Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 1, 1993 TAG: 9305010013
SECTION: RELIGION PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID BRIGGS ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
From medical ethics to the environment, society depends on the tension between science and faith, between what is possible and what is morally acceptable, to develop ethical limits on modern technology.
But in the past 400 years, even if the strife is not o'er, the battle has been won in the duel of competing worldviews by science, according to Bryan Appleyard, author of a new book which argues that scientific claims have taken on the status of absolute truth in the modern world.
In "Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man," a provocative best seller in England that was recently published in the United States by Doubleday, Appleyard warns that science has not only taken over the world, it has become "our faith and our age's unique signature.
"My conviction is equally simple: We must resist and now is the time to do so," Appleyard says.
The book by the secular British journalist comes out against a backdrop of some signs of a growing cooperation among the realms of faith and science.
Centers for the study of science and religion were established at prominent universities in the 1980s. An Ecumenical Roundtable for Science and Technology has been meeting yearly in the United States, and professional societies such as the American Psychiatric Association no longer dismiss religious beliefs as signs of emotional immaturity.
And though it was three-and-a-half centuries too late for Galileo, the Vatican last year proclaimed that the Roman Catholic Church erred in condemning the astronomer for holding that the Earth was not the center of the universe.
Kurt Richardson, assistant professor of Christian theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., sees parallels between biblically based religion and science in that both believe human problems can be solved and both exhibit altruistic desires to improve the quality of life.
He rejects what he calls "a monster in the machine" view of technology in favor of increased cooperation to address the problems such as pollution and new dilemmas in medical ethics that come with the benefits of modern technology.
"It is time to improve the dialogue between theologians and scientists," he said. "We have presumed that there is hostility between science and religion, and it is a self-fulfilling prophecy."
The British science magazine Nature weighed in with a review calling "Understanding the Present" a "dangerous book."
But Appleyard said in a recent interview that science has become corrupted by its own success, and society is placed in danger when it elevates science above the realm of critical debate.
For example, he asks, can science alone be expected to solve environmental problems when it expresses no remorse over the pollution created by new technology in the first place.
In the field of medicine, Appleyard says, as society tries to control medical costs and provide care for all citizens, science is producing more and more expensive technology to serve fewer and fewer people.
In more difficult ethical areas, according to Appleyard, advances that make it possible to take tissue from living human beings to give to others raise ominous possibilities if unchecked by ethical safeguards.
"If we can experiment on handicapped children, we can save these people's lives" is the thinking advanced by some in the field, Appleyard said. "There has to be some balance the other way."
He calls on religious leaders and others to bring moral values into debates over how new technology should be applied in society.
There are some signs of vulnerability in the image of science as an all-powerful force, he says.
It may be, he says, that the great disease of our age for which technology has no answers - AIDS - may finally halt the ascent of science.
Appleyard recalled how he and some of his friends - many of whom were not observant - gravitated naturally toward an Anglican church to remember a friend who died of the disease.
"The only language somebody had for that service was religious," he said.
by CNB