[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 105 (Thursday, July 30, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9353-S9355]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


      MAN'S LONGING FOR IMMORTALITY SHALL ACHIEVE ITS REALIZATION

  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that an article from 
the July 20, 1998, edition of U.S. News & World Report and an article 
from the July 20, 1998, edition of Newsweek be printed in the Record. 
The two articles are relevant to the speech that I delivered on Tuesday 
this week entitled ``Man's Longing for Immortality Shall Achieve Its 
Realization.''
  I understand the Government Printing Office estimates it will cost 
approximately $1,283 to have these articles printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the articles were ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

             [From U.S. News & World Report, July 20, 1998]

          Scientists and Theologians Discover a Common Ground

       Darwin, Freud, relativity, the mechanics of the big bang--
     rightly or wrongly, all have been taken as supporting the 
     modernistic conception of a change-based world in which 
     forces devoid of meaning account for all outcomes. Some 
     thinkers have maintained that the big-bang theory shows that 
     no god was necessary at the creation. Intellectuals have 
     wrung their hands in angst about how bang-caused cosmic 
     expansion will result in an inescapable running down of the 
     stars, proving existence to be pointless. A depressing 
     inevitable death of the universe figures prominently in the 
     works of post-modern novelist Thomas Pynchon; while in the 
     movie Annie Hall, Woody Allen's character is psychologically 
     paralyzed by his dread of the galaxies expanding until they 
     die.
       By contrast new developments in big-bang science are almost 
     supernaturally upbeat: The universe wants us, and the stars 
     will shine forever!
       This remarkable change in perspectives is helping inspire a 
     warming trend between scientific and spiritual disciplines. A 
     conference last month in Berkeley, Calif., at which 
     cosmologists discussed the theological implications of their 
     work, is representative. Allan Sandage, one of the world's 
     leading astronomers, told the gathering that contemplating 
     the majesty of the big bang helped make him a believer in 
     God, willing to accept that creation could only be explained 
     as a ``miracle.''


                                Heresies

       Not that long ago, such a comment from an establishment 
     scientist would have been shocking. The mere existence of the 
     organization that sponsored the Berkeley event, a well-
     regarded academic group called the Center for Theology and 
     the Natural Sciences, might have been snickered at. Today, 
     ``intellectuals are beginning to find it respectable'' to 
     talk about how physical law seems to favor life, notes Ian 
     Barbour, a professor of both religion and physics at Carleton 
     College, in Northfield, Minn.
       In this vein, the recent book Consilience by Harvard 
     biologist E.O. Wilson argues that there is no need to wall 
     off scientific from moral thought; rather, people should once 
     again pursue the Enlightenment vision of reconciling the 
     technical and the spiritual. A boomlet of serious books with 
     titles such as A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization 
     and God: The Evidence  goes further, suggesting the unknowns 
     of the big bang eventually will be seen as divine latency.
       If nothing else, the theological idea of creation ex 
     nihilo--out of nothing--is looking better all the time as 
     ``inflation'' theories (main story) increasingly suggest the 
     universe emerged from no tangible source. The word 
     ``design,'' rejected by most 20th-century scientists as a 
     theological taboo in the context of cosmology or evolution, 
     is even creeping back into the big-bang debate. Physicist 
     Ernest Sternglass, among Einstein's last living acolytes, 
     recently argued that the propitious circumstances of the big 
     bang show that the universe is ``apparently designed for the 
     development of life and destined to live forever, neither to 
     fly apart into dying cinders nor collapse.''
       Parallels between cosmology and spirituality may be 
     coincidence. Some fine it significant that the Book of 
     Genesis describes God creating existence out of the 
     ``waters,'' because big-bang science asserts the early 
     universe was mostly hydrogen, the chief component of 
     H2O. Maybe that tells us something; probably it's 
     just a word choice.
       But on more telling issues, the trend line of cosmology 
     unquestionably favors a sense of purpose. Existence may be 
     eternal, prewired somehow for life; consciousness may expand 
     forever, never running out of room or resources; there may be 
     a larger cosmic enterprise waiting for us to join its 
     purpose, if we can just learn wisdom and justice.
       Because the cosmos is ancient by our measure, people assume 
     they are latecomers, gazing out into a universe worn down and 
     faltering. But if the firmament will expand for an enormous 
     span of time, or even for an eternity, then our universe 
     glistens with morning dew. Homo sapiens may represent a youth 
     movement, arriving at a time when almost everything is still 
     to come. Dreary projections about ultimate fates may be 
     supplanted by the belief that, like the cosmos itself, the 
     human prospect is, as the physicist Freeman Dyson once wrote, 
     ``infinite in all directions.''
                                  ____


