As the host of the recently concluded series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey now available on home video, if you missed it Neil deGrasse Tyson became, along with Americas most prominent astrophysicist, the public face of science in its effort to recapture the public imagination. But although Tyson is an important author in his own right, he didnt conceive, write or produce Cosmos. He essentially served the role of an actor or a news anchor, a charismatic and credible figure reading someone elses words off a Teleprompter. Those words, and damn near everything else about the show, were the work of Ann Druyan, the writer and executive producer who also co-created the original Cosmos series with her late husband, Carl Sagan, more than 30 years ago.

Druyan does not personally seek the limelight and is not a celebrity, but in her own way shes a key cultural figure in the struggle against the popular antagonism to science and the spread of anti-scientific claptrap about climate change and evolution. Those on the creationist or anti-evolutionist fringe who understood the unstinting scientific arguments of Cosmos as a direct attack on their beliefs were entirely correct, but Druyans critique of religion goes well beyond the literal-minded idiocy of the Answers in Genesis crowd. She describes herself as an agnostic rather than an atheist based on the premise that science must withhold judgment on questions it cannot answer but she has also described religious faith as antithetical to the values of science and religion in general as a statement of contempt for nature and reality.

Druyan is well aware that many religious people would reject those characterizations, and those snippets may make her philosophical approach sound less generous and open-minded than it really is. While she is profoundly uncomfortable with the artificial wall between the domains of science and religion erected by Stephen Jay Goulds famous pronouncement that they are non-overlapping magisteria, she welcomes discussion of seemingly indefinable and unscientific concepts like sacredness and spirituality. Those things are to be found at a capacious and more evolved level, she argues, by leaving behind our infantile sense of centrality in the universe, in which we are the precious offspring of a benevolent protector, and instead shifting our focus to the profound and immense mysteries presented by 13 billion years of cosmic evolution and four and a half billion years of the story of life on this planet.

During my all-too-brief phone conversation with Druyan, we also discussed her brilliant rereading of the story of the Garden of Eden, which she sees as the story of humanitys escape from a maximum-security prison with 24-hour surveillance. Adam and Eves capital offense is that they seek knowledge and ask questions, precisely the qualities that define the human species. At least in that story, God appears to demand a subservient and doctrinaire incuriosity, and many of his followers continue to insist on that path to this day. There are certainly currents within the major religious traditions that resist such a simple-minded negation of science Buddhism, Judaism and the Catholic Church are now OK, generally speaking, with both evolution and cosmology but Druyans provocative critique of religion as a distorting social force is well worth considering even if you think her argument is too sweeping.

One mistake Druyan never makes, either in Cosmos or anywhere else, is the arrogant historicism sometimes displayed by Richard Dawkins and other prominent scientific atheists. By that I mean the quasi-religious assumption that we stand at a uniquely privileged position of near-perfect scientific knowledge, with just a few blanks to fill in before we understand everything about the universe. Im sure most of what we all hold dearest and cherish most, believing at this very moment, Druyan has said, will be revealed at some future time to be merely a product of our age and our history and our understanding of reality. Science as a process, as the never-ending search for truth, is sacred. But what we now know, or think we know, is always a matter for humility and doubt.

Ann, I know Im not the first person to bring this up, but youve done two versions of this show where, you know, a prominent male scientist was on-screen and you were behind the scenes. The first time around, of course, it was your husband, and this time its Neil Tyson. Because hes standing in front of the cameras, everybody thinks of him as the creator of the show. Whats going on with that?

That is a funny thing, isnt that? I am a little bit surprised when critics, who I think are more likely to read the credits with some degree of attention, talk about the show as if Neil has had something to do with its inception or its writing. In the case of Carl it was different. Obviously Carl was the senior partner in conceiving the show with me and [astronomer] Steven Soter. And so, I mean, I am kind of taken aback. But then I look at the brilliance of Neils performance, and how unexpectedly he has taken what I wrote and given it its best possible expression on the show. So I love the guy. I guess thats the plight of the writer. It is coming out of someone elses mouth; people think it must be theirs. Its a natural reaction.

Its funny, though. I mean, Im a movie critic, and I dont think people are confused when they go to see a movie and Johnny Depp is up there playing a character. They pretty much get the concept that somebody wrote those lines for him. But they dont seem to understand that in this case.

They dont, and thats because, you know, Neil is a scientist and a writer also. So its not that great a leap to think that this is his material. And of course, it was true for Carl too, in a much greater degree. So it all makes sense. Im happy. I mean, look, I cant get the fact that this show has played in something like 181 countries, and in the vast majority of them its been an off-the-scale success. For someone who started out on this road seven years ago, this is the best possible outcome I could have imagined.

How have you felt about the degree of pushback from religious folks? Youve been very clear about embracing the scientific consensus that climate change is the result of human activity, that evolution by natural selection is a fact, and that the age of the universe is not in dispute. Im sure you were expecting some resistance to all that.

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Why is God telling me to stop asking questions?: Meet the woman behind Neil deGrasse Tysons Cosmos