Science and religion together

SCIENCE AND RELIGION TOGETHER: In an open letter to an imagined Southern Baptist pastor, Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson calls for making common cause on behalf of the earth's environment. Wilson, reared a Baptist, calls himself a secular humanist and says he sees no way of bridging the gap between his worldview and that of evangelical Christians.

But he sees no need to do so. "Surely we also share a love of the Creation," he says to his fictional pen pal, and both recognize a moral obligation to care for the environment. He notes that there is a practical reason for forming an alliance: the three leading humanist organizations in the U.S. have a total membership of only several thousand; the National Association of Evangelicals counts 30 million Christians among its members (New Republic, September 4).

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