A members' forum for discussion of PSCF articles

JH: If we were to take Compton and place him in the early 21^st Century faith-science discussion, where would he fit? Would he have something to say today?

TD: Great questions. I’d like to think more about them, but my quick answer to the second question is yes—someone with his intense interest in science and religion and his wide and deep knowledge of science would probably have something to say today. I doubt that it would be identical to what he said in the 1930s, but I also doubt that Bill Terry would hit .401 in the modern game of baseball; conditions change, and players have to adapt to them and find their niches accordingly. The questions of human freedom, purpose, and responsibility haven’t gone away, and some thinkers today (John Polkinghorne and Robert Russell are two examples) still think that quantum mechanics has important implications for the general philosophical and theological issue of freedom—both for humans (Compton’s main interest) and also for God (Polkinghorne’s main interest). Although I don’t know exactly what Compton would say about this if he were writing now, I suspect that he’d be a great deal more sympathetic to Polkinghorne’s views than to those of either Dawkins or Johnson, despite his use of the term “intelligent design” in 1940 (see the second part of my essay). Possibly, Compton would also be a Trinitarian Christian like Polkinghorne and Russell; he apparently was a Trinitarian early on. Certainly the mileu today is more favorable toward that possibility (see above), but I hesitate to suggest this very strongly. More likely, he would identify fairly closely with Ian Barbour or the late Arthur Peacocke, whose very liberal views of scripture and Jesus he shared. Indeed, the more I learn about the modernists of the 1920s, the more similarities I find with some of the more liberal current thinkers. The continuities I see here stand alongside the contrast pointed out above.

(If I can get John Compton to join in the conversation at some point, Jack, this would be an ideal question to ask him.)

Now that I’ve answered Jack’s questions, I’d like to hear from other readers. You need not pose a question for me; it’s perfectly appropriate simply to comment on something you learned from the essay or to add interesting information of your own about Compton or one of the topics he wrote about. In short, this is your space to use. I’ll respond to as many questions as I can, or at least to general kinds of questions if some questions are similar to one another. I might not have time to respond to everything, but please do not take my silence as an indication of inattention or lack of interest: you’d probably be wrong.

Ted

JH: Having cast Compton as a theological liberal, are you aware of any American conservative physicists of the time who contributed to the big questions?

TD: I can’t think of any at the moment, although this might mean only that I haven’t done enough work yet on that period to know who the others were. The combination of terms you used—American, [religiously] conservative, and physicist—together with the requirement that they contributed to the big questions, pretty much narrows it down to none, though again I stress that we don’t have much detailed knowledge of the religious beliefs of American scientists from the first half of the last century. Here, “we” doesn’t mean simply “me,” it means the fairly small community of scholars who study American science—or American religion—in that period. It’s an area that’s just wide open for scholarly work, and that’s one of the main reasons I was so excited to discover the pamphlets.

Now, Jack, if you’re willing to relax your conditions a little, then I might be able to come up with some names. For example, if you don’t insist that a physicist “contributed to the big questions,” then Columbia physicist Michael Idvorsky Pupin might be a possible answer. He was a very famous scientist in the 1920s, but his scientific reputation came from inventions in electrical engineering (which made him wealthy) and not from discoveries in fundamental physics. Some of his fame derived from his activities on behalf of the Serbian nation during World War One, when he was effectively the spokesperson for Serbia in the United States. He was also famous as a writer; his autobiography, relating the story of a penniless immigrant who became a professor at Columbia who advised President Wilson about the creation of Yugoslavia, won a Pulitzer Prize. Theologically, he was a devout Serbian Orthodox believer with orthodox views on the divinity of Jesus and the divine creation of the universe.

