we are alone. We must measure
and judge ourselves, and we will decide our own destiny.

Why then, am I a humanist? Let me give the answer in terms of Blaise
Pascal's Wager. The seventeenth-century French philosopher said, in
effect, live well but accept religious faith. "If I lost," he wrote. "I
would have lost little: If I won I would have gained eternal life."
Given what we now know of the real world, I would turn the Wager around
as follows: if fear and hope and reason dictate that you must accept
the faith, do so, but treat this world as if there is none other.