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BOOK REVIEW:

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, By Edward 0. Wilson. Knopf. 352 pp., $26.00.





The subtitle of this book, "the unity of knowledge," will strike some readers as abstruse, yet it directs us to important questions: Can we think about the world and ourselves in anything resembling an integrated manner? Do our moral convictions connect in a reasonable way with what we think about human origins? Is the way we think about the physical world consonant with the way we think about human conduct? Is our view of human nature compatible with our religious convictions? Wilson thinks that the answer to these and similar questions is no, primarily because of scientific illiteracy, but also because of a widespread failure to live up to the intellectual, religious and moral implications of science.

"Consilience" is a l9th-century term connoting a "jumping together" of knowledge "by the linking of fact and fact-based theory across the disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation." Wilson's "consilience" aims to provide a comprehensive framework for relating all the various disciplines of knowledge under the banner of natural science. Wilson is well qualified to take on this task. He is a distinguished Harvard biologist and popular teacher, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, sociobiologist, naturalist, authority on entomology and outspoken advocate for environmental responsibility and species diversity.

For our survival and well-being, Wilson says, we need a consensus about our origins, our nature as human beings, our place in the natural world and our purpose, or what it is that makes life worth living. The most credible foundation for this consensus, he insists, is natural science. And the biggest threats to this enterprise come from completely opposite directions--postmodernist denial of scientific objectivity and religious obscurantism and dogmatism.

Wilson believes that evolutionary biology, strategically situated as the bridge between the natural and the human sciences, should replace theology as the "queen of the sciences." "The legacy of the Enlightenment is the belief that entirely on our own we can know, and in knowing, and in understanding, choose wisely."

To a great extent, Enlightenment hope has been realized by 20th-century "hard science." The challenge remaining is to extend well-tested scientific principles into the domain of the social sciences and the humanities. Eventually, Wilson predicts, science will provide a synthesis of all knowledge from all fields of inquiry, from philosophy and literature to art and architecture.

We humans have a tendency to think of ourselves as different from all other animals, as special, noble and created in the "image of God." But like Stephen Jay Could and Richard Dawkins, Wilson rejects anthropocentrism. Since human nature has evolved throughout millions of years of natural selection, he says, the most appropriate science for examining the meaning of human behavior is evolutionary biology and its allied disciplines. Wilson has dedicated his life to persuading us to think of ourselves as animals who, by dint of luck and natural selection, have evolved to possess highly complex brains. For all our intelligence when compared with gorillas and chimpanzees, we are still primates. We should, therefore, not be under the illusion that when anatomically modern human beings emerged 100,000 or so years ago, after millions of years of evolutionary change, they ceased to be influenced significantly by their evolutionary past. We cannot climb up a ladder and kick it away while standing on the top rung.

Wilson takes a "no holds barred" evolutionary view of religion. Religion is the bastion of superstition, dogmatism, fanaticism, tribalism and other atavistic impulses. Whereas Hegel viewed religion as the poor man's philosophy, Wilson regards religion as the poor man's science. Religion was once the only way preliterate people could comprehend the natural world and deal with human suffering. But now we have science, so religion is no longer needed by those who want to know the truth about human life--indeed, it frustrates such a quest. Yet Wilson does not want to extinguish all religion. For the time being, at least, we must keep it in place as an emotional crutch for the weak and as a civic religion that can bind us together in political community. Some day, Wilson hopes, the "evolutionary epic" will replace the biblical mythology as our core religious narrative.

Wilson also believes that religion and ethics can be "explained" in terms of evolved "epigenetic rules" that serve to promote human survival and reproduction. Epigenetic rules are "hereditary regularities of mental development" that "animate and channel the acquisition of culture." A smile, for example, signifies happiness across all cultures because smiles are genetically encoded responses common to all human beings. Fear of snakes is also universal: Native Americans may fear rattlesnakes and Indians fear cobras, but both fears express the evolved epigenetic rule that instinctively recognizes the potential lethality of snakes. Controversially, Wilson stretches this notion to embrace other behavioral phenomena--many quite broad and all substantially influenced by culture, including incest taboos, status seeking, care for children, sexual behavior, the morality of cooperation and cheating, and altruism. In Wilson's view the Christian ethic of selfsacrifice has functioned to encourage loyalty to the group, thereby tacitly promoting the selfish interests of the individuals who belong to these groups and promoting human survival.

Wilson adamantly rejects theism or belief in a personal God who loves us as individuals and requires obedient love in response. He believes that there is no evidence whatsoever for a transcendent deity who creates, governs and redeems the world. There has been no revelation from on high: the moral requirements of Christianity are not divine commands, but human constructs generated from epigenetic rules for the purpose of securing survival and reproduction. All human communities teach systems of morality in order to encourage conformity and cooperation and to discourage and punish nonconformity and cheating. For Wilson, individuals who are thought of as "good" are usually given rewards by society, such as power, status and health, that in turn contribute to greater longevity and more secure families; those who are "bad" are punished in the same currency.