                     [From Newsweek, July 20, 1998]

                           Science Finds God

                           (By Sharon Begley)

       The more deeply scientists see into the secrets of the 
     universe, you'd expect, the more God would fade away from 
     their hearts and minds. But that's not how it went for Allan 
     Sandage. Now slightly stooped and white-haired at 72, Sandage 
     has spent a professional lifetime coaxing secrets out of the 
     stars, peering through telescopes from Chile to California in 
     the hope of spying nothing less than the origins and destiny 
     of the universe. As much as any other 20th-century 
     astronomer, Sandage actually figured it out: his observations 
     of distance stars showed how fast the universe is expanding 
     and how old it is (15 billion years or so). But through it 
     all Sandage, who says he was ``almost a practicing atheist as 
     a boy,'' was nagged by mysteries whose answers were not to be 
     found in the glittering panoply of supernovas. Among them: 
     why is there something rather than nothing? Sandage began to 
     despair of answering such questions through reason alone, and 
     so, at 50, he willed himself to accept God. ``It was my 
     science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is 
     much more complicated than can be explained by science,'' he 
     says. ``It is only through the supernatural that I can 
     understand the mystery of existence.''
       Something surprising is happening between those two old 
     warhorses science and religion.
       Historically, they have alternated between mutual support 
     and bitter enmity. Although religious doctrine midwifed the 
     birth of the experimental method centuries ago (following 
     story), faith and reason soon parted ways. Galileo, Darwin 
     and others whose research challenged church dogma were 
     branded heretics, and the polite way to reconcile science and 
     theology was to simply agree that each would keep to its own 
     realm: science would ask, and answer, empirical questions 
     like ``what'' and ``how''; religion would confront the 
     spiritual, wondering ``why.'' But as science grew in 
     authority and power beginning with the Enlightenment, this 
     detente broke down. Some of its greatest minds dismissed God 
     as an unnecessary hypothesis, one they didn't need to explain 
     how galaxies came to shine or how life grew so complex. Since 
     the birth of the universe could now be explained by the laws 
     of physics alone, the late astronomer and atheist Carl Sagan 
     concluded, there was ``nothing for a Creator to do,'' and 
     every thinking person was therefore forced to admit ``the 
     absence of God.'' Today the scientific community so scorns 
     faith, says Sandage, that ``there is a reluctance to reveal 
     yourself as a believer, the opporobrium is so severe.''
       Some clergy are no more tolerant of scientists. A fellow 
     researcher and friend of Sandage's was told by a pastor, 
     ``Unless you accept and believe that the Earth and universe 
     are only 6,000 years old [as a literal reading of the Bible 
     implies], you cannot be a Christian.'' It is little wonder 
     that people of faith resent science: by reducing the miracle 
     of life to a series of biochemical reactions, by explaining 
     Creation as a hiccup in space-time, science seems to 
     undermine belief, render existence meaningless and rob the 
     world of spiritual wonder.
       But now ``theology and science are entering into a new 
     relationship,'' says physicist turned theologian Robert John 
     Russell, who in 1981 founded the Center for Theology and the 
     Natural Sciences at the Graduate Theological Union in 
     Berkeley. Rather than undercutting faith and a sense of the 
     spiritual, scientific discoveries are offering support for 
     them, at least in the minds of people of faith. Big-bang 
     cosmology, for instance, once read as leaving no room for a 
     Creator, now implies to some scientists that there is a 
     design and purpose behind the universe. Evolution, say some 
     scientist-theologians, provides clues to the very nature of 
     God. And chaos theory, which describes such mundane processes 
     as the patterns of weather and the dripping of faucets, is 
     being interpreted as opening a door for God to act in the 
     world.
       From Georgetown to Berkeley, theologians who embrace 
     science, and scientists who cannot abide the spiritual 
     emptiness of empiricism, are establishing institutes 
     integrating the two. Books like ``Science and Theology: The 
     New Consonance'' and ``Belief in God in an Age of Science'' 
     are streaming off the presses. A June symposium on ``Science 
     and the Spiritual Quest,'' organized by Russell's CTNS, drew 
     more than 320 paying attendees and 33 speakers, and a PBS 
     documentary on science and faith will air this fall.
       In 1977 Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg of the University 
     of Texas sounded a famous note of despair: the more the 
     universe has become comprehensible through cosmology, he 
     wrote, the more it seems pointless. But now the very science 
     that ``killed'' God is, in the eyes of believers, restoring 
     faith. Physicists have stumbled on signs that the cosmos is 
     custom-made for life and consciousness. It turns out that if 
     the constants of nature--unchanging numbers like the strength 
     of gravity, the charge of an electron and the mass of a 
     proton--were the tiniest bit different, then atoms would not 
     hold together, stars would not burn and life would never have 
     made an appearance. ``When you realize that the laws of 
     nature must be incredibly finely tuned to produce the 
     universe we see,'' says John Polkinghorne, who had a 
     distinguished career as a physicist at Cambridge University 
     before becoming an Anglican priest in 1982, ``that conspires 
     to plant the

