Religion: Faith & the Scientist

“I see no conflict between science and religion,” Geneticist George Beadle told a gathering of Christian laymen in Chicago recently. “The answer to the question of creation still remains in the realm of faith. In early Biblical times . . . it was believed as a matter of faith that man was created as man. Since then, science has led us back through a sequence of evolutionary events in such a way that there is no logical place to stop . . . until we come to a primeval universe made of hydrogen. But then we ask, ‘Whence came the hydrogen?’ and science has no answer. Is it any less awe-inspiring to conceive of a universe created of hydrogen with the capacity to evolve into man than it is to accept the creation of man as man? I believe not.”

This credo, from a top scientist who is also president of the University of Chicago, illuminates the new terrain of the conflict between science and religion. Last week TIME correspondents sampled scientific and theological opinion all over the U.S. to find the borders of the terrain.

After Darwin, Doubt. In the aftermath of Darwin, scientists grew increasingly confident that their questioning disciplines could eventually supply all answers, and were increasingly contemptuous of Genesis and all other parts of the Bible that conflict with science’s discoveries. After World War II, when science capped humanity’s plight with the hydrogen bomb, some scientists joined the nation’s postwar religious revival. But eventually, though the churches had by then conceded much to science, many of the converts found them still too laden with ceremony and dogmatism for the scientific taste.

Beadle’s statement implies that God set the universe in motion and then “retired,” and this is an idea now much favored by scientific believers. Many, accepting this hydrogen-God, go on perforce to reject the person-God of Christianity. Beadle’s credo thus seems to be central in the new terrain, though scientists’ beliefs spread both ways in a wide spectrum from atheism to total faith.

An Ordered Universe. In the postwar technological explosion, scientists have seen trusted “laws of nature” replaced by subtler hypotheses, discovered that the more they know, the more remains to be learned. “Scientists are not as cocksure as they used to be,” says Botanist Edmund Sinnott. former dean of Yale’s Graduate School. They have come to show greater respect for the kind of questions that religion—although not necessarily the Christian church—asks. “Most of the scientists I know,” says Boston University Theologian Edwin Booth, “believe in the immanent principle of life in the organic universe. If they are religious, they call it God. If they are not religious, they have awe and reverence for this principle. But it isn’t retired, nor is it personal. It is greater than personal—it is absolutely essential to the principle of life itself.”

By far the majority of scientists and technicians interviewed by TIME agree on belief in an ordered universe. “I feel increasingly impressed,” says one Princeton physicist, “by the great miracle that the world, so to say, exists. Its irregularities are as mysterious as its regularities.” Microbiologist Seymour Hutner agrees that the day of scientific materialism has passed. “All good scientists stand in awe and wonder at creation,” he says. “Only matter-of-fact scientists who are either inarticulate or brute mechanics might not have this sense of awe.”

Useful Ethics. For some scientists this new sense of awe increases their love and understanding of the God spoken of in the Bible. “I see no conflict,” says Biochemist Robert Smillie, a Roman Catholic, “between believing in a personal God and investigating a scientific fact.” Others find that they can easily belong to churches only if technical questions about God and the nature of the universe are mentally put aside. Admits Theologian Booth: “If many scientists were asked to give affirmation of their belief in the Creed, they would have to leave the church.” Religion, for many of them, becomes primarily a matter of being neighborly, providing good examples for children, or subscribing to a code of useful ethics. To James R. Dempsey, president of General Dynamics Astronautics, religion is primarily a matter of living up to the Golden Rule. “If this isn’t enough,” he says, “then I’m not going to make it.”

Scientists who get concerned with theological problems resent the lack of interest by the clergy in trying to adapt the verbal expression of dogma to changing times. Caltech Physicist Richard Feynman argues that theologians should redefine the body of church doctrine—not to make it compatible with scientists’ understanding of the universe, but to allow room for scientific discoveries. Many scientists feel drawn to such denominations as the Unitarian Universalist Association, which has virtually no creedal requirements. Chemist Linus Pauling, who this week is joining the Unitarian Universalists, says, “I have not found the concept of God a necessary idea as a scientist or as a man.”

Religion’s Self-Criticism. In the long run, most theologians believe that there will prove to be no irreconcilable conflict between the discoveries of the laboratory or telescope and the revelation of God. But scientists are convinced that religion will have to undergo a vast intellectual change, to rid itself of dogmatic expressions that are no longer tenable in light of scientific progress. Says Dr. James Van Ness, professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University: “Any time religious beliefs come in conflict with the things we learn about the world, we must modify the beliefs.”

Yet religion’s self-criticism has at least begun, and some scientists share churchmen’s approval of the pioneering theological speculations of Paul Tillich and the late French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Scientists also feel that they themselves have done more to bridge the chasm of belief than the clergymen have, and Boston Theologian Booth agrees. “We are now,” he says, “in the examinational and destructional phase of the evolution of Western culture. But this is not discouraging, for we know that our grandchildren will have achieved the bigger view.”