Yet Wilson is not an amoral Machiavellian. He writes with moral passion about intellectual honesty, freedom of inquiry and ecological responsibility. He has no problem with the Darwinian function of morality, which he thinks ought to promote survival and reproduction. (How he moves from "is" to that "ought" is never clearly explicated.) The problem behind our interminable moral conflicts, Wilson thinks, is that ethics has been too closely identified with religion. Like a number of 19th-century forebears, he wants to sever ethics from its religious base and reconstruct it on the new, more objective foundation of scientific knowledge. The result will be to free morality from a host of evils--parochialism, bias, tribalism, xenophobia, nepotism and other forms of excessive in-group bias (including irrational bias toward members of our own species in exclusion of all other species). Social interactions will then be regulated by a less oppressive and backward moral code, one that is truly objective, democratic and fair to all people. Science thus provides the key not only to greater intellectual coherence, but also to personal and collective moral development.

Contrary to what Wilson himself claims, his interpretation of religion is not the product of a neutral, detached and "objective" standpoint. It is crucial to recognize that as a child Wilson was raised in Alabama as a strict fundamentalist--a perspective he adamantly rejected in college, where he turned away from revelation and embraced science as the best means for understanding the world. After all these years, Wilson seems to continue to identify "religion" with the fundamentalism of his childhood. Indeed, one might wonder whether the moral passion and craving for certainty that he initially learned in fundamentalist circles hasn't been transferred, in a secularized form, to evolutionary theory.

It is thus no coincidence that Wilson always regards religion as the archenemy of evolutionary theory. It is disappointing that, with all the capaciousness of his learning, Wilson has done only casual and ad hoc reading of theology and religion. Christian evolutionary theism, for example, is simply not on his map. To this reviewer, it seems that Wilson's scientific distinction and publishing fame have encouraged a wildly inordinate confidence in his own judgments about religion and ethics.

We should admire his ambition and breadth of vision. Few scientists have sufficient courage and public concern to write a serious book to a popular audience on such an expansive range of subjects. And he is correct to be concerned about the fragmentation of knowledge and the intellectual incoherence that it breeds. The desire for coherence lies deep in the human mind and finds little satisfaction in contemporary society. Information multiplies geometrically, but wisdom and vision seem to recede at the same rate.

It might be helpful to recall some reflections from Karl Barth. Three years after the end of World War II, Barth's work in theological anthropology led him to take up the challenge of evaluating naturalistic examinations of human nature. Science, particularly medical science, had been put to terrible use under the Nazis. Yet Barth was not antiscientific. Instead, he believed that the scientific investigation of human behavior was valuable and should not in any way be opposed by Christians as long as it did not pretend to provide a comprehensive worldview or a "pseudo-theology."

Barth's observations were aimed at naturalism in their day, but they clearly pertain to our day as well. As James M. Gustafson has observed, Wilson offers not just an explanatory scientific analysis of human conduct, but the "secular equivalent" of a comprehensive systematic theology. In Consilience, Wilson asks:

Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it? Perhaps science is a continuation on new and better tested ground to attain the same end. If so, then in that sense science is religion liberated and writ large.

This approach is flawed in several ways. First, Wilson seeks to unify knowledge by construing all knowledge as the kind of objective, empirically verifiable information intended by the natural sciences. This project rides on the dubious assumption that there is only one kind of truth, the kind of empirically established explanations attained by scientists.

Certainly the music of Mozart can be "explained" by graphing sound waves, and the paintings of Rembrandt can be "explained" through a chemical analysis of their pigmentation. But how far do these explanations get us in really comprehending the deeper human truths communicated in the music of Mozart or the art of Rembrandt? The same holds for the deeper truths communicated in scripture, doctrine and sacrament. What counts as "knowledge" for Wilson is in effect only one kind of knowledge, not all human knowledge. It ignores what Pascal knew as the "reasons of the heart" that inform the Christian tradition.

Second, Wilson's epigenetic rules deserve critical scrutiny. Of course fear of snakes or of heights can plausibly be regarded as biologically based emotions. Yet most of Wilson's epigenetic rules are only vaguely related to genetics and seem much more the product of culture than biology.

Nature, to be sure, encourages all of us to channel our caregiving more in the direction of blood relatives and reciprocating friends than in the direction of strangers and enemies, so perhaps there is a universally human epigenetic rule to this effect. But this "channeling" assumes radically different shapes in different cultures, ranging from urban to agrarian settings, ancient to modern families, polygamous to monogamous marriages and so forth.

The epigenetic rule is much too general to be very helpful in understanding human behavior. For this reason, Wilson never provides any substantive content to what he calls "innate epigenetic rules of moral reasoning."

The weakest aspect of Consilience is its impoverished and ill-informed treatment of religion. Wilson gives full play to his prejudices and preconceptions in a way that he would find preposterous if indulged in by a scientific colleague writing about science. His proposals regarding religion amount to assertions concocted on the basis of evolutionary hunches rather than conclusions proceeding from carefully constructed arguments.

