Science for Clergymen; Religion for Scientists?

The sun had just set behind a distant, hazy mountain ridge. Two dozen ministers and several of America’s most eminent scientists were sipping drinks and chatting outside an Oak Ridge, Tennessee, home. They began discussing civil defense. A wrought-iron fountain sprayed mist over flowers in the garden beyond.

The ministers were part of the third annual Science for Clergymen conference sponsored by Oak Ridge Associated Universities. They were nearing the end of two weeks of classes on everything from space travel to genetics, medical ethics to air pollution.

They had come from across America to learn what was happening in science—an area often at sword’s point with organized religion, yet deeply involved in the Church’s future.

For an hour that evening everything followed the normal, polite pattern: Scientists talking to ministers. Telling their views. Imparting knowledge. Then Earl Schipper, a young campus minister from Ohio, shattered the agenda by asking the scientists how they personally regarded religion. And the conference’s first real no-holds-barred discussion broke loose.

“There used to be a feeling,” said Ellison Taylor, director of chemistry at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, “that religion handled the things science couldn’t explain. But as the gaps are being removed, religion is being displaced.”

“Forgive me,” countered Nobel Prize-winner (physics, 1963) Eugene Wigner, “but there are so many basic things that we scientists can’t even touch—like why we exist, why we feel, why we have consciousness, why there is a world. We can’t be too arrogant.”

Then a third man, Oak Ridge biology chief Howard Adler, expressed his view: “There is no happy marriage between science and religion. Religion has always tried to thwart science. But science is finding out more and more about the mind. The questions you ask about origins and consciousness may be answered in a short time.”

And again the slight, ever-gracious Wigner came back: “I just can’t believe this. You’ve got to recognize that we’re as far as ever from that knowledge.”

The darkness, falling rapidly, now seemed to stir the clergymen into intense probing, and questions came quickly. Nearly all were directed at Wigner.

How does the scientist view religion? Answer: “Some of us (and we’re in the minority) feel we must have a certain humility about science, a certain veneration for the unknown, even though we don’t necessarily believe all the Bible. I think this is our religion.”

Is there a soul? “Yes, in the same sense that there are atoms. But if the ‘soul’ is to play a role in physics we will have to introduce totally new concepts—just as when they introduced gravity or electricity.”

Does organized religion help you answer basic questions? “That’s difficult. But when I listen to some sermons I feel a certain elation that seems to bring me closer to the answers. I wish ministers would preach more on big topics like forgiveness and love rather than on down-to-earth subjects—like telling me I should vote for McCarthy.”

Of all the sessions at the Oak Ridge conference, this clearly had been the most stimulating. Until then, in fact, many participants had grumbled over meals that the sessions were long on fact and short on dialogue, that scientists were more willing to teach than to be taught, and that too many lectures lacked an ethical framework.

Most timely session of the conference, which coincided with the Apollo 11 moon mission, was a lecture on space travel by University of Tennessee asteroid expert C. J. Craven.

Most provocative of discussion, on the other hand, were the sessions dealing with the quality of human life—with population pressures, food, man’s environment, and genetic experiments.

What concerned the speakers was “the whole quality of life” thirty years from now. “We’re running out of space, out of quiet,” they said. “And we’re polluting our skies, as well as our bodies of water.”

Even here, though, the technicians were optimistic. One panelist predicted pollution problems largely will be solved within two decades. “The atmosphere and waters can be cleaned up,” he said, “if we stop putting in more pollutants; within the next ten years or so we expect federal legislation to accomplish this.”

The conference’s “lightest” life-quality lecture found Oak Ridge researcher Peter Mazur talking skeptically but comically about the growing practice of freezing corpses in anticipation of the day science can restore them to life. And its “heaviest” (at least most far-reaching) sessions may well have been those explaining advances in genetics—the possibilities of artificially creating life, of changing a person’s IQ, of determining sex before birth.

“The unknown will be explored,” said panelist James L. Liverman. “Nothing will stop us. The big question is whether you should put genetic findings into use on humans. Scientists and technicians alone can’t make that decision.”

United Methodist Bishop William Stowe of Kansas, expressing a common concern, noted that in the plethora of facts presented, almost no attempt was made to provide a moral context—despite the ethical implications of so much that science does, and despite a general fear that the failure of moral values to keep up with (and influence) scientific progress could spell social disaster.

In the only session specifically devoted to values, three doctors and an attorney noted that physicians today face numerous new ethical problems.

First, said Oak Ridge medical director G. A. Andrews, they have to decide whether or how to handle sensitive experimentation on humans. He told of transferring lymphatic cells between leukemia victims and their healthy relatives. “We were careful and had no problems,” he explained. But several members of the audience questioned legal and ethical aspects of such an experiment.

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