SCIENCE ISSUES

Scientists Discuss Ways To Integrate Science with Christianity

Group of scientists affiliated with the Christian faith provides unique forum for resolving debate between science and religion

WN Lepkowskl, C&EN Washington

Whenever the word Christianity turns up in the scientific press, peo­ple usually get set for another neck-reddening round of the creationism debate. What many scientists may not realize, however, is that there is a large number of scientists who are also Christians who regard the creationism debate as irrelevant to science policy at its essence: the deeper humanization of science, technology, and society.

Their basic tenet is that faith needs science, and science—if it is to be applied with truly humanistic poli­cies—needs a grounding in the western religious heritage. And so, a number of those scientists have organized to achieve what they feel is a needed synthesis so that the heritage in a technological society isn't totally secularized around merely Greek ideals.

Their intellectual tools are chiefly philosophical, and their faith is not in humanism per se but in a human­ism grounded in belief in Jesus Christ, sin, and redemption—some­thing hard for the bulk of today's scientists to swallow.

Early this month, a little more than a hundred of them, mostly so­cial and natural scientists, gathered at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, to hear various papers on the integration of their Christian lives with their work in science. The event was the 39th meeting of the 2300-member American Scientific

Cummings: people living scientific lives devoid of spiritual foundation

Affiliation, scientists "affiliated" with the Christian faith.

The conference theme was "1984: The Responsibility of Science," and papers were presented on such top­ics as Quantum Mechanics and the Nature of Reality, A Christian Per­spective on Ecological Ethics, and Behaviorism and the Closed Society. The point of the papers was to raise and broaden the question of wheth­er George Orwell's vision of a soci­ety dominated by governmental con­trol through high-tech methods, as portrayed in his famous novel, "1984," was in fact coming true.

Creationists were there, too, and a few papers were devoted to their orientation. One paper described ef­forts of universities to deny tenure to scientific faculty who subscribed to the creationist view of "the beginning." Three others discussed different ways of reconciling the literal Biblical account of Genesis with geological facts. Indeed, as one ASA member observed, some 18 va­

rieties of creationists now exist, each trying to reconcile Genesis with sci­ence in some particular way.

But in general it seemed obvious that the creationist point of view was a way of thought no longer central to most Christians who make their living in science. "I'm not hung up on creationism," comment­ed Bradley University analytical chemist Thomas F. Cummings, a member of ASA for 26 years; "I don't know what mechanism God used." What Cummings says he is more worried about is people living sci­entific lives devoid of any spiritual foundation.

That is the core of the debate be­tween science and religion: scien­tists believing religion skews objec­tive reasoning, fuels repressive movements, and stifles freedom of thought; religionists insisting that science pursued from an agnostic or atheistic base feeds the growing materialism, narcissism, and vio­lence of the current age. At the third corner of the triangle are the hu­manists in both camps who do their science and have the welfare of hu­man beings as the base from which their science policy must operate. These humanists would differenti­ate science from faith as two dis­tinctly important but separate areas of life.

ASA members say, however, that humanistic values, to be sustained, must spring from the Judeo-Chris-tian religious base. And 43 years ago they organized around that principle.

"Our platform of belief has three important planks," says the ASA brochure. "First, we affirm that the 'Holy Scriptures are the inspired word of God, the only unerring guide of faith and conduct.' Second, we affirm that 'Jesus Christ is the son of God, who through his atone-

36 August 27,1984 C&EN

ment is the one and only mediator between God and man/ Finally, we affirm that 'God is the creator of the physical universe. Certain laws are discernible in the manner in which God upholds the universe. The scientific approach is capable of giving reliable information about the natural world/ "

ASA executive director Robert L. Herrmann says the organization is pondering a slight but key change in the wording concerning the Bi­ble as the "only unerring guide of faith and conduct." He says more Catholics, with their long, if check­ered, history of dealing with sci­ence through theology and philoso­phy, would be attracted to the orga­nization if some new wording allowed for their belief in tradition as developed and guided through the Holy Spirit.

wich, Mass. Besides the quarterly journal, it publishes a newsletter and is in the process of preparing a tele­vision series on the universe, a Christian answer to Carl Sagan's suc­cessful but dogmatically atheistic series, "Cosmos."

