Science vs. religion (I): some tough questions.

It was a moment of consequence.

Galileo Galilei, seventy-years-old, blind and feeble, knelt on the marble floor of a Roman palace before assembled princes of the church and renounced his life work, affirming, against the evidence of reason and his own senses, that the Earth was the fixed center of the universe.

Historians debate how Galileo's conflict with papal authorities came to this sorry pass. Pride, foolishness, simple misunderstanding: All may have played a part. In retrospect, the church admits it made a mistake in condemning Galileo, although it took 350 years to acknowledge doing so. Even the most recalcitrant medievalist now admits that the Earth revolves around the sun.

But Galileo's misfortune worked to the advantage of science. Within a century of his recantation, science had severed its ties with ecclesiastical tradition and scriptural authority. From the time of Isaac Newton (1642-1727), mathematical deduction and experimentation became the sole arbiters of scientific truth, administrated by a secular establishment anchored in local scientific societies. The new authority was international, nonsectarian, and fiercely independent. The motto of Britain's Royal Society, established in 1662, was "Take no one's word."

What they meant, of course, was take no one's word but ours. What had changed was the standard by which a segment of society decides what is true, and not everyone embraced the new standard, certainly not the Roman church, which went its own way, advocating in place of the new learning a medieval natural philosophy based on polarities--immanent and transcendent, body and soul, natural and supernatural. This was the natural philosophy that I learned in Catholic schools in the 1950s and '60s, even as I studied chemistry, biology, and physics. The result was a conflict between theology and science that proved devilishly difficult to resolve.

Science, according to the church of my youth, was "materialistic," "mechanistic," and "quantitative," and these terms were meant pejoratively, implying a partial and paltry view of reality. But the world described by my philosophy and theology teachers bore little resemblance to the world I discovered in chemistry, biology, and physics. The "materialism" of modern quantum chemistry seemed more like a kind of cosmic music. The "mechanisms" of molecular biology astonished with their generative magic. And the "quantification" of mathematical physics swept me away with its lofty elegance. The world of my science classes seemed grander, more marvelously contrived, and infinitely richer than the anthropomorphic and anthropocentric cosmos I studied in Natural Philosophy 101.

More important, science made no use of irreconcilable polarities. "Matter" and "spirit," "body" and "soul," "natural" and "supernatural" denoted meaningless distinctions. I was impressed by the impetus toward conceptual unity in science, and by the ability of science to achieve consensus across barriers of religion, class, politics, ethnic origin, and gender.

Many of us who came of scientific age during the '50s and '60s were deeply influenced by positivist philosophers such as Carnap, Frank, Hempel, Langer, Lindsay, Margenau, Nagel, Northrop, Quine, Reichenbach, and Skinner. We were weary of the seemingly endless squabbles of metaphysicians, and dreamed of objectivity, even if it meant focusing our attention on the small part of human experience that is amenable to logical analysis. We sought clarity at the cost of completeness. If we were not able to define the soul in scientific terms, then we were willing to wait until it became practical to do so.

The study of the history of science in recent decades has made abundantly clear that our dream of objectivity was an illusion. Even such confirmed positivists as Albert Einstein created theories that embody personal, institutional, and cultural influences. Nevertheless, many of us who were influenced by positivist principles remain impressed by the ability of the sciences to achieve consensus. What we know of the world may be limited, partial, even subjective, but it is firmly held. Nothing we have learned would suggest the need to revive the old polarities.

But body-soul dualism resides as a hard kernel at the heart of our culture. The vast majority of Americans believe in an immaterial self that comes into being whole and entire at conception and survives the physical disintegration of the body. And fair enough. It is decidedly pleasant to believe that we reside at the nexus of a chain of being--lords of material creation, with one foot up on the immaterial rungs of the ladder. What does science offer instead? A self that is a speck of cosmic dust in a meaningless void--accidental, impermanent, inconsequential to the gods.

And so we live in a state of intellectual schizophrenia, with our way of knowing contradicted by our way of believing. We tolerate, even grudgingly admire science as the source of our health, wealth, and well-being, but we refuse to commit ourselves to the truths of science. We admit that Galileo was right about the respective places of Earth and sun, but we still insist upon the cosmic centrality of self. Against all the evidence of science, we cling to a medieval notion of the soul.

As we approach the end of the millennium, our ambiguous feelings about science appear to be deepening. Astrology, parapsychology, and other New Age superstitions are more popular than ever. Fundamentalist religions grow stronger at the expense of what used to be called mainstream faiths. Surveys show that fewer than 7 percent of U.S. adults can be called scientifically literate, and only 13 percent have a minimum understanding of scientific processes.

Even secular intellectuals that scientists used to count on as friends have begun to express doubts about the value of the scientific enterprise. In Britain, Bryan Appleyard's book Understanding the Present (1992) has stirred up a storm of antiscience sentiment. Appleyard is a knowledgeable historian and critic of culture. Not only is science unnecessary to our happiness, he argues, it is positively inimical to it: "Science, quietly and inexplicitly, is talking us into abandoning our true selves." Writing in the prestigious journal Nature, Dai Rees, the secretary and chief executive of Britain's Medical Research Council, claims science has "contributed massively to human misery" by undermining traditional stable societies and beliefs without offering any compensating vision of what human life might be.

Most damaging of all is the address of Czech poet, playwright, and statesman Vaclav Havel, delivered before the World Economic Forum and published with the title "The End of the Modern Era." Havel singles out "rational, cognitive thinking" and "depersonalized objectivity" as the abiding sins of our century. He says: "Traditional science with its usual coolness, can describe the different ways we might destroy ourselves, but it cannot offer us truly effective and practicable instructions on how to avert them."

