DOES GOD EXIST? This age-old question was the subject of an AAAS-sponsored symposium in Washington, DC last week. Actually, to accommodate a very ecumenical council of scientists (mostly physicists) and religious thinkers, the session organizers framed the debate in terms of three tactful "cosmic questions" (one for each day of the meeting): Did the universe have a beginning? Was the universe designed? Are we alone? The colloquy reached its dramatic climax in the matchup between John Polkinghorne of Cambridge and Steven Weinberg of Texas. Their collision of views was reminiscent of the famous Oxford debate of 1860 (sponsored by the British Association for the Advancement of Science) between biologist Thomas Huxley, staunch defender of the-then new theory of evolution, and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, who argued that the notion of human descent from the apes was absurd. One thing, at least, has changed in 129 years. Nowadays most clerics are comfortable with the terminology and methods of modern cosmology. Indeed, Polkinghorne is (like Wilberforce) an Anglican minister and (like Weinberg) a particle physicist. Nevertheless, the surface compatibility of science and religion could not cover up the sense that the essence of the AAAS meeting lay in the atheism/theism dichotomy as exemplified by Weinberg and Polkinghorne respectively. Addressing the issue of a designed universe, Weinberg asked about the designer: Who would he be? What is his nature? Why are miracles no longer performed? "The evidence for miracles is weaker than for cold fusion," he said. Polkinghorne asserted that the idea of a cosmic designer was an unanswerable metaphysical question; metaphysics, he continued, could be constrained but not determined by science. Weinberg countered by suggesting that recent cosmological models (e.g., "eternal inflation") and certain interpretations of quantum mechanics (e.g., the "many-universes" hypothesis) demonstrated that physics, and not just metaphysics, might one day assimilate all of the above-named cosmic questions. Polkinghorne listed things that reductionist science could not account for---beauty, art, and ethics. "Consciousness is an intrinsic sign of a creator," he said. In defense of a designer-less universe, Weinberg cited a possible connection between the human disposition for beauty and the seeming symmetries of nature as manifested in the laws of physics. (For the full meeting agenda see this website: http://www.aaas.org/spp/dspp/dbsr/events/cosmo/cosmic.htm.)