Wilson rips Christian beliefs from their contexts, simplistically characterizes them and simplistically rejects them. Belief in the afterlife, according to Wilson, justifies indifference to others, exploitation of nature, extermination of infidels and "suicidal martyrdom." While many Christians have been guilty of these faults and others, many other Christians who believe in eternal life have exhibited compassion, justice and stewardship. Wilson never entertains even this kind of simple objection to his position.

He lumps together complex positions within theology under grossly misleading titles like "empiricist" and "transcendentalist." Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval synthesist of faith and reason, is depicted as an exponent of divine-command morality. In order to force Thomas Aquinas into the "transcendentalist" position, Wilson mangles and amputates his thought beyond recognition.

Wilson's book is more significant for the cast of mind that it represents than for its arguments. Consilience represents the increased tendency of the educated mind in our society to feel alienated from religion (if at the same time a bit nostalgic for it), to be suspicious of religious authority, and to find theism implausible. Wilson's interest for us, then, may lie in the fact that he articulates, at least in the "disenchanted" and secularistic tenor of his thought, what many educated people of our society increasingly suspect to be the case: matter and genes really are all that there is or ever will be.

How well are the churches addressing the tensions felt in the minds of many educated Christians who internally hear two choruses: on the one hand, the voices of their pastor and Sunday school, the scriptures and tradition; on the other, the voices of their high school science teacher, their college biology professor and the science section of the New York Times? Perhaps not very well.

Wilson at least shows us what the world looks like from the point of view of a secular, scientifically educated person who recognizes the need for intellectual integration and moral integrity.

Like many other pastors, I received a formal education that was rich in the humanities

and spiced a bit by the social sciences -- particularly the subjects related to the helping

professions. But the natural sciences were, like green vegetables, endured in small

helpings and seldom savored. Indeed, I suspect that most pastors have only a minimal

understanding or appreciation of the natural sciences. Though our attitudes toward the

sciences may range from benign condescension to outright hostility, we rarely feel

compelled to broaden our awareness in this area in order to minister or theologize more

effectively.

Yet I have become convinced that pastors must reach out to scientists and must increase

their ability to understand and speak in the context of the natural sciences. For if we

presume that the gospel addresses the destiny of all creation, we do well to understand

the tools that reveal that creation. Moreover, many of the great religious and ethical

issues of our day are rooted in the world of science and technology. The dilemmas of

euthanasia, the wonders of genetic engineering, the mixed blessings of atomic energy,

the obscenity of environmental pollution, the depletion of natural resources -- all of

these concerns are legacies of a scientific culture. If religious people are to have a voice

in determining the uses of knowledge, we must have a rudimentary understanding of the

values, perspectives and methods that placed these issues in our culture's lap.

Furthermore, and perhaps most important, we minister within a society heavily

influenced by science and its methods of seeking truth. At the university where I

minister, I am continually struck by the dominance of science and engineering; often it

is to students in these disciplines that I attempt to communicate the glorious, yet often

subtle, mystery of the gospel. If preaching and teaching are to be meaningful to these

persons, we must find ways either to speak within their frame of reference or to expand

their frame of reference to include our own. With that need in mind, I would like to

suggest some themes that offer points of contact between the worlds of science and

religion.

The quest for intelligibility. In the popular mind, the essence of science is

experimentation, which produces data observable to the senses. But though science

does indeed rely on empirical methods of research, and though scientists may regard

empirical data as the only relevant kind, empirical research is only the means, not the

goal, of science. The raison d'etre of science is not the generation of data but the

attainment of intelligibility. Scientists look for patterns that relate one bit of sensory

data to another, and it is these patterns of intelligibility which constitute reality, not the

data themselves. Most of modern physics, for example, points toward a structure of

reality that cannot be visualized, or described in standard language. But the insights of

physics are "true" or "real" because with them the behavior of matter becomes

intelligible.

Understanding science as the search for the intelligible is significant, because it

suggests that science and religion share the same ultimate goal -- to give intelligibility

to the world and human experience. Religion does not use empirical methodology with

anything like the rigor of science, but it does seek in its own way to make human

experience intelligible. What is love? What is the destiny of humanity? What is

humanity's status in the universe? Why do the innocent suffer? Why must we die? These

are questions that prompt us to seek intelligibility. They are also questions that

empirical methodology cannot answer.

If science and religion really are mutually exclusive ways of gaining intelligibility, one

would expect religious fervor to wane in places where scientific inquiry is highly

valued. But that does not seem to be the case. At our major universities, for example,

there is currently a resurgence of conservative evangelical and charismatic religious

groups. There is a multitude of reasons for this trend, but the strength of these groups,

many of which make virtually no concessions to the scientific mind-set, suggests at the

very least that students are not finding sufficient intelligibility in the laboratory.

Some might say that it is not the budding scientists and engineers who are fueling the

religious resurgence. Yet, in my experience, this group is often two or three times more

heavily involved in religious activity than is the university population as a whole. The

students who are most aware of what scientific tools can reveal appear to have some

awareness of those tools' limitations.

