God & Nature

When scientists begin writing like preachers and preachers begin talking like scientists, the great battle of God and Nature is all but over. Famed for his piety is Physicist Robert Andrews Millikan, son of a Presbyterian minister. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington is a devout, creedless Quaker. Physicist Arthur Holly Compton has been advancing towards God more slowly although his father, too, is a Presbyterian minister. Now writing a book about his beliefs, the University of Chicago professor expounded some of them last week in an interview with Philip Kinsley of the Chicago Tribune. Said Scientist Compton:

"Faith in God may be a thoroughly scientific attitude, even though we may be unable to establish the correctness of our belief. Science can have no quarrel with a religion which postulates a God to whom men are as his children. Not that science in any way shows such a relationship . . . but the evidence for an intelligent power working in the world which science offers does make such a postulate plausible."

Dr. Compton believes in no such firm, almighty Divine Intelligence as do Scientists Einstein and Planck. A student of "indeterminism," he says that "natural phenomena do not obey exact laws.'' Physicists have tested the behavior of the smallest known units of matter and light, only to discover that their movements are unpredictable. This "complexity of small-scale events," leads Dr. Compton toward resolving the dilemma of freedom v. law, which is "as essential to the welfare of science as it is to the growth of religion." If a little photon of light can move capriciously, so can man by exercise of will. Thus Dr. Compton sees "the whole great drama of evolution as moving toward the goal of personality, the making of persons, with free, intelligent wills, capable of learning nature's laws, of glimpsing God's purpose in nature and sharing that purpose."

Scientist Compton and his colleagues are content that the facts they are amassing about "nature's laws" serve as a key to this world and possibly the next. In deed many persons believe that science, complete in itself, has effectively displaced God. At such thinkers last fortnight was directed a thoroughgoing flaying by Scientist Compton's superior at the University of Chicago, President Robert Maynard Hutchins, who is also a clergyman's son. Accepting Science's true achievements, he nevertheless damned it for proffering ''green facts" and "raw empiricism'' as solutions to the world's troubles. Said young Dr. Hutchins: "We have more in formation, more means of getting more information, and more means of dis tributing information than at any time in history, and yet we are [skeptical of] science, ideas and knowledge. Men have long since cast off God. To what can we now appeal? "The answer comes in the undiluted animalism of the last works of D. H. Lawrence, in the emotionalism of demagogs, in Hitler's scream, 'We think with our blood.' Satisfied that we have, weighed reason and found it wanting, we now turn to passion." Dr. Hutchins' remedy: Let Science stick to fundamentals and let the universities base their principles on "fixed and immutable ideas." inculcating the young with pure ."intellectual virtues."

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