When William Phillips received the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, he responded “there are many people I would like to thank, but I’d also like to thank God for giving us such a wonderful and interesting universe to explore.”

“Science and religion are often viewed as separate aspects of our beliefs and understanding,” observed Charles Townes, another Nobel Prize-winning physicist. “But religion is an attempt to understand the purpose of our universe and science an attempt to understand its nature and characteristics, so the two are necessarily related.”

Phillips and Townes were two among hundreds of world-renowned scientists who
have participated in Science and the Spiritual Quest, or SSQ, a seven-year-long, two-phased international program underwritten by the John Templeton Foundation. Begun in 1996 under the auspices of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, which is affiliated with Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, SSQ convened leading scientists from around the world, encouraged them to discuss the interrelation of science and spirituality, and then to present their findings to public audiences.

Implicit in this goal was a realization that in many scientific-theological interactions up to this time, it was frequently theologians who were more eager to enter into conversation and, thus, did most of the talking.

SSQ organized 16 meetings, in nine countries, on four continents. Locations ranged from Berkeley (a 1998 conference that prompted a Newsweek cover story entitled “Scientists Find God”) and Harvard, to Paris and the Alhambra in Grenada, Spain. Participants included a veritable who’s-who of contemporary scientists, including Jane Goodall, Ian Barbour and John Polkinghorne. Asked to cite one conference that best exemplified the spirit of SSQ, Philip Clayton, a professor of religion and philosophy at Claremont Graduate University in California, and the principal investigator of SSQ, spoke of a convocation in Bangalore, India.

This four-day event, which was held in January of 2003, involved no fewer than 37 speakers and session chairs, and bore the title “Science and Beyond: Cosmology, Consciousness, and Technology in the Indic Traditions.” Particularly memorable was the meeting’s final convocation: it featured Sir Roger Penrose, Jane Goodall, and two of India’s most revered holy men: Poojya Sri Sri Ravishankarji and Raja Ramanna. The closing ceremony took place at the 7,000-seat Karnataka State Tennis Stadium, which was completely filled with people who’d traveled on buses from all over Southern India to attend. The CNBC network telecast the proceedings across the nation.

“Imagine a cross between a rock concert and a darshan, which is when Hindus gather to be in the presence of the holy,” said Jim Schaal, SSQ’s program director. “It was truly unforgettable.”

“When scientists who have insights into the nature of reality speak also of religious mystery, ultimate values and the integration of all these things, then they have a voice of authority and importance,” said Clayton. “What happened in Bangalore was a sense of combined wisdom, of speaking to a common quest, which is to live
well and live knowledgeably in the world.”

The need for such combined wisdom, Clayton stressed, is especially crucial now, as the power of scientific knowledge, expressed as technology, is greater than ever before. “We can destroy ecosystems in decades through pollution and destroy the planet in minutes with nuclear weapons. Never before has science more needed the guidance of values,” he cautioned. “And, it’s the religious and spiritual traditions that are our greatest repository for providing these values and guiding their applications.”

SSQ was broadly inclusive in defining these religious or spiritual traditions. Beyond monotheistic faiths such as Islam, Judaism and Christianity, there was a concerted effort to invite participants from polytheistic traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, emerging spiritualities including pagan and earth-based beliefs, indigenous traditions out of Latin America and Africa, and even atheists and agnostics. It’s also worth noting that nearly 20% of all invitees were women – an especially commendable percentage given that most scientific fields are overwhelmingly populated by men.

“The single most important dimension of SSQ was an interreligious one. It must be said that there’s an incredibly western bias to the science and theology dialogue with a dominance by theists and Christians in particular,” Clayton said. “I believe this was the first major international project that brought the voices of all religions together on an equal footing.”

The importance of this approach was dramatically underscored when the landmark Memorial Church of Harvard University hosted SSQ’s three-day conference entitled “The Quest for Knowledge, Truth, and Values in Science and Religion” in October 2001, only a month after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. At that time, Bruno Guiderdoni, head of the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, hailed SSQ’s efforts in reconciling the world’s religions in a time of crisis.

“We were challenged to talk about our personal experience with science and religion, and this lifted up the meeting’s atmosphere so it wasn’t just a discussion of theories,”
said Manuela Veloso, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who attended the Harvard meeting. “I have an enormous admiration for how all this was handled. There wasn’t a gigantic number of people; we all got to talk. And so,
a bond formed between us. When you meet colleagues at only the scientific level, sometimes this doesn’t happen.”

To encourage such personal sharing, the SSQ staff interviewed each speaker about their religious beliefs, or lack thereof. Each interview, which lasted from 60 to 90 minutes, was recorded, transcribed, edited, and returned to the scientist for his or her approval. All participants then received this background information about their colleagues in advance of the meetings they were to attend.

“Our key goal was to establish a sense of trust and to encourage people to engage one another as well as their experience,” said Schaal. “This coincides, of course, with the motives of the Templeton Foundation and how fond Sir John is of talking about the humble approach to learning.”

“Part of what’s involved in scientific training, is to get the self out of the picture, to let the data speak for itself. But scientists are real people, too,” Clayton elaborated. “What SSQ did, was allow scientists to integrate their personal responses with the professional work they do. The result was like turning on a tap. Insights and passions flooded out.”

This flood is already being channeled into a series of publications. Papers read and materials generated at the various SSQ meetings have been compiled into Faith in Science: Scientists Search for Truth as well as Science and the Spiritual Quest: New
Essays by Leading Scientists, out from Routledge Press, with several more volumes planned for the near future. Oxford University’s Pauline M. Rudd, speaking at an October 2002 SSQ conference in Japan, eloquently summed up the thesis of these books.

“Religion and science are two sides of a coin,” she said. “While science allows us some control over the environment, religion gives a way to explore how we should use that knowledge. Genetics tells us that we are all unique, religion provides a way of exploring our uniqueness and discovering how we might make our particular contribution to the world.”

Links of Interest
Science and the Spiritual Quest
Center for Theology and Natural Sciences

Stephen Henderson is a freelance writer based in New York and a frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun and Religion News Service.

Milestones is a publication of the John Templeton Foundation.