In Conversation with Mitzi Rapkin on the First Draft Podcast March 15, 2021 First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in. This week on Probable Impossibilities, out now from Pantheon Books. From the episode: Alan Lightman: Most biologists agree on the properties of a thing that deems it alive, but I think that that raises all kinds of philosophical and theological questions. I have a very good friend Micha Greenstein, who’s a rabbi in Memphis, Tennessee; I asked him this question about how he would regard an organism that was created from scratch. And he said that it would not have a soul because only God can breathe a soul into a living being. It would be a soulless creature. So that’s just one theological angle, and that philosophically raises a question of what is the difference between living and non-living material matter? And if we are in that rare fraction of matter that is alive in the cosmos—which is just a tiny, tiny fraction—then does that impose any obligation to us?