Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/122892/12289943.000

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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 42

SCIENCE AND GOD

Galileo and Other Faithful Scientists


By RICHARD N. OSTLING - With reporting by John Moody/Rome and
Amany Radwan/Cairo


    Popes rarely apologize. So it was big news in October
when John Paul II made a speech vindicating Galileo Galilei. In
1633 the Vatican put the astronomer under house arrest for
writing, against church orders, that the earth revolves around
the sun. The point of the papal statement was not to concede the
obvious fact that Galileo was right about the solar system.
Rather, the Pope wanted to restore and honor Galileo's standing
as a good Christian. In the 17th century, said the Pope,
theologians failed to distinguish between belief in the Bible
and interpretation of it. Galileo contended that the Scriptures
cannot err but are often misunderstood. This insight, said John
Paul, made the scientist a wiser theologian than his Vatican
accusers. More than a millennium before Galileo, St. Augustine
had taught that if the Bible seems to conflict with "clear and
certain reasoning," the Scriptures obviously need
reinterpretation.

    The Pope's speech was the latest episode in the age-old
struggle to reconcile science and religion. The year's most
intriguing book about God was produced not by theologians but
by 60 world-class scientists, 24 Nobel prizewinners among them.
Cosmos, Bios, Theos gives their thoughts on the Deity and the
origin of the universe and of life on earth. For instance, the
co-editor, Yale physicist Henry Margenau, concludes that there
is "only one convincing answer" for the intricate laws that
exist in nature: creation by an omnipotent, omniscient God.
While many scientists are skeptics or are still seeking their
own theologies, others are true believers -- not just in some
mysterious cosmic force but in the God of the Bible or the
Koran.

    Religious leaders generally value scientists, whether
believers or not, for their curious bent and careful
explorations of the mechanisms behind the Almighty's work.
Though determined Fundamentalists adhere to creationism, most
Christian denominations no longer demand strictly literal
interpretation of the Genesis creation account. Catholicism
encourages pursuit of scientific knowledge but opposes certain
applications, from artificial contraceptives to human genetic
engineering.

    Some scholars bridge the gap between religion and science
in the mode of Gregor Mendel, the 19th century Austrian monk
who discovered basic laws of heredity. Stanley Jaki of New
Jersey's Seton Hall University is both priest and physicist. He
believes that science can describe the Big Bang beginning of the
universe but is incapable of fathoming the ultimate origins of
matter and energy, which will always come under the realm of
religion. George Coyne, a Jesuit astrophysicist who directs the
Vatican Observatory, warns against reducing science to religion,
or vice versa. For instance, when the Big Bang theory was brand
new, Pope Pius XII wrote that "scientists are beginning to find
the finger of God in the creation of the universe." Coyne
thinks the Pope was wrong to "take a scientific conclusion and
interpret it in favor of supporting a theological doctrine."
Working scientists "don't need God for our scientific
understanding of the universe," he says, because "we don't
pretend to have all the ultimate answers."

    Judaism has been a fertile breeding ground for scientists,
many of whom have no difficulty squaring their work and their
faith. In his 1990 book Genesis and the Big Bang, Israeli
nuclear physicist Gerald L. Schroeder argues in detail that
there is no contradiction between the Bible's account of
creation and current science. Schroeder also notes that the
Ramban, the great medieval commentator on Scripture, had the
remarkably modern insight that at the moment after creation, all
the matter in the universe must have been concentrated in a tiny
speck.

    Though Islam has factions hostile to science, it has
spawned quite a few of its own researchers. Mustafa Mahmoud, an
Egyptian physician, is host of the TV show Science and Religion
and operates an education-and-research complex built around a
mosque. In Islam, properly understood, Mahmoud contends, "if a
believer ignores science and knowledge, he is not a true
believer." Sounding like St. Augustine, Mahmoud says that "God,
the creator of the universe, can never be against learning the
laws of what he has created."

    But he might get a strong argument from America's
Protestant creationists, who still insist that life on earth was
created about 10,000 years ago and that a Flood engulfed the
entire planet. In recent decades, creationists promoted their
own brand of science and even persuaded a few state legislatures
to decree that schools give Fundamentalist theories equal time
with Darwin's evolution. Those laws were eventually struck down
by the U.S. Supreme Court.

    Opposing the creationists is a group of devout, mostly
Protestant scientists who are also conservative but willing to
consider evidence for evolution. They are organized into the
American Scientific Affiliation, based in Ipswich,
Massachusetts, which counts nearly 1,000 Ph.D.s among its
members. The A.S.A. has distributed 100,000 copies of a booklet
urging schoolteachers to be aware of the unanswered scientific
questions about Darwinism and to avoid slipping in the
unwarranted assumption that evolution in effect displaces God.
A.S.A. executive director Robert Herrmann, a biochemist, advises
fellow Bible believers to remain open to "evolution as the
process the Creator may have used to bring life and mind into
being."

    For Harvard astrophysicist Owen Gingerich, an Evangelical
Protestant, the real choice is not "creation or evolution" at
all, but "purpose or accident." Like millions of ordinary folk,
he says, "I passionately believe in a universe with purpose,
though I cannot prove it." Purpose, like origin, is a point
where the wisdom of empirical science ends and the quest for
religious faith begins.