"The Washington Times"
October 22, 2001

Putting faith in science 

By Larry Witham
THE WASHINGTON TIMES


William Phillips' life changed in more than one way after the
impromptu press conference for his 1997 Nobel Prize in physics. 
"I said something like, 'There are many people I want to thank, and I'd
also like to thank God for giving us such a wonderful and interesting
universe to explore," the Gaithersburg resident said in an interview.
Such accolades for a deity, which are rare in Nobel settings, put Mr.
Phillips on the radar screen of the science and religion movement.
Yesterday, the churchgoing physicist addressed a main showcase
of the movement, the Science and the Spiritual Quest II conference at
Harvard University. 
"Being an ordinary scientist and an ordinary Christian seems perfectly
natural to me," he told the gathering of several hundred at the Havard
Memorial Church. "For others, however, it appears strange, even
astonishing, that someone could be serious about science and about
faith." 
If a half-century ago people believed that science and religion
were at war with each other, the new movement says it doesn't have
to be so.
At the forefront of the warming relations are scholars, scientists,
philanthropists, and a growing number of Americans who like reading
books on the subject. The Harvard event is the second of its kind,
following a similar conference held at Berkeley in 1998.
Both events gathered 60 scientists in the fields of biology, physics
and cosmology, and computer science, who wrote papers, met in
closed conferences, and cultivated friendships. They then took their
experience public in a culminating event.
"The idea is for some of the scientists to share with the public
what they've discussed in private for two years," said Phillip Clayton,
a visiting professor of religion at Harvard and organizer of the
three-day assembly, which is funded by the John Templeton
Foundation. "In the very bastion of higher education, they'll speak of
an openness to religious questions and a belief in higher beings."
Some controversy is expected.
After the first conference, which generated a great amount of
media coverage, including a Newsweek cover story titled "Science
Finds God," some hard-nosed scientists objected to the dalliance
with theology. More traditional believers questioned what scientists
know about faith, and objected to some of their efforts to redefine it.
But the key goal is being achieved to make the subject of
religion credible in the world of science. "In eight years since [the
idea] began, we've watched this transformation," Mr. Clayton said.
After 20 years of political drama and headlines about the
evolution-versus-creation debate, Americans tend to think that
subject alone constitutes the "science-religion" dialogue.
It has also perpetuated the image that science and religion are at war.
"The ordinary believer, and, more important, the person seeking to
find belief, needs reassurance that science isn't antagonistic to
belief," said the Rev. Arthur Peacocke, a biologist and former
agnostic who, after playing a role in the DNA revolution, became an
Anglican priest.
"Science influences everyone now, and that coincides with the
global awakening of the religions to each other," he said in an
interview before the conference, for which he gave the keynote
address yesterday. "The best way to get the religions to work
together is together to start facing up to what the scientific vista
means for the spiritual enterprise."

