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By Laurent Belsie (belsiel@csps.com) Staff writer
of The Christian Science Monitor
The
past four centuries have not been especially kind to religious
believers.
Every
time scientists have peered through a microscope or a telescope,
their findings have usually challenged popular notions about
God. Religious authorities have often fought back. But the
latest discoveries about the human genome have produced
no such backlash.
At least,
not yet. This week's revelations, published in the journals
Science and Nature, have produced more scientific questions
than religious consternation. But how society perceives
the Creator will depend on how broadly the new genetics
explains creation in years to come.
"Every
age, every culture has articulated its belief system or
philosophy within some kind of a framework," says Tom
Shannon, author of "Made in Whose Image? Genetic Engineering
and Christian Ethics." "That happened with Copernicus.
It should have happened with Darwin. And we have that same
opportunity again. What we're being given here is a new
paradigm."
Perhaps
the biggest reason for the lack of religious hostility stems
from the relatively humble stance that many genetic researchers
are taking. They reject the notion that genes explain what
makes man tick.
"It
is a delusion to think that genomics in isolation will ever
tell us what it means to be human," writes Svante Pääbo
of Germany's Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology
in this week's edition of Science. "The history of
our genes is but one aspect of our history, and there are
many other histories that are even more important."
For
example, the ancient Greeks contributed only a tiny portion
of man's genetic pool, he points out. But their ideas about
architecture, science, technology, and politics have had
a powerful influence on Western culture.
Even
revelations that man possesses only about 30,000 genes -
not that many more than fruit flies or worms - have caused
little religious hand-wringing.
"Biblically,
everything's made from the earth," says Norbert Samuelson,
professor of Jewish philosophy at Arizona State University
in Tempe. So the finding that man's genetic makeup looks
similar to a roundworm's seems logical to him. For Jews,
he adds, man's uniqueness depends on his relationship with
God, not his material origin.
Similarities
with animals
The
similarity of the genetic codes of man and animals poses
problems for Christians, but perhaps not insurmountable
ones, theologians say.
"The
church has played up the uniqueness of the human person.
[But] there's a continuity between humans and other forms
of life," says Lou Ann Trost, program director for
the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley,
Calif.
The
genome finding may prove positive, she adds. Perhaps it
may lead to a stronger Christian basis for environmental
stewardship.
Even
conservative Christians who take the biblical account of
creation as literal fact say the latest genetic findings
don't pose a roadblock to faith. In fact, many evangelicals
argue that the new research points out the implausibility
of Darwinian evolution. Adherents of a movement called Intelligent
Design claim the findings support their beliefs - though
most genetic researchers reject these views as bad science.
The
central idea behind Intelligent Design is that life looks
too elegant to be explained solely by Darwinian evolution.
An intelligent designer or Creator must have gotten the
ball rolling. Thus, the key discovery of the new genetics
is that DNA is literally an information-carrying molecule.
"That
has very powerful implications when you begin to think of
the origin of life," says Stephen Meyer, director of
the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture in Seattle.
"Information in our experience is a distinctive product
of mind.... We can't really prove therefore that there is
something called a spirit or a soul in a way that you can
prove things in a laboratory. But we do have this first-person
awareness of our own consciousness."
Here,
paths diverge between strict creationists, who hold that
the world was formed some 6,000 years ago, and those like
Professor Meyer, who believe that a Creator's work has taken
place through more gradual and lengthy change.
"What
we're doing is saying ... what if naturalism isn't true?"
Meyer says. "We want to go back to that great 19th-century
question and say: Maybe they were wrong.... If there's evidence
of real design, then the God question may be back on the
table."
To be
sure, many leading genetic researchers don't believe their
work excludes God. They reject notions that genes explain
all, or even most, of what makes man tick. But they - and
more mainstream Christian thinkers - do hold that the accumulating
genetic evidence does point to evolution as a key process
through which man developed.
But
once God created the process, perhaps He or She left it
alone, some Christian thinkers say. That would suggest that
man's appearance was accidental rather than predetermined.
"What
we're discovering is that what God created was a process
and that process has a lot of play in it," says Mr.
Shannon, the author. "There's elements of surprises
and spontaneity."
An accidental
creation?
Other
Christian thinkers reject the idea that man's creation was
purely accidental. "I believe that God is somehow guiding
the process," says Professor Trost of the Center for
Theology and the Natural Sciences. And "there's still
a sort of unique relationship between God and human beings.
Despite all these genes [in common], we don't see worms
creating culture."
It is
this sense of culture and, really, self-aware consciousness
that may point to something unique about man. "It's
a myth that science, with all the power of its reductive
methods, can give us an understanding of the great products
of human self-reflection, culture, knowledge," says
Phillip Sloan, director of the Program in Science, Technology,
and Values at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend,
Ind.
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