This phenomenon should remind us that theology, if it is to be taken seriously, must

effectively address the deepest human concerns about meaning and value. As George K.

Schweitzer told a group of campus pastors, "The problem of science and religion is not

an intellectual one. The 'scientific' critique of religion can be answered so that religion

is not unreasonable. In the popular mind there is, however, a difference of credibility.

The problem is that science is good at what it does, explaining the physical world;

religion does not seem to be nearly as effective at its task."

The strength of conservative religion among students in the sciences may also suggest,

however, that there is a tendency for people to compartmentalize reality. Among the

students with whom I minister, I sense very few ethical qualms or even questions

regarding the use of science and technology. They look to religion primarily for

personal support, a sense of belonging, and hope for the future. Their faith has little or

no impact on vocational plans. Thus, ministers are called to walk a difficult tightrope:

without forgetting that religion offers a different kind of intelligibility than science

does, we must refuse to allow faith to become privatized. The intelligibility we offer

must include a discernment of how science can be most humanely employed.

Except in the minds of fundamentalists, religion has long since stopped trying to lend

intelligibility to nature in the way science does. And science seems to be recognizing

the limitations of its methodology -- its inability to give intelligibility to all of what

humanity experiences. Once we accept the fact that the quest for intelligibility requires

many tools, perhaps we can allow the scientific saw and the religious hammer to pursue

the common goal of understanding.

The limits of conceptual networks. Arthur Eddington tells a parable about a zoologist

who decided to study deep-sea life using nets with a two-inch mesh. After repeatedly

lowering his nets and studying what was caught, he concluded that there was no fish in

the sea smaller than two inches.

The story humorously illustrates the importance of recognizing the relationship of

epistemology and ontology. If we assume that only that which is known by sensory

observation is real, we are fishing with a certain size mesh, which may or may not

apprehend all of reality. Conversely, if we assume that reality consists only of the

physical universe, we will accept as valid only those methods of knowing that

investigate sensory data.

Langdon Gilkey and Stephen Toulmin have forcefully argued that science,

understandably invigorated by its success in comprehending the physical world, has

tried to extend itself beyond its methodological capabilities. For example, the theory of

evolution, which offered an explanation of the development of biological

characteristics, was presented as a naturalistic philosophy of history, which presumed to

speak of the nature and destiny of humanity. That philosophy may or may not be true; it

is an opinion not testable by empirical methods.

There is, of course, nothing deplorable about the fact that science has limits, any more

than it is a failing of the biblical creation narratives that they shed no light on the

structure of DNA. An essential part of critical thinking is deliberately to exclude certain

factors from the field of study. The key word is "deliberately"; it is essential that

scientists and theologians be aware of their tools' limitations -- that they are aware of

the sorts of questions that are beyond the scope of their inquiry. The dialogue between

theology and science is always least productive when one side is imperialistic in the

claims it makes for its methodology.

The role of imagination and metaphor. The importance of metaphor and story in

contemporary theology is well known. Instead of seeing the theological task as that of

mining eternal gems of dogma, recent biblical critics and theologians have been

concerned with how biblical images function in a given context, and with the range of

meanings that metaphors have for the reader. As Jesus' own frequent use of parables

suggests, we are incapable of encapsulating the divine reality in theological

propositions; we are able to speak only by analogy.

In the popular mind, it is just this inability to speak with absolute precision that

separates religion from science. While theologians must deal with images, scientists, it

is thought, are concerned with the "bare facts." While the theologian must say that God

(or sin or grace) "is like" such and such, the scientist can say "salt is sodium and

chlorine combined in this way."

This language difference can be a stumbling block for persons trained in the sciences.

Shortly after becoming a campus pastor, I was involved in an undergraduate Bible study

on one of the "light" passages in John's Gospel. I asked the group to think about what

the image of light conveyed to them. The students noted that light is something that

reveals, exposes and judges, or gives hope and comfort. "But which meaning is the right

one?" asked a computer science major. "They're all true," I replied; "taken together they

enrich the image." "But one of them has to be the idea the writer intended," he

persisted. "When I write a program, each of the symbols means one thing that I want it

to mean. I want to know what John's symbol stands for." Clearly that student was most

comfortable in the world of mathematics, where symbols do not have shades of

meaning.

Those of us who wrestle with multifaceted biblical images may envy the clarity of

scientific terms. But science is more dependent on creative imagination and metaphor

than we might think. A number of philosophers have suggested that science cannot be

concerned only with "bare facts," for all data come to the observer within a context of

assumptions which are not provable by the immediate data. To measure the amount of a

gas given off by a solution, for example, one must assume certain "laws" concerning the

behavior of gas. These laws are abstractions from experience which have been shown to

yield a high rate of correlation among data.