[[Page S9354]]

     idea that the universe did not just happen, but that there 
     must be a purpose behind it.'' Charles Townes, who shared the 
     1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the principles of 
     the laser, goes further: ``Many have a feeling that somehow 
     intelligence must have been involved in the law of the 
     universe.''
       Although the very rationality of science often feels like 
     an enemy of the spiritual, here, too, a new reading can 
     sustain rather than snuff out belief. Ever since Isaac 
     Newton, science has blared a clear message: the world follows 
     rules, rules that are fundamentally mathematical, rules that 
     humans can figure out. Humans invent abstract mathematics, 
     basically making it up out of their imaginations, yet math 
     magically turns out to describe the world. Greek 
     mathematicians divided the circumference of a circle by its 
     diameter, for example, and got the number pi, 3.14159 . . . . 
     Pi turns up in equations that describe subatomic particles, 
     light and other quantities that have no obvious connections 
     to circles. This points, says Polkinghorn, ``to a very deep 
     fact about the nature of the universe,'' namely, that our 
     minds, which invent mathematics, conform to the reality of 
     the cosmos. We are somehow tuned in to its truths. Since pure 
     thought can penetrate the universe's mysteries, ``this seems 
     to be telling us that something about human consciousness is 
     harmonious with the mind of God,'' says Carl Feit, a cancer 
     biologist at yeshiva University in New York and Talmudic 
     scholar.
       To most worshipers, a sense of the divine as an unseen 
     presence behind the visible world is all well and good, but 
     what they really yearn for is a God who acts in the world. 
     Some scientists see an opening for this sort of god at the 
     level of quantum or subatomic events. In this spooky realm, 
     the behavior of particles is unpredictable. In perhaps the 
     most famous example, a radioactive element might have a half-
     life of, say, one hour. Half-life means that half of the 
     atoms in a sample will decay in that time; half will not. but 
     what if you have only a single atom? Then, in an hour, it has 
     a 50-50 chance of decaying. And what if the experiment is 
     arranged so that if the atom does decay, it releases poison 
     gas? If you have a cat in the lab, will the cat be alive or 
     dead after the hour is up? Physicists have discovered that 
     there is no way to determine, even in principle, what the 
     atom would do. Some theologian-scientists see that decision 
     point--will the atom decay or not? will the cat live or 
     die?--as one where God can act. ``Quantum mechanics allows us 
     to think of special divine action,'' says Russell. Even 
     better, since few scientists abide miracles, God can act 
     without violating the law of physics.
       An even newer science, chaos theory, describes phenomena 
     like the weather and some chemical reactions whose exact 
     outcomes cannot be predicted. It could be, says Polkinghorne, 
     that God selects which possibility becomes reality. This 
     divine action would not violate physical laws either.
       Most scientists still park their faith, if they have it, at 
     the laboratory door. But just as belief can find inspiration 
     in science, so scientists can find inspiration in belief. 
     Physicist Mehdi Golshani of Sharif University of Technology 
     in Tehran, drawing from the Koran, believes that natural 
     phenomena are ``God's signs in the universe,'' and that 
     studying them is almost a religious obligation. The Koran 
     asks humans to ``travel in the earth, then see how He 
     initiated the creation.'' Research, Golshani says, ``is a 
     worship act, in that it reveals more of the wonders of God's 