Perhaps you were thinking only of Protestant scientists, Jack, when you said “conservative,” in which case the most famous conservative Protestant “scientist” of the period was probably Howard Kelly, a surgeon who taught gynecology and obstetrics at Johns Hopkins. Perhaps he counts as a scientist, or perhaps not; but obviously he wasn’t a physicist. I cannot think of a conservative Protestant physicist from that time who was as eminent as Kelly or Compton. Even if you were simply thinking of traditional Christian believers, not necessarily Protestants, then it’s still hard to think of an example. Would Victor Hess count? He received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1936, he worked briefly in the United States in the early 1920s, and as far as I can tell (I have not studied him carefully) he was a devout Roman Catholic. However, he was born in Austria and moved permanently to the United States only in 1938, in order that his Jewish wife could escape the Nazis. I don’t think he counts as an American, for our purposes here. American Catholics of that generation, generally speaking, just didn’t become top scientists at all, for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here.

To the best of my knowledge, all of the leading Protestant scientists from the 1920s and 1930s, including physicists, were theologically liberal, by which I mean (for example) that they did not believe in the divinity of Jesus or the bodily resurrection. Compton is just one of many I could name; Robert Millikan, a very liberal Congregationalist, held a concept of God that was similar to that of Einstein and even more “liberal” than Compton’s notion of God. Both Compton and Millikan contributed to the big questions, and both were conservative politically, especially Millikan, but neither came close to being a conservative in religion; they were modernists, not fundamentalists. Interestingly, one of the most liberal politicians of his day, William Jennings Bryan, was a fundamentalist Presbyterian. The contrast with our own day that is suggested by these comparisons is not often noticed.

A much more important contrast with our own time, in my opinion, is illustrated by the ASA itself. We do have among our members some world-class scientists, including a few physicists. (I don’t want to start naming names here, because I am genuinely concerned that I might forget to name someone I ought to name and current ASA president I don’t want to slight anyone.) I can think right away of two Nobel Laureates who are not ASA members, though both have been keynote speakers at our annual meetings and both are orthodox believers as far as I know: Charles Townes and William Phillips. Let me make my point by taking the spirit, if not the letter, of your question, Jack. In 2010, there are in the English-speaking world (not just the United States) a significant number of world-class scientists (not just physicists) who are traditional Christians, by which I mean people who can say the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds without crossing their fingers. Some are Americans, such as Francis Collins or Donald Knuth; others are English, such as John Polkinghorne or Brian Heap; at least one (George Ellis) is South African. Here now is my point, which answers your question as well as I can: there was no one like them in the United States between the two world wars, when the rancorous fundamentalist-modernist controversy was raging. That is when Compton did most of his writing about science and religion. At that time, the leading scientists were all or nearly all either unbelievers, pantheists who considered themselves Christians (such as Millikan), or more traditional theists who did not believe in the divinity of Jesus but also considered themselves Christians (Compton). I state that somewhat tentatively, for reasons already given; the more my research continues, however, the more confidence I have in it. The contrast between the Scopes era and our own is stark—and (in my opinion) in favor of our own era. It’s a much better time to be a traditional Christian in the sciences. Despite the claims of Richard Dawkins on the one hand or Philip Johnson on the other hand, orthodox Christians can fully embrace—and and greatly succeed at doing–modern science. It didn’t look that way in the 1920s and 1930s, as far as I can tell.

Sorry for another overly long answer. Your next question, Jack—

JH: Numerous British physicists were discussing the same philosophical questions as Compton and his peers, yet I get the impression that the influence ran more from east to west than from Americans to their British cousins. (See Peter Bowler, Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early-Twentieth-Century Britain, 101-121.) Is this true?