Most of the data cited in the theory of evolution were available long before Darwin's

time. Scientific progress was made only when he created a context, a theory, around the

notion of natural selection. This was as much a creative act as the writing of a

symphony or the painting of a picture. The really significant moment for the scientist,

as for the poet, is when he or she finds a new way to speak of what is familiar, creating

a new context for understanding.

The use of metaphor and imagination in science is also evident in its use of models.

Most of us have made models of atoms using Tinker Toys and styrofoam balls. In

textbooks the action of electrons in chemical reactions is pictured as little balls jumping

out of one orbit and into another. Nothing like these Tinker-Toy atoms or those orbiting

balls actually exists, of course, but the models are not false for that reason. They lend

intelligibility to the physical world and are in that sense true.

In both science and religion, then, language is constantly used to speak of a reality that

is beyond the capacity of language to express. But even as theologians insist on the

significance of metaphor and the importance of the imagination in creating contexts of

meaning, they can also benefit from the scientific concern for making language as

precise as possible. All who are involved in biblical preaching or teaching have at one

time or another been guilty of taking a text out of context. We should not impose on a

biblical image just any meaning we happen to find comfortable or helpful. The context

and the overall thrust of Scripture impose limits on interpretation. If the cost of lacking

imagination in interpretation is spiritual sterility, the price of unfettered license is a

faith so mushy that it means nothing in particular.

A professor once said to me, "Sometimes I wonder why some of you preachers bother

going to seminary. By the time you finish explaining a passage, it's reduced to terms

from other disciplines." That is the voice of someone who has been confused about how

his faith differs from other theories he can hear on campus. And indeed, what unique

insights can ministers bring to a discussion if every humanity-affirming action is termed

"incarnational" or "sacramental," and every social cause is judged "prophetic"? Only

when the significance of Christian images is clear will they be accorded serious

consideration. We cannot and need not make the products of theological imagination

subject to empirical verification, but we can at least be clear about what our insights

are.

The idea of continuous creation. Luther's exposition of the first article of the creed

begins, "I believe that God has created me and all that exists; that he has given me and

still [my emphasis] sustains my body and soul" (The Book of Concord, edited by

Theodore G. Tappert [Fortress, 1959], p. 344). Luther understood creation as an

ongoing activity of God, and he was certainly not the only theologian to do so. But in

practice the church has usually treated creation simply as the initial event in history, the

moment that God brought order out of chaos. That focus has greatly complicated the

relations between science and religion. If God were simply the means of getting the

world started, a post-Newtonian mind would have no need of God to understand the

workings of nature.

A renewed emphasis on creation as a continuing process is thus essential if a fruitful

dialogue between religion and science is to take place. The work of Pierre Teilhard de

Chardin, the process theologians and some feminist theologians has suggested ways that

religion can focus on God's activity of bringing new reality into being. This brand of

theology will focus less on God's transcendence and more on God's co-creation with

humanity. It will contain a greater willingness to tolerate randomness in the universe,

regarding it as the means by which God works through the infinite possibilities of the

cosmos. The benefit of this approach will be that the explanations of science, instead of

being an alternative to God, can be regarded as clues to the processes of divine creation.

It would be a mistake to conclude from all this that the most significant meeting place

for science and religion is the Olympian heights of academic discourse. I believe,

rather, that the most crucial dialogue on the issue is not conducted at professional

meetings between scholars but daily in the public areas of our society, as persons

influenced by scientific perspectives consider the claims of religious faith. Indeed, the

conflict between science and religion is best seen as a pastoral issue.

Obviously, one of the first things a pastor can do is -- as has been suggested -- to

emphasize the ground that religion and science share. Pastors can acknowledge and

affirm the sense of mystery that the scientist experiences, and suggest that it is this

same sense of mystery that undergirds the religious quest as well. Second, pastors can

offer alternative ways of viewing the world. At the college level today, those trained in

sciences and engineering usually gain little exposure to nonempirical ways of knowing.

Even basic English courses are being replaced by courses in technical writing.

Therefore I have found it helpful in conducting Bible studies to make use of dramatic

readings, which force students to interpret the tone of the text, the intent of the writer

and the motivation of the characters. Theology and literature seminars also allow

participants to confront the ambiguity and subjectivity of interpretation. In doing so,

they realize that not all analysis is as clear as the work in their labs. My aim is not to

discredit scientific inquiry but to suggest its limits and to offer alternative paths of

study.

Finally, it is important simply to support and encourage those whose vocation is

science. Until recently, most religious people engaged in dialogue with science tended

to assume the role of the custodian of ethics, lecturing the amoral technicians of the

laboratory. As in other contexts of pastoral care, a constructive confrontation is seldom

possible until a relationship of trust is established. Something as simple as an earnest

inquiry over coffee -- "What issues do you struggle with in your research?" -- may open

the way for fruitful discussion. If theology is to make an impact on scientific culture,

we cannot lose sight of the fact that scientists, engineers and technicians are not the

enemy but persons who struggle for meaning and purpose just as we do. Science and

religion should be regarded as allies in the effort to discern the meaning of God's

creation.