     creation.'' The same strain runs through Judaism. Carl Feit 
     cites Maimonides, ``who said that the only pathway to achieve 
     a love of God is by understanding the works of his hand, 
     which is the natural universe. Knowing how the universe 
     functions is crucial to a religious person because this is 
     the world He created.'' Feit is hardly alone. According to a 
     study released last year, 40 percent of American scientists 
     believe in a personal God--not merely an ineffable power and 
     presence in the world, but a deity to whom they can pray.
       To Joel Primack, an astrophysicist at the University of 
     California, Santa Cruz, ``practicing science [even] has a 
     spiritual goal''--namely, providing inspiration. It turns 
     out, explains Primack, that the largest size imaginable, the 
     entire universe, is 10 with 29 zeros after it (in 
     centimeters). The smallest size describes the subatomic 
     world, and is 10 with 24 zeros (and a decimal) in front of 
     it. Humans are right in the middle. Does this return us to a 
     privileged place? Primack doesn't know, but he describes this 
     as a ``soul-satisfying cosmology.''
       Although skeptical scientists grumble that science has no 
     need of religion, forward-looking theologians think religion 
     needs science. Religion ``is incapable of making its moral 
     claims persuasive or its spiritual comfort effective [unless] 
     its cognitive claims'' are credible, argues physicist-
     theologian Russell. Although upwards of 90 percent of 
     Americans believe in a personal God, fewer believe in a God 
     who parts seas, or creates species one by one. To make 
     religions forged millenniums ago relevant in an age of atoms 
     and DNA, some theologians are ``incorporat[ing] knowledge 
     gained from natural science into the formation of doctrinal 
     beliefs,'' says Ted Peters of Pacific Lutheran Seminary. 
     Otherwise, says astronomer and Jesuit priest William Stoeger, 
     religion is in danger of being seen, by people even minimally 
     acquainted with science, ``as an anachronism.''
       Science cannot prove the existence of God, let alone spy 
     him at the end of a telescope. But to some believers, 
     learning about the universe offers clues about what God might 
     be like. As W. Mark Richardson of the Center for Theology and 
     the Natural Sciences says, ``Science may not serve as an 
     eyewitness of God the Creator, but it can serve as a 
     character witness.'' One place to get a glimpse of God's 
     character, ironically, is in the workings of evolution. 
     Arthur Peacocke, a biochemist who became a priest in the 
     Church of England in 1971, has no quarrel with evolution. To 
     the contrary: he finds in it signs of God's nature. He 
     infers, from evolution, that God has chosen to limit this 
     omnipotence and omniscience. In other words, it is the 
     appearance of chance mutations, and the Darwinian laws of 
     natural selection acting on this ``variation,'' that bring 
     about the diversity of life on Earth. This process suggests a 
     divine humility, a God who acts selflessly for the good of 
     creation, says theologian John Haught, who founded the 
     Georgetown (University) Center for the Study of Science and 
     Religion. He calls this a ``humble retreat on God's part'': 
     much as a loving parent lets a child be, and become, freely 
     and without interference, so does God let creation make 
     itself.
       It would be an exaggeration to say that such sophisticated 
     theological thinking is remaking religion at the level of the 
     local parish, mosque or synagogue. But some of these ideas do 
     resonate with ordinary worshipers and clergy. For Billy 
     Crockett, president of Walking Angel Records in Dallas, the 
