A Gentle Scientist Ponders Religious Belief - Review

A Biologist Looks at Religion. Victor B. Scheffer. Bamboo Press, Seattle, 2001. (Distributed by the author, 1750 152nd Ave. NE, #214, Bellevue, WA 98007.)

ISBN 0-9676634-0-7. 88 pp. Softcover, $12.

More than three decades ago, zoologist Victor B. Scheffer wrote The Year of The Whale, which won the Burroughs Medal for the best book in the field of natural history in 1969 and helped spark the marine mammal conservation movement of the 1970s. The Year of the Seal followed (I am proud to own both), and along the way there were ten other books, most dealing with outdoor values and biology.

Now in his ninety-fourth year, Scheffer turns his philosophical and literary attention to religion. In the closing years of his life, Scheffer says, he is trying to make sense of religion--particularly its Christian forms in America. Scheffer grew up a Presbyterian, but the pull of natural science drew him away from church and creed. He switched to what he calls "natural religion."

In this slim, thoughtful volume he ponders, as do so many other scientifically oriented people, why religion is "so vital to millions of thinking persons," even while its supernatural base is "so highly improbable."

Scheffer's approach is gentle and thoughtful. He acknowledges that scientists like him have no special credentials for writing about religion, but his extended essay is nevertheless infused with a wildlife biologist's appreciation and awe of nature. He considers life an electrochemical system, self-contained, self-sustaining, multiplying and evolving by natural selection. He sees similarities throughout the animal world, ranging from the largest whale to the pygmy shrew--a 90-million-times difference in scale, "yet both have similar tissues and organs arid both (I presume) nurse their young with tenderness." Our human feeling of sympathy with others in pain has roots in the behavior of social wild animals; care-giving for an injured companion is common, for example, among bottlenose dolphins. And while he sees no evidence of purpose in life anywhere outside imagination, he nevertheless sees the human enterprise itself as full of purpose.

In brief chapters, Scheffer considers the origins of religion, its strength today, the strength of nonbelief, and belief in prayer and immortality. "Science and Religion" is treated in a concise six-page chapter. He gives the statistics showing that belief among scientists in a personal god has not significantly changed over the past eighty years (41.8 percent in 1916, 39.3 percent in 1996), although among "greater" scientists, members of the National Academy of Sciences (as polled in 1998), disbelief is greater--almost total. He briefly sketches the beliefs of five selected scientists including two believers, two nonbelievers, and one uncommitted.

In a balanced chapter on the bright and dark sides of religion, he sees both. "The bright side of organized religion displays love expressed through pity, kindness, charity, compassion, sympathy, care-giving, friendship, peacemaking, generosity, and goodwill." The dark side is intolerance. "The dark side of religion displays hate expressed through the calculated use of power to suppress freedom of thought and to impose by force the beliefs of one group on another."

In other brief chapters he considers the challenges to religion in an ailing society, the future of religion, and the greening of religion (a growing environmental ethic). He predicts hopefully that in the future the most greatly admired persons "will be those who believe in, and work for, the triumph of gentleness and reason." His heroes from his own time in this regard include Eleanor Roosevelt, Archibald MacLeish, Joseph Wood Krutch, E.B. White, and Rachel Carson. He calls for the teaching of moral values, "clearly dissociated from religious doctrine," in elementary schools. He agrees with Carl Sagan's view that there is true spirituality in our reverence and awe for nature.

Scheffer concludes with a brief personal credo. "I am an agnostic. ... I do believe that giving credit to a god-figure is far too easy: the cosmos deserves respect; it deserves truly thoughtful speculation as to its being." The social gifts of church can be valuable, but he finds its sacraments and contracts for salvation unneeded.

"One holds fast to Russell's dictum that a good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage. One remembers the unceasing human need for love--'the organizing power of the universe.' One cultivates the habit of optimism. And one reserves the right to challenge all who, hiding in the cloak of religion, show disrespect for the worth and the dignity of human life."

Kendrick Frazier is editor of the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group