William Bragg, a pioneer in the field of X-ray crystallography, made the point quite

succinctly. He was asked whether science and theology are opposed to one another.

"Yes," he replied, "but in the sense that my thumb and forefinger are opposed to one

another -- between them I can grasp everything." Perhaps, between science and

theology, we cannot grasp everything, but surely the combination reveals more of the

cosmic mystery than either can touch alone.

In the late 1960s, when Sir John Templeton laid the groundwork for a prize for progress in religion, esteem for religion took on a euphoria which invited dreams reminiscent at times of psychedelic delirium. The logic that led from the honest-to-God religion through a recycled process theology to the death-of-God religious studies unfolded itself with appropriate speed while being taken for a symptom of progress. It took courage not to be overawed by theologians who by proclaiming God's demise began to play god and downplay religion properly so-called. It could not then easily be foreseen that within two short decades human progress, in fact our very physical health or survival, would seem to depend more than ever on a return to laws set by the ever-living God.

Long before the 1960s progress became increasingly identified with an enterprise, science, looked upon in many quarters as incompatible with religion. Yet, it is not for science, which today has all the know-how to eliminate hunger, that the greatest need is felt in these very scientific times. Demand for Mother Teresa, the first recipient of this prize, for her religious, and for other heroic volunteers of true love, is greater than ever.

Hunger for true love -- heroic, self-sacrificing love -- remains humankind's basic hunger. Acknowledgment of this comes on occasion even from those who earned their fame (often their fortunes, too) by preaching salvation through science. When Bertrand Russell stated at Columbia University in 1950 that Christian love or compassion was the thing most needed by modern humans, he moved revealingly close to declaring intellectual bankruptcy on his and many others' behalf. He said much more about Christian love. Although fully familiar with the enormous power of modern science, medicine and technology, he held high Christian love as the answer to human needs in the broadest sense: "If you have Christian love," he declared to a stunned audience, "you have motive for existence, a guide for action, a reason for courage, an imperative necessity for intellectual honesty."

If intellectual honesty, usually taken for a fruit of scientific method, is to be had only through Christian love, science and religion should not seem far removed from one another. In fact science is as closely related to religion, and especially to Christian religion, as a child is to the womb out of which it came forth and with full vitality.

Such a claim may appear to be beyond belief to most among the great of the Western world. Sir Winston Churchill may well represent those great figures. One reason, a very modest one, to speak of him here and now is my own indebtedness to him. Not that I ever saw him alive. He entered my personal world when, on the occasion of his death, a leading American daily carried the facsimile of the first page of the final typewritten text of one of his major war speeches. In 1965 1 had already tried for ten years to cope with a throat condition that barred me from the public use of my voice whether as a priest or a professor. Writing books remained the sole channel for communicating my thoughts, but a channel full of obstacles for anyone barred from using that natural vehicle of thought which is one's own mother tongue. The sight of that facsimile, heavily corrected in the very hand of Sir Winston, a Nobel laureate of literature, put me over a psychological barrier. From that moment on I was able to live with the fact that a perfect script is not produced at the very first try.

A far more important reason to continue with Sir Winston relates to an essay of his, written in 1931. Its actuality is suggested by its very title, "Fifty Years Hence." Indeed, it appears to be written for the 1980s, and for this very occasion. It certainly provides me with the right background for discussing my claim about the incredibly close ties of science to religion.

Those close ties were seen by Sir Winston only to the extent of admitting that "there was never a time when the inherent virtue of human beings, the hope of immortality, and the disdain of earthly powers and achievement were more necessary for the safety of the children of men." Such is a vote on behalf of religion that would readily come from many greats of Western culture. Many of them also would look at science in the way in which Sir Winston looked at it in that essay, although perhaps not with the grasp which he had about the latest in science.

The sixth sense which Sir Winston had about the best scientific advice has much to do with England's coping with the trials of an insane war. In 1931 he gave specific figures about nuclear fusion as a source of energy far superior to nuclear fission. About the promises of science he spoke with a euphoria that would be to the liking of many today. To be sure, we had not reached the stage foreseen by him where scientific food factories would produce chicken breasts and chicken legs without the need of producing entire chickens. Sir Winston voiced, however, a safe view when he contrasted the hundred years beginning with Queen Victoria as the phase of history that witnessed far more progress than all the previous centuries of recorded history taken together. He also voiced the general consensus in crediting science with that progress. Or, as he put it with his penchant for startling comparisons: "A priest from Thebes would probably have felt more at home at the Council of Trent two thousand years after Thebes had vanished than Sir Isaac Newton at a modem undergraduate physics society. "

What had happened in physics since 1931 would certainly corroborate his words. Again, even today, almost every scholar or writer would find natural that Sir Winston should hold high the novelty of science and ask not why science is so novel. Indifference to the question why science is not old, that is, why science did not arise in any of the great ancient cultures, is still that mark of cultural sophistication which it was in the early 1950s when, for instance, Einstein dismissed that question as unfathomable.

