“What is conscience?” asked Rob Stein, a national science reporter for the Washington Post and a 2006 Templeton-Cambridge Fellow on a beautiful July day in Cambridge UK. His front-page Washington Post story, “A Medical Crisis of Conscience,” on the refusal of some health-care workers to provide certain kinds of care to patients on religious grounds, had appeared the previous Sunday. As Templeton-Cambridge Fellows are asked to do during the final 8th week seminar, he was reflecting further on his news story, discussing with his colleagues the rather surprising intellectual history of conscience.

The Old Testament, it turns out, had no Hebrew word for conscience. “I thought Jews would be big on conscience, given that Mother used guilt as a major form of discipline,” he said. “But not true.” He then took his audience on a “romp” through centuries of debate and study among church fathers, philosophers, Enlightenment thinkers, Freud, etc. down to today’s controversy: Can or should health care workers be compelled to provide services they regard as immoral? The right of conscience versus professional duty has long been a dominant theme in Western society, says Stein, but had been mainly limited in practice to physicians and hasn’t encompassed, say, ambulance drivers. Many pressing issues derive from advancing science—both at the start of life with the viability of ever younger fetuses and the end of life. High-level professionals are often protected by their professional organizations or even by law, but lower-level professionals seldom are.

Stein quoted William Hurlbut, a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, summarizing an overarching dilemma: “Medicine today is being asked to do all sorts of things that are in conflict with its fundamental healing traditions.” The Fellows argued long and hard about the consequences, agreeing that health workers should never be forced to do what they think is immoral, but also should not be permitted to interfere with a patient’s care.

The problem of the individual’s understanding of morality versus a larger society was also at the core of another, very different work—a film called “The Deep Divide: Islamic Science in a Troubled World,” by John Kelleher, a London-based independent filmmaker. Kelleher began with the glories of Islamic medieval civilization—mathematics, astronomy, chemistry as it emerged from alchemy—and asked where it lost momentum. More important, he asked where is Islam and science today? Even though fully a third of the verses in the Qur’an are calls for good Muslims to understand the world created by Allah, Kelleher is pessimistic about the emergence of a science based Islamic society. He does, however, regard the 12-15 million Muslims in Western Europe as a source of optimism—capable of producing an Islamic scientific revolution as youngsters are educated and move into scientific professions.

Islam and science was probably the most frequently discussed subject over the eight weeks of the fellowship. In a brilliant overview of comparative theology, Keith Ward, the Regius Professor of Divinity Emeritus at Oxford, kicked off debate in early June by attributing at least part of the intellectual problems in Islam today to an 11th century thinker, al-Ghazali, who urged Islam to return to revelation as the basic source of authority. Fellow Eric Ormsby objected, arguing that al-Ghazali’s writings were nuanced, and that he was attempting to reconcile different and often conflicting forms of knowledge. Since no one else in the room was familiar with al-Ghazali, Honorary Fellow Madeleine Bunting, former columnist at The Guardian, asked Ormsby to hold a soirée on al-Ghazali and medieval Islamic thought. Everyone showed up on a sultry evening on the Cam, listening attentively to Ormsby’s elegantly delivered lecture (he’s a former professor at the University of Toronto) in which he said al-Ghazali had composed a systematic treatise on Sunni theology that served as a model for all later theological works up to the 19th century. He not only was the first to expound the teachings of Aristotle, Farabi and Avicenna in objective detail, but in his work The Incoherence of the Philosophers, he “subjected some of their suspect teachings—such as their notion of the eternity of the world—to savage and devastating criticism.” He was far from a revelation-based fundamentalist, Ormsby speculated.

Ormsby spent his fellowship weeks between the al-Ghazali talk and his final presentation to the group interviewing Muslim scientists and studying their work. In the end his conclusion was similar to Kelleher’s: Science is held in low esteem in Islamic countries. Paris-based Tom Heneghan, religion editor for Reuters, looked at Islam in the context of France’s laïcité, which requires strict neutrality by the government in all religious matters. One result, argues Heneghan, is that “an undercurrent of hostility often meets any person or group making what are seen as special faith-based demands,” even when those demands are sensible.

The scientist’s achievement—and what, if any, science’s links might be to transcendence or spirituality—became the core of the work of Steven Paulson, executive producer at Wisconsin Public Radio, who interviewed the giants—E. O. Wilson, Simon Conway-Morris, Karen Armstrong, Francis Collins, and many others. “I’ve heard you call yourself a theist,” he said to Wilson. “No, no, I’m a provisional deist. I don’t know how the universe got started. But I’m a scientist, so I can’t rule out what I don’t know.”

Which is what the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships are all about—searching, studying, thinking, discussing, trying to come to some deeper understanding of the great issues of science and religion. The time is very short—just June and July—but the resources of Cambridge are extraordinary, and the generosity and intensity of the speakers and fellows ensured that every opportunity was fully used. When Fellow Michael Powell, New York bureau chief for the Washington Post, couldn’t decide among multiple topics he blamed the fellowship’s “embarrassment of riches.”

Links of Interest
For more information please go to:: www.templeton-cambridge.org.

Julia Vitullo-Martin is a co-director of the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion.

Asking The Big Questions

The John Templeton Foundation serves as a catalyst for scientific discovery on what scientists and philosophers call the ‘Big Questions,’ ranging from the laws of nature to the nature of creativity. The following are examples of current research grants:

Can science help lead the way from conflict to coexistence? Harvard Professors Martin Nowak and Sarah Coakley lead an interdisciplinary project, Evolution and a Theology of Cooperation, studying the emergence of altruistic behavior and forgiveness in the context of biological and theological considerations. The scientific component is pursuing the principles of natural selection that can lead from competition to cooperation. http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~etc/index.html
Does religion have a place in Medical Education? Dr. Christina Puchalski, George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health, oversees the Spirituality and Medicine Curricular Awards that support course development in medical schools. Over two-thirds of all medical schools include courses that prepare doctors to better understand the role of spirituality in health care. http://www.gwish.org/id40.htm

To subscribe to any of the Foundation’s various free e-mail newsletters, including Milestones, go to our JTF Newsletter Subscriptions page.

Milestones is a publication of the John Templeton Foundation.