There is truth to these critiques. We have indeed lost a compelling vision of what might be our "true selves," and science does not provide the moral guidance we desperately seek. But science is not the culprit. Science seeks clarity at the cost of completeness. It does not pretend to offer the kind of integrative human vision that has traditionally been the province of theologians and philosophers.

If there has been a failure, it is on the part of theologians and philosophers to define our "true selves" in a way that is consistent with the scientific way of knowing. A new Copernican revolution is under way in science--a revolution in our understanding of the self--and once again the medievalists are shoring up their defenses and wishing the scientific upstarts would go away.

Science is not going to go away. It is far too fruitful a way of knowing to be denied by human curiosity. Even if driven underground from its established position, it will survive. However, the latter is not likely to happen. There is little chance that science will be suppressed by the dominant culture; it is too useful. Who is prepared to turn over our medical and technological establishments to revivalists, crystal-gazers, or astrologers? Or, for that matter, to the likes of Appleyard and Havel? The idea is unthinkable.

The source of our end-of-century intellectual malaise is not science but our lingering commitment to a philosophical dualism that has proven to be scientifically bankrupt; thus, the tension between our way of knowing and our way of believing.

We must come to terms with this scientific truth: There is no such thing as a disembodied self. Our bodies are a mess of chemicals. Our minds are electrical circuits firing like the chips of computers. Scientists have plumbed the human machine and found no ghost, no thing that lingers when the body's substance turns to dust. We now understand that our genetic self is determined by a chemical code that can be read and amended. Soon, genetic engineers will be able to add or subtract features both benign and deleterious from our physical selves.

Consciousness can be turned on, turned off, altered chemically.

Memories can be jogged electrically, not surgically.

The soul as a thing separate from the body has been hunted to its lair. The lair is empty.

Most of us were raised to believe in a self that only temporarily resides in a physical frame. We were taught that the self is there at the beginning, fully formed, in the fertilized egg, and that it survives the body's death and lives forever. This idea of an immaterial, immortal self is among the most cherished of human beliefs. We cling to it. We desperately want it to be true.

But where do we find this disembodied self?

In the fertilized human egg there is an arm's length of DNA, some from each parent. DNA is a molecule with the form of a spiral staircase. The treads of the staircase are pairs of chemical units called nucleotides. There are four kinds of treads--designated A-T, T-A, G-C, and C-G by biologists--altogether 3 billion steps in the human DNA, a coded recipe for making a person. Soon, biologists will have a complete step-by-step transcription of the code--and the power to change it.

What about consciousness? Machines are intelligent, and are becoming smarter every day. Already, computers mimic human intelligence with remarkable fidelity. When machine intelligence becomes functionally indistinguishable from human intelligence, will we concede that machines are conscious? Will machines have souls?

Research suggests that the difference between animal and human intelligence is a matter of degree rather than kind. Chimpanzees can be taught the use of language and mathematical abstraction. Do chimps have souls?

Memories? Neurobiologists have convincingly demonstrated that memories are webs of electrochemical connections in the brain.

Then where resides the disembodied soul? We are hardware and software. We are thinking meat. We are earth, air, and water made conscious. The self comes into existence slowly as cells divide, multiply, and specialize, guided by the DNA, organized by experience. When the organization of cells disintegrates, the self is gone. Or so say the scientists.

We resist. We assert belief in a self that is more than the mere sum of its parts. And rightly so. If to have a soul means anything at all, it means to be confident in our specialness, our uniqueness, our individual significance in the cosmos. It means to believe that the human self is undefilable and capable of ennobling the universe.

But we can't hanker back to a discredited medieval dualism, nor should we lodge our nostalgia for the disembodied soul in the remaining niches of scientific ignorance. Niches have a way of becoming filled. This much is certain: We will learn more and more about the biological bases of life and consciousness.

If our way of knowing is not to be divided against our ways of believing, philosophers and theologians must face the challenge of redefining the self in a way that is consistent with twenty-first-century science, respectful of religious traditions, and elevating of the human spirit. We must bring what we believe into harmony with what we know. The agenda for reinterpretation is considerable. Theological concepts such as immortality and resurrection need to be reexamined in the light of the new science. The task may seem insurmountable. But so must the new cosmology of Galileo have seemed intractable to theologians and philosophers of the seventeenth century.

I am not optimistic about the short haul. The photograph that accompanied the newspaper story about the church's admission of error in the condemnation of Galileo showed John Paul II dressed in Renaissance garb sitting on a Renaissance throne in a Renaissance palace, surrounded by other men also dressed in Renaissance clothes. All that was missing was the seventy-year-old man on his knees. The photograph is symbolic: In spite of the pope's cautious and carefully worded proclamation to the contrary, orthodox theology and science remain essentially at odds.

As for myself, I look at the trillions of interacting cells that are my body, the webs and flickering neurons that are my consciousness, and see a self vastly more majestic than the paltry soul illustrated in my grade-school catechism as a circle besmirched with sin. The more I have learned about the biological machinery of life and consciousness, the more profoundly miraculous the self has seemed. "All that is wonderful in this world," said Augustine, "is included in that miracle of miracles, the world itself."

In coming years, biological science will present us with staggering moral dilemmas. Genetic engineering, cloning, reproductive technologies, consciousness-modifying drugs and surgeries: The possibilities for mischief are frightening. If the churches are to provide us with desperately-needed moral guidance, they must offer a vision of our "true selves" which is consistent with--and relevant to--the emerging biology of self. It will not be enough to simply assert the old dualism of body and spirit.

The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures tell us that God created the first man and woman out of the slime of the earth, breathed life into those creatures, and pronounced creation good. The myth is consistent with our current understanding of the nature of life. According to the best scientific theories, we are literally animated slime. Now we must relearn how to think ourselves "good."