Yet the question why science did not arise in any of the great ancient cultures is one of the most important questions that can be raised about human history. Its answer is also the answer to the question why science is so novel. The answer lies hidden in Sir Winston's reference to that good old Egyptian priest whom he made to visit the Council of Trent. The opening of the Council of Trent puts us back to 1545, or two years after the publication of Copernicus's great book. There is no evidence that anything had been said there about the daring new view of the world centered on the sun. In that respect that ancient priest from Thebes may have thought that things were going in exactly the same way in 1545 as 2,000 years earlier. But at least in one, for us now trivial aspect, things, everything or anything, went on at the Council of Trent -- or at Geneva, or at Wittenberg, or at Canterbury -- in a way which would have deeply upset that priest from Thebes. In any of those famous places, or in any big and small place in Christian Europe, things went on because they were regulated by mechanical clocks.

Long before the Council of Trent, mechanical clocks began to turn into household items. In the late 13th century, very likely somewhere in England (perhaps in Salisbury), a marvelous double feedback mechanism was invented for turning the accelerating fall of a weight into a slow motion with constant velocity. From that moment on, weight-driven pendulum clocks struck the hour at the same intervals, whether in winter or summer, spring or fall, day or night. Our priest from Thebes would have found this very upsetting. In ancient Egypt, there were 12 hours to the night, 12 hours to the day, regardless of whether the night was long or the day was short. Of course, in Thebes the variations of daylight were not as great as farther north, say in Oxford, let alone in Edinburgh. The attitude of Egyptians of old to the length of hours may seem "elastic" but in fact it was expressive of a broader rigidity. A most telling aspect of that rigidity was the oath by which each pharaoh bound himself to nip in the bud any attempt at calendar reform although it was sorely needed.

Quite different was the situation at church councils. Reform of the calendar -- discussed at Constance, Basel and Lateran IV -- became a chief topic when the Council of Trent had its last session in 1563, and a reality less than 20 years later. Copernicus, it is well to recall, wrote his book also with an eye on calendar reform. Had the Council fathers at Trent been asked to discuss his book, in at least one and very important respect they would have found that Copernicus said nothing new. In Copernicus's explanation of why falling bodies do not fall behind on a fast rotating and even faster orbiting earth, they would have recognized a very old idea that had been argued for 200 years as part of the university education everywhere in Europe. The idea was formulated in early 14th-century Sorbonne under the name of impetus theory. It is the clear anticipation of Newton's First Law on which rest his Second and Third Laws, and ultimately all that marvelous set of laws that constitute classical and modem physics. More important, this daring innovation was the fruit of a direct reflection on what is implied in that very first tenet of the Christian religion -- belief in the Maker of heaven and earth who created all out of nothing and in time.

Our dear priest from Thebes would have found this exceedingly innovating with respect to his own world view. There an absolute beginning, the very ground for the formulation of the impetus theory, was inconceivable. Not only in Egypt but in all ancient cultures -- China, India, Babylon and Greece too -- the world was looked upon as an eternal being. Worse, that being was taken for a living entity, often for an animal full of unpredictable turns and twists. This should be kept in mind in recalling another ancient pagan way of looking at the universe. If the universe was not taken for deity itself, it was taken at least for a direct emanation from divinity, whatever it was. Such is the background of Plato's, of Plutarch's and of Cicero's references to the universe as the only-begotten, monogenes or unigenitus, being.

These words immediately take us to the very core of Christian religion, the dogma about Christ as the only-begotten, monogenes or unigenitus, Son of God. On the face of it, this dogma may seem to force a choice between Christ and the universe, or between the world to come and this world, or between religion and science. But the fact, the great historical fact, still to be set forth in all its details and turned into cultural consciousness, is that science owes its very birth to that dogma. A proof of this is the provenance of the idea of a fully ordered universe, an idea indispensable for science. That idea is a bequest not from the Greeks, but from the church fathers -- Hippolytus, Irenaeus, and Athanasius in particular. As they argued that the Son in whom the Father created all was truly consubstantial or God, they also said that such a Son or Logos could create but a completely logical or fully ordered physical universe.

Sir Winston and other greats of Western civilization notwithstanding, our good priest from Thebes would have felt most uncomfortable at Trent or in other contemporary centers of Christendom where dogmas were held in high regard. In ancient Egypt only opinions were allowed. The only dogmatic phase of Egypt of old -- Akhenaton's exclusive sun worship -- was erased with all its traces immediately upon Akhenaton's. death and at the instigation of priests from Thebes. Clearly, they wanted neither innovation nor those certainties which are always dogmatic if truly certain. The ancient Egyptians' engrossment with the wildest combinations of animal forms shows their preference for. inconsistencies over certainties or dogmas.

Of course, not even the Greeks of old were able to give the word dogma the meaning given it by the church fathers. The new meaning stood for the conviction that truth, superhuman or supernatural as its reference point may be, must mean complete absence of contradictions and even of inconsistencies. This conviction produced the Trinitarian dogmas of Christianity and is, or rather should be, the deepest motivation of the scientific quest. Science certainly owes its only viable birth to that Christian dogmatic conviction. Viable birth is, of course, the best and most promising token of growth or progress, religious or other, together with the possibility for continual revitalization.