TD: From glancing at Bowler’s book, Jack, I gather you are thinking primarily of James Jeans and Arthur Eddington. (On Eddington’s religious beliefs, incidentally, I strongly recommend Matthew Stanley’s recent book, Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington.) Pupin liked Jeans and (as discussed in my essay) Compton was very impressed by Eddington, a liberal Quaker who believed in free will no less strongly than Compton did. Compton was also influenced by physicist-turned-theologian E.W. Barnes, someone else discussed in Bowler’s book. Yes, the influence does seem to have been mainly from England to America rather than the other way around. Prior to the Civil War, at least, American thinking about science and religion was pretty much all derived from the other side of the pond. The first geology textbook written by an American wasn’t published until 1840, by Edward Hitchcock, and the schemes he put forth for understanding Genesis were borrowed from William Buckland and others in England. The first detailed efforts by an American to relate natural history to the Bible—those of Benjamin Silliman in 1829 and the following decade—were very heavily based on ideas imported from Edinburgh. Asa Gray, writing in the 1860s and 1870s, might have been the first American to have original thoughts about science and religion, though I’m hesitant to make such a claim. In the 1920s, Pupin advanced at least one idea that was probably original; he called it “creative co-ordination,” a kind of cosmic design principle that pointed toward union with the incarnate Creator as the ultimate end of the created order. But Americans have in general been thrifty, not prodigal, in this regard, until after World War Two—when ASA members and others have done a fair bit of original thinking about science and Christian faith.

Your last question, Jack?

JH: Ted, with your background in physics it is easy to see why Arthur Compton would attract your historical attention. Were there other factors that drew you to study this important American scientist?

TD: Quite right, Jack, I studied physics as an undergraduate. I also did a year of graduate work before I became a high school science and mathematics teacher. And, for several years I taught introductory physics at Messiah College. Although I am not a physicist, I understand physics better than the other sciences and I knew something about Compton’s work before I became an historian. I can’t say that I understand all of his work in a technical sense—much of it went well beyond my limited training, even apart from the fact that I’ve forgotten quite a bit of physics over the years. But, I wasn’t completely at sea, and I’ve never lost my early interest in physics.

What led me to study Compton, however, was not simply the fact that he was a leading physicist with an active religious life; he was hardly alone in that. What led me to study him was a combination of three things. First, he was one of the top American physicists of his generation; second, he was not only very religious, but he wrote extensively about science and Christian faith for many years, for a wide popular audience; third—and this was actually the crucial factor for me—Compton wrote a pamphlet called Life After Death for the American Institute of Sacred Literature, an arm of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. (The final part of my essay tells about this pamphlet and the organization that printed it.)

That might seem arbitrary to many readers, so let me fill in some background. It all started with a whale—actually, several whales. Back in December 1991, the ASA Journal published my essay about modern Jonah stories—I’m sure you remember this, Jack, because you were the editor at the time. A key figure in that study was Harry Rimmer, a self-educated evangelist who was probably the most widely visible fundamentalist opponent of evolution from the late 1920s through the 1940s. In doing research on Rimmer, I learned that in November 1930 he participated in a debate about evolution with Samuel Christian Schmucker. Hardly anyone remembers Schmucker today (though many have heard of Rimmer), but at that time he was nearing the end of a long career as a nationally prominent writer, speaker, and teacher on scientific subjects. Like John Muir, he had a deeply religious response to nature that comes out even in the textbooks he wrote for the future elementary and secondary science teachers who mainly populated his courses at West Chester (PA) State Normal School. I wrote an essay about that debate for the journal, Religion and American Culture, and in doing so I discovered a rare pamphlet on natural theology and theology of nature that Schmucker had written for the American Institute of Sacred Literature. This was before the world wide web was really world wide. I learned about the pamphlet from the old National Union Catalog from the Library of Congress. It was rare—all of the AISL pamphlets are hard to find today—but a local college library had a copy that I was able to study. Inside the front cover was a list of several other pamphlets in a series called “Science and Religion” that the AISL distributed very widely during the years surrounding the Scopes trial in 1925. On further digging I found that there had been nine pamphlets in all, and that Compton had contributed to a tenth pamphlet that closely relates to the others, even though technically it was not issued as part of the same series.