Encouraging overlap Science and religion can interact in four different
ways, depending on a person's outlook, experts say. The first approach is
conflict. In this war between science and religion, science views
religion as an illusion; religion views science as human hubris or an
attack on scriptural truths.
The second approach holds the two in sharp separation. The
National Academy of Science said in 1981, for example, that science
and religion are "are separate and mutually exclusive realms of human
thought."
The third and fourth approaches to science and religion involve
interaction either as an exchange of ideas or as a final
"integration" of the spiritual and the physical.
"It's very hard to defend the idea that all 'real' knowledge is on the
science side, and none on the religion side," Mr. Clayton said.
"Everyone knows it's false. You can know you love your wife and
know that life is meaningful. You know certain actions are wrong."
Such efforts to overlap scientific and religious phenomena are
encouraged in the science-religion dialogue. This may involve the
use of religious terms to describe scientific matters, or vice versa.
A more secular effort at overlap is the idea of "religious
naturalism," in which scientists give nature the devotion usually
afforded a deity.
Yesterday, Mr. Peacocke urged something in between, an "open
theology" that adapts to new scientific findings. "Can religion learn
to outgrow its reliance on claimed authorities and popular images of a
God who acts and reveals by supernatural means?" he asked.
The Rev. John Polkinghorne, a particle physicist turned Anglican
cleric, said the key questions for the science-religion debate have
been posed during the past 30 years. 
Many scientists, he said, are replacing the idea that life is
mechanistic with the view that natural systems are domains of
complexity and chaos. Some believe that God's work is hidden in the
complexity.
Mr. Polkinghorne said another trend today is toward "natural
theology" the effort to find in nature evidence of a God and the
deity's characteristics. Natural theology was rejected with a
vengeance after Darwin's theory of evolution was said to explain all
complexity in the universe.
Conflict between the conference participants comes usually over
the question of biology for example, whether God acts in evolution
or whether scientists may clone humans.
"In biology, the differences between theists and nontheists are
much more pronounced," Mr. Clayton said. "There's heated debate:
Is Darwinian evolution sufficient to account for all things that exist?
The theists say no, the naturalists say yes. There, the debates are
much more divisive, even to the point where the smooth flow of the
workshop is endangered."
Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson, a critic of Darwinism, says
the science-religion dialogue is dominated by "modernist theology"
that caves in to scientific "naturalism" and never questions the
science itself.
Many religious thinkers in this discussion say "that theism must
always yield to naturalism on any subject about which science has
the power to investigate," Mr. Johnson said. "[They] would never
argue that God might have intervened in nature to produce the first
living organism."
Meanwhile, the National Center for Science Education, a leading
critic of creationism, describes the dialogue as bolstering evolution
teaching in schools because it shows that religious people accept the
tenets of science.
"Participants seemed largely content to let science rather than
revelation tell us about the nature of the physical world," said
director Eugenie Scott. "The 'science and religion' movement may be
beneficial to the public understanding of science and evolution."

Looking for meaning Scientists may still be setting themselves up for
peer-group sneers by joining in the conference, says former religion
professor Bill Grassie, who founded the Philadelphia Center for Science
and Religion.
"This is a risky thing professionally," he said.
"Participants are usually in their mid to late careers. They're looking for
something more meaningful."
Though science will not return to the era when Isaac
Newton said God adjusted the orbits of planets, Mr. Grassie believes
new, fuzzier realities in biology, cosmology and physical systems allow
scientists to see something more at work. "These categories don't fit
into the dogmatic materialist view," he said.
Foremost, he said, is the need for scientists to join
the ethical debate as humanity faces the prospects of genetic
engineering and environmental collapse.
Indeed, concerns over stem-cell research or human
cloning continue to engage the religious public, but it's still
questionable whether wider America will take to the science-religion
dialogue, said James Miller, a Presbyterian minister and officer with the
science and religion program of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science.
Clearly, there has been a rise in Bible studies on
science and Genesis, and a boom in books on spirituality and the
cosmos. Still, Mr. Miller said, the newcomer needs to have mastered a
minimum of knowledge to get excited about the subject.
"It's hard to do science-religion dialogue unless
you know a little bit from both sides," he said. "We hope this eventually
reaches down to the grass roots."
Mr. Phillips, the Nobel physicist, attends Fairhaven
United Methodist Church in Gaithersburg because he takes the
deity personally. "Einstein's god, who is really just the laws
of nature, is not for me," he said. "I'm strongly of the conviction that
God is personal, and this is the foundation of my faith."
But he wonders whether science could ever really
touch that question, let alone prove anything about the God he
worships.
"Let's imagine we do learn a lot more, and it is
really pointing us to the idea of a Creator," Mr. Phillips said. "It's difficult
to see how that will point to a Creator who wants a personal relationship
with us, who loves us, who wants us to love each other, who has
expectations for us that come to us by the wisdom of Scriptures."
Still, he said, both science's limits and its
findings could bolster believers in a world of doubt. "Some things about
science," he said, "give you the impossibility of ruling out divine
intervention." 

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