That at Trent the dogmas about Creator and incarnation were not taken up shows that by then they had proved themselves to be a basis on which no Christian wanted disagreement. This unshakable basis is also the assurance today that the eventual unity of all Christians may not be a utopia. The same basis is also the token that Christendom possesses perennial perspectives that alone illuminate that birth of science which alone explains its progress.

To be sure, once science had been given that viable birth and had accumulated a sufficiently wide set of laws, that set kept expanding on it own terms. As the progressive secularization of the Western world went on, fewer and fewer scientists were thinking of theology as they were doing their science and at times their most creative science. But when they reflected on what they did, they found time and again that their work presupposed certain ideas. What those ideas were or could lead to is best summed up in a remark by Einstein who in 1950 tried to assure a close friend that he had not yet fallen into the hands of priests.

The context of that remark was the cosmology issued from the theory of general relativity. The essence of that cosmology is that through it science has achieved for the first time in its history a contradiction-free discourse about the totality of consistently interacting things, or the universe. The universe was for Einstein the finest prize which human intellect could get hold of. Although proud of having read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason at the age of 13, Einstein, in all appearance, never reflected on a central claim made in that book. According to that claim, the notion of the universe is a bastard product of the metaphysical cravings of the intellect. Immanuel Kant, whose chief aim was to undermine intellectual assurance about what Emmanuel (God with us) stands for, would not, however, see his predicament as entirely hopeless in today's world of science. He would be overjoyed on hearing brash young scientific talents declare and repeat: "The universe could be the last free lunch."

The ground for this global glibness is sheer mythology. Its present domination over the philosophical interpretation of science and very often over the thinking of physicists is not a new phenomenon in the history of science. Until about 100 years ago, machine and mechanism were the supreme and sacred catchwords in that mythology. For the past 50 years or so the history of exact science has been a worship of the Myth of Chance. The wonderful statistical methods of quantum mechanics are now widely believed to be able to do the greatest marvel -- to draw entire universes out of nothing by the skillful pushing of a pencil or by the clever tinkering with the keyboards of supercomputers.

Sir Isaac Newton would certainly be astonished today if present at the meeting of an undergraduate physics society. In that respect Sir Winston and other greats of our civilization would certainly be correct. But they should also remember that Sir Isaac tolerated no cheaters. At no time had counterfeiters in the British Isles had more of the fear of the Lord in their bones than in the two decades during which Sir Isaac was director of the Mint and had the power to send to the gallows anyone tampering with the currency. I leave it to you to imagine what he would do now with those who in these days, when lunches are no longer free, claim to deliver entire universes for free, that is, out of that nothing which they are unable to take at face value.

If progress is something like a voyage, its continuation does not cease to be a function of its very starting point and of the provisions acquired there. If religion is to be an ongoing progress, its very starting point should be rethought continually. That starting point is the recognition of dependence on the Creator on the part of everything which is the universe and of which we human beings are the very voice. (I should not tax you with the mythology of extraterrestrials, often assumed to have English for their native tongue.) Recognition is, however, much more than mere cognition. Recognition is knowledge to which commitment has been added.

Commitment may, of course, come hard if too many aspects of one's behavioral pattern or lifestyle are to be reformed. Then the specter of religion may prompt one to repeat with King Lear, "that way madness lies," words hardly amounting to reasoned argument. But if one's reasons for reluctance appear to do with science, they should seem groundless. The only viable birth of science in terms of the Christian belief in creation and Incarnation, the continual falling back of creative scientists on that same matrix as it implies a specific view of the cosmos or rather the cosmological argument, the reinstatement by the best science of the reality of the universe in all its intellectual dignity, and, finally, awareness of the difference between science and a mythology equated with it-all these four points (the chief targets of my work) should give enough confidence in the possibility of progress in mutual understanding. But that progress will come about only if humankind, increasingly bent on science, will muster more willingness to bow to God.

A bow, if it is more than a mere ritual, is always an act of humility. But so is love which seeks not its own, broods not over injuries, and always rejoices with the truth (I Cor. 13:5-6). This tremendous insight into the very depth of love comes from a perception about God ready to empty himself and take the form of a slave (Phil. 2:6-7). For such is the only love that never turns into a slavery, emotional or other. It is in that love that religion completes all the progress it is capable of. It has already done so on countless occasions, long before the advent of science, and will keep providing the only means whereby science may act not as a curse but as a blessing.

In this age of science, and in coming times to be increasingly more scientific, no claim may be more startling than the one that love rooted in religion would be around long after all science is gone. Long before science had arrived, religion also foresaw a stage where even faith and hope would cease by finding their completion in love. That stage will consist in knowing God as he is. Such is the deepest aspect of the true harmony between intellectual honesty and Christian love, between science and religion, and also the crowning phase of their progress.