     discoveries of quantum mechanics that he reads about in the 
     paper reinforces his faith that ``there is a lot of mystery 
     in the nature of things.'' For other believers, an 
     appreciation of science deepens faith. ``Science produces in 
     me a tremendous awe,'' says Sister Mary White of the 
     Benedictine Meditation Center in St. Paul, Minn. ``Science 
     and spirituality have a common quest, which is a quest for 
     truth.'' And if science has not yet influenced religious 
     thought and practice at the grass-roots level very much, just 
     wait, says Ted Peters of CTNS. Much as feminism sneaked up on 
     churches and is now shaping the liturgy, he predicts, ``in 10 
     years science will be a major factor in how many ordinary 
     religious people think.''
       Not everyone believes that's such a hot idea. ``Science is 
     a method, not a body of knowledge,'' says Michael Shermer, a 
     director of the Skeptics Society, which debunks claims of the 
     paranormal. ``It can have nothing to say either way about 
     whether there is a God. These are two such different things, 
     it would be like using baseball stats to prove a point in 
     football.'' Another red flag is that adherents of different 
     faiths--like the Orthodox Jews, Anglicans, Quakers, Catholics 
     and Muslims who spoke at the June conference in Berkeley--
     tend to find, in science, confirmation of what their 
     particular religion has already taught them.
       Take the difficult Christian concept of Jesus as both fully 
     divine and fully human. It turns out that this duality has a 
     parallel in quantum physics. In the early years of this 
     century, physicists discovered that entities thought of as 
     particles, like electrons, can also act as waves. And light, 
     considered a wave, can in some experiments act like a barrage 
     of particles. The orthodox interpretation of this strange 
     situation is that light is, simultaneously, wave and 
     particle. Electrons are, simultaneously, waves and particles. 
     Which aspect of light one sees, which face an electron turns 
     to a human observer, varies with the circumstances. So, too, 
     with Jesus, suggests physicist F. Russell Stannard of 
     England's Open University. Jesus is not to be seen as really 
     God in human guise, or as really human but acting divine, 
     says Stannard: ``He was fully both.'' Finding these parallels 
     may make some people feel, says Polkinghorne, ``that this is 
     not just some deeply weird Christian idea.''
       Jews aren't likely to make the same leap. And someone who 
     is not already a believer will not join the faithful because 
     of quantum mechanics; conversely, someone in whom science 
     raises no doubts about faith probably isn't even listening. 
     But to people in the middle, for whom science raises 
     questions about religion, these new concordances can deepen a 
     faith already present. As Feit says, ``I don't think that by 
     studying science you will be forced to conclude that there 
     must be a God. But if you have already found God, then you 
     can say, from understanding science, `Ah, I see what God has 
     done in the world'.''
       In one sense, science and religion will never be truly 
     reconciled. Perhaps they shouldn't be. The default setting of 
     science is eternal doubt; the core of religion is faith. Yet 
     profoundly religious people and great scientists are both 
     driven to understand the world. Once, science and religion 
     were viewed as two fundamentally different, even 
     antagonistic, ways of pursuing that quest, and science stood 
     accused of smothering faith and killing God. Now, it may 
     strengthen belief. And although it cannot prove God's 
     existence, science might whisper to believers where to seek 
     the divine.
                                  ____


