Religion: Science and Religion

War makes unexpected bedfellows in heaven as well as on earth. Because totalitarian thinking threatens U. S. democracy as much as totalitarian force, front-rank scientists and philosophers gathered last week for an epoch-making three-day conference with outstanding churchmen—Protestants, Catholics, Jews. The place: Manhattan's Jewish Theological Seminary. The purpose: to unify the thought of democracy, make it a united spiritual and intellectual force. The cast: seven Nobel laureates, a dozen college presidents, a host of philosophers, scientists, teachers, theologians. Altogether, over 600 representatives from 165 institutions attended, made a gallant effort to piece together the tree of knowledge which for more than a century men had busily sawed into separate branches.

To churchmen everywhere, the meeting was doubly historic: it paved the way for a possible reconciliation of science and religion, separated 80 years ago by the conflict between six-day Creation and the theory of evolution. Never had so many famed scientists of no religious affiliation answered a call to meet for a common purpose with religious leaders. Never had so many famed churchmen held their peace while an outstanding scientist urged them to give up their belief in a personal God.

"The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events, the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by [its] side for causes of a different nature," wrote Physicist Albert Einstein addressing the gathering by proxy "To be sure, the doctrine of a personal god interfering with natural events could never be refuted ... by science for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. ... In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal god—give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests. They will have to avail themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True and the Beautiful in Humanity itself."

Einstein's message was the only false note of the entire conference after its chairman, President Louis Finkelstein of the Jewish Theological Seminary, key-noted its aims: "Our failure to harmonize science, philosophy and religion in their true relation to the democratic way of life has been a catastrophe. We must not allow Western civilization, already destroyed in much of Europe, to suffer any further disintegration. We believe that the military struggle in Europe is but one phase of a far greater conflict—the conflict between ideas which make for the development of human civilization and ideas which make for its destruction."