I knew then that I had made a very interesting and potentially important discovery: a whole series of pamphlets on science and religion, written mostly by very famous scientists (such as Robert Millikan) and clergy (such as Harry Emerson Fosdick), that neither historians of science nor historians of religion knew anything about. I made plans eventually to write a history of the pamphlets, but since I was heavily involved then with an edition of Robert Boyle’s works I had to postpone further work on the pamphlets for many years. Since finishing the Boyle project in 2000, most of my research has been focused on the pamphlets and their authors. That’s where Compton comes in.

Even so, I didn’t envision a separate study about Compton until I realized how much he had actually written about science and religion and the range of important topics he had covered. Nor did I know until quite recently how much unpublished material related to this vital interest of his—letters, speeches, draft versions of published works, even a lengthy autobiographical essay that was crucial to my research. Nearly all of his manuscripts are at Washington University in St. Louis, where he did the work that led to his Nobel Prize and where he was Chancellor after World War Two. The archival staff there are as knowledgeable as they are friendly, which always helps. In addition, Compton’s younger son, John Joseph Compton (named after the famous physicist Joseph John Thomson), is still living. He had briefly been my department chair at Vanderbilt, and he was delighted to help me with my project. So it was easier than it might have been to pull together the materials for the essay.

Sorry for such a long answer, Jack. What’s your next question?

Hello, everyone. The ASA blog has been a long time coming, but I am very glad we are finally there. Terry and Randy deserve our thanks for getting it off the ground. They are also ahead of me in launching their parts, which is ironic given that I am the Council member who made it such a priority to establish a blog for you, our members. It is you whom we serve, so please keep your opinions coming, including opinions about the ASA list that is presently taking a sabbatical. We have not yet decided its fate, and your views on this are being heard. The place to express those views, however, is over on “ASA Voices,” not here.

This particular blog is devoted to discussing the essays in our journal, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith. I also want to have your thoughts about how best to do this, but please send them privately to me at tdavis@messiah.edu. I’d like to keep this space focused as far as possible on the content of the journal, not the logistics of blogging about it. Let me admit from the start my own very limited experience with this format; many of our members and most of my students probably know a great deal more than me about how to blog effectively. I ask for your patience. If you get frustrated with me, an offer to help in substantive ways is likely to get more results than a pointed comment about my ignorance – which (I assure you) is all too great.

There are also many demands on my time—is this not so for most of us? Consequently I won’t try to keep a breakneck pace here. In most cases I will try simply to initiate conversations that others will dominate: conversations involving the authors of essays with our members, conversations that I will facilitate but not participate in more than anyone else. I don’t expect to say very much, frankly, unless the essay under discussion relates to my professional expertise or I simply can’t restrain myself from asking a particular question or adding a particular viewpoint. Mostly, I expect to follow the conversation quietly and occasionally, not loudly and constantly.

As long as everyone adheres to our policy, I shouldn’t need to make a nuisance of myself. Express your views freely; disagree with any idea you don’t like, as long as it’s relevant to the topic; don’t shy away from vigorous engagement with ideas and pursuit of the truth. In all things, however, be as charitable as you can toward those who hold those ideas you don’t like. We all hope to spend eternity together, and there in the presence of our Lord we will continue relationships that we have only just begun during our short time on this earth. Let’s try to get them off to a good start.

Having just said that ordinarily I want to be more in the background than the foreground, I will deny all of that for the moment—though soon you will be able to hold me my implicit promise. To get us started, I invited Jack Haas to ask me some questions about my essay on Arthur Compton’s religious life and views, which was serialized in the three most recent issues of PSCF, June 2009, September 2009, and December 2009. (Let me add that the March issue will contain John Compton’s fascinating, invaluable memoir of his father. Be sure not to miss it.)

Jack, a retired chemistry professor from Gordon College, is a former editor of PSCF. In addition to his scientific and editorial experience, Jack has published refereed articles on John Wesley’s interest in natural philosophy (the forerunner of what we call “science” today) and some other historical topics. In short, I thought he might be the ideal person to interview me about my work on Compton. His questions are brief, clear, and thoughtful. My answers are unfortunately much longer.

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