Moral and ethical issues for the new millennium.

• Author: Meeks, Fred E.

Cloning is just the latest conflict between scientific endeavors and religious precepts. The next century undoubtedly will bring further clashes between moralists and revolutionary idea.

Years ago, a radio program based on H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds caused great alaram throughout the nation. Many persons misinterpreted the broadcast about an invasion of aliens from Mars as a reality that threatened their lives. Today, a new invasion from Mars is threatening some people. Meteorites and NASA space vehicles have produced data from the red planet indicating the possibility that life may have existed on Mars. This news, along with claims of encounters with extraterrestial and sightings of UFOs, has ignited another "war" --one between the worlds of science and religion.

Of course, this war is not actually new. Religion long has been in conflict with science, as Karl Giberson has documented in his 1993 book, Worlds Apart: The Unholy War Between Religion and Science. He suggests that this war began with Galileo Galilei, the 17th-century Italian astronomer, whom Giberson calls the first modern scientist. Galileo, the astronomer who pionered use of the telescope, argued that the then new cosmology (theory of the nature of the universe) proposed by Polish astronomer Nicalaus Copernicus was correct and the medieval cosmology held by the Church was wrong. Contradicting the official Church cosmology, Galileo declared that the Earth is not the center of the universe. Morever, he said, the Earth is not stationary, as the Church, citing Psalm 93:1, claimed. It is the Earth that moves, not the sun. In an apparent contradiction of a literal reading of Joshua 10:12-14, Galileo asserted that the sun does not move.

In 1642, the year that Galileo died, another scientist, Isaac Newton, was born in England. He agreed with the "new" view (actually, the ancient Greeks also believed it) that the Earth and the other planets move, and proposed that there were laws governing such movements. In the view of the Church. yet another belief was being contradicted the Church by denying that the sun moved, and Newton did so by asserting that the heavenly bodies are moved by gravitational laws rather than by God.

Newton did make provision for a divine role in the natural universe by saying that the anomalies which occur in the movement of the planets directly are caused by God. This accommodation for divine involvement in the universe led eventually to a "God of the Gaps" cosmology that used God to explain the "gaps" of understanding that resulted whenever science was unable to provide an explanation for natural phenomena.

Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton all were committed Christians who viewed science as a method of worshipping the Creator. They did not believe that replacing theological explanations of the natural world with scientific ones diminished God as the creator in the least.

Another Christian, British naturalist Charles Darwin, continued to fuel the fires of war between science and religion with On The Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin's views filled in yet another gap that appeared to remove God from His most important work--the creation of life. Darwin's view of the origin of life--descent with modification--commonly is associated with the term evolution. He maintained that the origin of all species, including humans, could be explained by an evolutionary process involving natural selection.

On the Origin of Species met great opposition from Church leaders, most of whom held to a very literalistic perspective of the Bible's account of creation in the Book of Genesis. They saw Darwin's views as contradicting Bible. However by the early part of the 20th century, may literalistic biblical scholars were adjusting their interpretation of Genesis to accommodate evolution. Fundamental Christian leaders such as Benjamin B. Warfield and Charles Hodge simply affirmed that God indeed was the creator, but used evolution as the method by which He created everything.

Views such as those of Warfield and Hodge seemed to bring about a truce between science and religion. This "peace" was short-lived, though. In the last half of the 20th century, the battle was re-ignited with a renewed attack on science by religion. The new assault was led by civil engineer Henry...