Not too many technical people, even Christians, are familiar with the organization because it never has gone out of its way to publicize itself. Its roots are Protestant, many of its members formerly belonging to the undergraduate religious organization, Inter-varsity Christian Fellowship. It has few, if any, black believers and at the recent meeting, most of the women there were wives of members. Its membership of 2300 is down from the peak of 3000, due to the exodus of its creationist members. Its journal circulation totals 4500.

"We miss the creationists," says

As a group we believe people should have freedom to believe that Biblical texts can have a breadth of interpretation

In any case, ASA lies squarely within the beliefs of orthodox Christianity. That fact makes the or­ganization of some interest through its willingness to tackle the issues constantly emerging within the technological society. For example, the March issue of its Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation has a critique of modern psychology's (and the philosopher Hegel's) prop­osition that there are no eternal truths, that only change is constant. The paper is a defense of the "eter­nal truths of scripture."

Another deals with the Christian far right and economic issues, accus­ing those of the far right of "serious deficiencies of logic, in economic content, and in treatment of the Bible." An article in the June issue by chemist Walter R. Thorson of the University of Alberta defends on a theological basis the notion of objectivity in science in the face of attacks against it from theoretical physics applied to eastern philoso­phies.

ASA's headquarters are in Ips-

Herrmann. "They have had a major input into the Christian community. But as a group we believe people should have freedom to believe that Biblical texts can have a breadth of interpretation. I'd like to think we're coming to a phase of mobilizing our energies toward presenting the Christian message to the scientific community in a credible way. We think we can be honest about scien­tific data and be faithful to tradi­tion at the same time."

Herrmann spent 17 years on Boston University's biochemistry faculty. In 1976 he was asked to head the biochemistry department and recruit a faculty for the new medical school at the fundamentalist Christian Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla. "I wrote at least 700 letters to candidates and concluded that there was a vast sea of Chris­tians in quality places in academia; that is, very many who will stand up for the faith if provoked." In 1981 ASA asked him to take over as executive director. He accepted, left Oral Roberts, and moved to Ipswich.

Herrmann, however, says that al­though the scientific community at large may fight to the death against creationism, it has developed a dis­comfort with philosophical ques­tions. "A couple of years ago," he recalls, "I spoke to a seminar at Mas­sachusetts Institute of Technology on the ethics of bioengineering. When I raised the importance of defining one's religious values in getting down the roots of the issue, my remarks fell like a lead balloon. The chaplain who organized the meeting said those kinds of ques­tions were best brought up one-on-one over a couple of beers."

Herrmann's agenda is to keep the society growing and to take a more public profile. "At the moment we may look more like a secret society than an organization that can speak to the major problems facing us in a technological age." He says he will be doing more speaking before non-Christian scientific audiences and at the same time help the churches understand science better in its rela­tion to Biblical revelation.

One new thrust, besides the TV series, is to develop a new maga­zine that will speak to the Chris­tian community and also get into the hands of pastors who need to modernize their teaching in the con­text of the scientific age. And he says he hopes to extend the reach of the organization beyond merely the Protestant community. "We need

Herrmann: pondering new wording

August 27, 1984 C&EN 37

Science Issues

to know what the wider group of Christians are thinking," he says.

Chemist Cummings summarized for C&EN his attraction to ASA. Said Cummings: "Most of my friends back home are agnostic or atheistic and, of course, I have very vigorous discussions with them. As scientists, they don't believe in chance. Few of them claim to be a determinist, either. But if you follow their logic to the extreme, they become just that.

"They all believe in the second law of thermodynamics, that is that the universe runs down. Implicit in the second law, then, is that the universe had a beginning. But if one imparts that beginning to 'some­thing' beside God, and if one as a scientist doesn't believe in chance, that to me makes one a determin­ist. I don't feel nonbelieving sci­entists carry their agnostic argu­ments to the logical extreme, de­terminism.

