Issue 14.11 - November 2006 Subscribe to WIRED magazine and receive a FREE gift!

For the past six decades, Warren Allen Smith has engaged in an unusual form of correspondence. Working from his cramped den in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, the 85-year-old sends letters to people asking if they believe in God. Many write back. Responses range from the brief – "Agnostic," scrawled on a postcard from Warren Buffett – to a lengthy exposition on morality by Walter Lippmann. The letter-writing began as research for Smith's master's thesis at Columbia University; it became the basis for a 1,264-page encyclopedia of nonbelievers titled Who's Who in Hell, published in 2000.

Raised a Methodist, Smith was already a committed atheist by the time he landed at Omaha Beach in World War II. Most people had dog tags with a P or C under religious affiliation; Smith's tag simply read "None."

Now Smith is working on his magnum opus: a Web site called Philosopedia, which he hopes will serve as a resource for philosophers as well as a comprehensive index of the world's most prominent atheists. A former English teacher and recording studio owner, he now spends about 10 hours a day working on the site. Smith is part aging beatnik and part college sophomore. One moment he's leafing through yellowed newspaper clippings as a pair of cats scramble across his desk; the next he's using his webcam to Skype with his technical assistant. He speaks in a gentle voice that belies his contentious work. "In a sense," he says, "I'm a missionary for nonbelievers."

Why the urgency? For one, he fears he doesn't have many years left before his memory starts to fade. But he also worries about the encroaching threat of fundamentalism, in the East as well as the West. Smith has written about 1,500 entries for Philosopedia beyond the 10,000 he uploaded from his book. So far he has refused to open his site to outside contributors à la Wikipedia. He may need to if he wants to fulfill his ultimate vision: "More than 10 percent of the world's 6.5 billion people are unchurched and freethinkers. I just hope the software can handle them all."

– Nicholas Thompson