                           How The Heavens Go

                        (By Kenneth L. Woodward)

       That many contemporary scientists make room for god in 
     their understanding of the cosmos should hardly be 
     surprising. For most of history, religion and science have 
     been siblings--feeding off and sparring with each other--
     rather than outright adversaries in the common human quest 
     for understanding. Only in the West, and only after the

[[Page S9355]]

     French Enlightenment in the 18th century, did the votaries of 
     science and religion drift into separate ideological camps. 
     And only in the 19th century, after Darwin, was the supposed 
     irreconcilability between ``God'' and ``science'' elevated to 
     the status of cultural myth. History tells a different, more 
     complicated story.
       In the ancient world, religious myth invested nature and 
     the cosmos with divine emanations and powers. But this 
     celestial pantheism did not prevent sober observation of the 
     heavens and sophisticated mathematical calculations. By 1400 
     B.C. the Chinese had established a solar year of 365 days. 
     Ancient India formulated the decimal system. Ancient Greece 
     bequeathed Euclidean geometry, Ptolemy's map of the solar 
     system and Aristotle's classification of living organisms, 
     which served biologists until Darwin.
       But none of these advances seriously disrupted religions's 
     more comprehensive worldviews. Buddhists, for example, showed 
     no interest in investigating nature since it was both 
     impermanent and, at bottom, an illusion. Islam made great 
     advances in algebra, geometry and optics, as well as 
     philosophy. But Muslim scholars left the mysteries of 
     physics--motion, causality, etc.--to the power of Allah and 
     to the aphorisms of Aristotle, whose works they recovered and 
     transmitted to the Christian West.
       The Bible, of course, has its own creation myth, and it is 
     that very story that eventually led scientists to realize 
     that nature had to be discovered empirically and so fostered 
     the development of science in the Christian West. The 
     universe created by a rational God had to be rational and 
     consistent--that much the Creeks already knew. But a universe 
     created out of nothing, as Genesis described, also had to be 
     contingent. In other words, it could have turned out other 
     than it did. It was only one of an infinite number of 
     possibilities open to a wholly transcendent deity. Gradually, 
     scientists realized that the laws governing such a universe 
     could not be deduced from pure thought--as Aristotle 
     supposed--but instead needed to be discovered through 
     experiment. Thus was experimental science nurtured by 
     religious doctrine.
       When the scientific revolution did occur, in Europe early 
     in the 17th century, and researchers for the first time began 
     to regard the world as a mechanism whose workings they could 
     probe through the scientific method, it wasn't God's 
     existence that was thrown in doubt. Rather, it was 
     Aristotle's ``sacred geography,'' in which Earth and the 
     heavenly bodies were fixed and eternal. Relying on Aristotle, 
     medieval Christianity had imagined a tidy geocentric universe 
     in which nature served man and mankind served God. ``In a 
     certain sense, religion got burned for locking itself too 
     deeply into a particular scientific view which was then 
     discarded,'' says Owen Gingerich, a professor of astronomy 
     and the history of science at Harvard.
       First Copernicus, then Galileo (aided by one of the first 
     telescopes) and Kepler demonstrated with ever greater 
     precision that the earth and other planets circled the sun. 
     Humankind, it seemed, was peripheral to God and the universe. 
     All three scientists, however, were devout Christians who 
     defended their new worldview as most worthy of the Creator. 
     But Copernicus and Kepler were denounced by Martin Luther for 
     views he thought contradicted the bible, and Galileo was 
     tried and condemned to house arrest by the Roman Inquisition. 
     Although Pope John Paul II declared in 1992 that the church 
     had erred in condemning Galileo, the incident was never a 
     simple conflict between science and religion. Galileo 
     overstated the proof he could provide for a heliocentric 
     (suncentered) cosmos and incautiously caricatured the pope in 
     a published tract. Yet he could also quote one of the pope's 
     own cardinals in his defense: ``The intention of [the Bible] 
     is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens 
     go.''
       In subsequent centuries, however, scientific theories of 
     ``how the heavens go'' increasingly determined the place and 
     power of God. The ``celestial mechanics'' of Isaac Newton 
     produced a god who designed a world machine and somehow 
     sustained it in motion. Theologians readily accepted whatever 
     proofs for God's existence the new science chose to give. The 
     result was a diminished ``god of the gaps'' inhabiting 
     whatever dark corners science had not yet brought to rational 
     light. In this way, says Jesuit theologian Michael Buckley of 
     Boston College, theologians themselves cooperated in the 
     advent of modern atheism by relying on science to explain God 
     and ignoring ``the traditional sources of religious insight 
     and experience that make belief in God intelligible,'' By the 
     18th century, astronomer Pierre Laplace could explain nature 
     as a self-sufficient mechanism. As for God, he told Emperor 
     Napoleon, ``I have no need of that hypothesis,'' Nor, a 
     century later, did Darwin in his theory of evolution.
       Now, at the end of the millennium, religion and science are 
     beginning to talk, though neither answers to the other's 
     authority. John Paul II consults with his Pontifical Academy 
     of Science--most of whom are not Catholic. Philosophers of 
     science examine the often-hidden assumptions on which 
     scientific theories rest. Confronted by dimensions of the 
     world no scripture has encoded, theologians are discovering a 
     God who resists domestication into any single theory of how 
     the world works. And at the center--still--are flawed and 
     fragile human beings trying to understand a universe that has 
     the uncomfortable feel of a home away from home.

                          ____________________