"Christians, on the other hand/ believe in a set of propositions that can account for order and origins in nature. And we have a model that can account for our freedom to choose, and that the universe can have a spiritual aspect, one not just tied to a system of atoms. As Chris­tians we have to face up to sin and evil and we do so by our belief in 'the Fall.' We become, as a result of the Fall, 'distorted.' God gave man the freedom and responsibility to choose between good and evil and undo the distortion."

W. Jim Neidhardt, a physicist at New Jersey Institute of Technology, is one of those ASA members who has thrown the bulk of his philo­sophical resources into achieving a blend of science and Christian belief. In a conference paper entitled, "Biblical Humanism—An Ally of True Science," Neidhardt drew as his model the 19th century physi­cist James Clerk Maxwell as one of the scientific originators of Neid­hardt's "Biblical Humanism."

Maxwell was raised as a Chris­tian and throughout his life, accord­ing to Neidhardt's readings, tried constantly to "feed back" his theo­logical belief structure into his ac­tivities as a scientist. The Bible nourished his life as a scientist, sci­ence nourished his life as a believer.

And, according to Neidhardt, "he looked for a deeper way of inter­preting nature that was not linked to the classical, Newtonian notions of mechanical necessity as mani­fested in isolated particles interact­ing causally with one another."

Out of that perception of a dy­namic rather than a static world or­der came Maxwell's discovery of the electromagnetic field. "In this the­ory," says Neidhardt, "the field con­cept was first formally articulated in a relational way of describing particles as never separable from their interactions. Thus this rela­tional notion of fields and their structure became an independent re­ality in its own right.

"This field notion of physical re­ality is profoundly analogous to the Biblical concept of the person. Cen­

tral to the Biblical understanding of the person is the reality of hu­man relationships as an integral part of what persons really are. You as a person are not a cut-off, isolated individual, like the Newtonian par­ticle separated from other autono­mous particles. Rather, you as a person are interrelated with others, your parents, your friends, even peo­ple with whom you disagree. These interrelationships constitute the very stuff of personal being."

Obviously, Neidhardt's analogies are open to dispute. But his point, however, is that Maxwell is merely the model for a way of thought that shows what he feels is the enriching quality of belief when applied to uncovering nature's secrets. It may be Neidhardt's wish as a believer to find analogies from the history of science appropriate to his personal belief. But his point is a more integrative one: Belief can enrich science, science can enrich belief.

It is these kinds of people and thinking that make up ASA at its turning point phase. It is interdisci­plinary thinking at the farthest fron­

tiers and thus imperfect and easy to criticize by reductionist thought— but in a way, fun to those who en­joy the challenge of interdisciplinary thought.

And it does take a certain leap of faith to come to Christianity, not the easiest religion to live up to, and in its abuses by so-called "be­lievers" to live down. To outsiders, Christianity is often seen more as a divisive than a uniting force in hu­man history. And Protestant Chris­tians of deep faith suffer from that certain "born-again" stigma—that is, seen as persons highly dogmatic, not very socially conscious, having low intellectual curiosity, and fi­nancially exploited by Elmer Gantry­like preachers.

Christianity's critics know their history, too, such as the plight of

Galileo, whose observations ran against dogma, and the easily verifi­able fact that science has gotten along very well without any Chris­tian viewpoint. Many of the great­est scientists are Jewish, most are probably agnostic. Any reader of history knows that scientific thought was developed in pagan Greece, that science thrived in traditional China, and that Islam was the first truly scientific civilization in the West with its massive contributions to mathematics and medicine.

But there is something special about faith working in people, and ASA members do have it. They do indeed subscribe to the born-again doctrine, believing it all the way, just as the Bible says. But they are scientists, too, and see their work as playing an observer and steward's role in what they see as God's unfolding creation. They see Chris­tianity providing ultimate meaning to the human being's life on Earth. Faith fills them out, and they'd like their scientific colleagues to share the experience, as a matter of life, and death. •

The creationist point of view is a way of thought no longer central to most Christians

who make their living in science

38 August 27, 1984 C&EN