From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Space and Spirituality
The impulse to see a world beyond a human one.
Why do we go into space? It's a question that the families of the victims of the space shuttle Columbia tragedy--not to mention members of Congress, which is planning to convene hearings on the subject as soon as next week--may be asking themselves a lot in the coming days. Space exploration is, after all, not like other scientific fields. Astronauts are not searching for a cure for cancer. Nor do they invent devices to make human life easier or safer. Though some important knowledge of human or plant biology or even a military advantage may be gained from the sojourns of these men and women, it has never seemed like their primary purpose.
President Bush noted the unique nature of this endeavor in his remarks on Saturday: "Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand." Indeed, perhaps one of the reasons NASA has been so frequently taken through the budget-cut wringer is the intangibility of the benefits the agency provides.
That the space program remains so important to the hearts and minds of Americans seems explicable only through the mystical nature of space exploration. According to their obituaries, four of the Columbia seven had wanted to be astronauts since they were small children. It could be a sign of the special determination required to get into the program, but there is also something so natural, even spiritual, about the idea of space exploration that even a child can grasp it.
Still, it is more than a simple child's yearning to "touch" what he can only see from afar. The impulse to see if there is a world beyond the human world, whether there is life other than human life, and view our own planet from another perspective, is deeply entangled with our curiosity about the fundamental questions of existence.
Maybe that's why no one seems surprised that at least three of the seven Columbia astronauts were religious: Lt. Col. Michael P. Anderson taught Sunday school at his local Baptist Church, Col. Rick D. Husband sang in his church's choir, and Col. Ilan Ramon carried a small Torah scroll with him, once used at a bar mitzvah in a Nazi concentration camp. But maybe the spirituality of these astronauts is remarkable. Secular culture so often teaches us that religion and science are mutually exclusive, even contradictory, forces. After such tragedies, we tend to throw astronauts into the hero pool with members of the military (certainly many astronauts do come up through the ranks of the armed forces and they are not unworthy of similar admiration), but that they are highly educated scientists cannot be ignored.
Indeed, these men didn't seem to see a conflict between maintaining their religious beliefs and exploring the outermost reaches of space, even though such missions have helped provide mankind with some of the most important information regarding the way in which the world was created. And they are hardly alone. A little-remembered 1997 survey of American scientists noted that about 40% of biologists, physicists and mathematicians say they believe in a God who actively communicates with humankind and to whom one may pray "in expectation of receiving an answer," while only 15% said they had "no definite belief" in a deity. Most interestingly, despite the vast growth in our knowledge of the universe in the intervening years, the percentages have not changed since the survey was first conducted in 1916.
Some 60 miles west of where most of the debris from Columbia has been falling sits Baylor University, the nation's oldest Baptist college, which, in the past couple of years, has become a flashpoint in the religion-science wars. Its establishment of the Center for Complexity, Information and Design--where researchers attempt to calculate through scientific means just how infinitesimal the chances are that the world came to be the way it is through random genetic mutation, and then speculate that some sort of intelligent being must have instead played a role--led to Baylor's lambasting in the national media by both leading religious and scientific figures.
Interestingly, though, this controversy has proved the exception at Baylor and other religious universities around the country, where most professors and students see their religious beliefs and scientific pursuits as tightly integrated. Truell Hyde, the vice provost for research at Baylor, who has worked on projects for NASA and tried to make it on to the Columbia flight, explains, "The chance to see more of God's creation is an awfully big draw for me" both as a Christian and a scientist. Indeed, the idea, as Mr. Hyde puts it, "that the Lord basically gives you intelligence because he wants you to do everything you can with it to understand the world around you" could hardly have been foreign to the astronauts aboard Columbia.
Generally, the interaction between religion and science receives public attention only when the two are at odds, but the occasions when they complement each other often outnumber these. In the case of Saturday's tragedy, religion has given us consolation when science has failed. Paraphrasing the prophet Isaiah, President Bush told his audience, "The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today." But perhaps belief in a higher power may bring something even more important than this comfort--a drive to go back "into the darkness beyond our world."
Ms. Schaefer, an adjunct fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is writing a book about religious colleges.
