PHILADELPHIA Scholars gather to look at science and religion

The largest group was there to discuss altruism.
DALLAS MORNING NEWS
PHILADELPHIA -- A conference dedicated to religion and science can produce odd juxtapositions.
That was surely true last month, when more than 400 scholars, researchers and others from 23 nations came together here at "Works of Love: Scientific and Religious Perspectives on Altruism."
The exchanges offered a sense of the range of the conference -- mainstream scientists, people outside the mainstream who wanted to work within the framework of science and folks simply out on the fringe. They all shared an interest in faith and human behavior and a civility that cut across boundaries of credentials and beliefs.
Even the jargon was friendly. One researcher is creating a database on college students he called S.M.I.L.E. -- Spiritual Modeling Inventory of Life Environments.
Love theme
"This is a conference about love," said Solomon Katz, president of the mostly mainstream Metanexus Institute on Religion and Science. "This is a conference about spiritual transformation."
But just as there's a fine line between an interesting stew and an inedible mess, there were times that this event seemed to combine too many ingredients.
"I get the feeling that we're a bunch of ball bearings bumping up against each other,' said Ann Rasmussen, a clinical psychologist from New Jersey.
Participants were religiously diverse. Christians of various denominations mingled with Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, atheists and those, like the woman receiving cosmic messages about her DNA, whose spirituality was harder to pin down.
Sponsors
The six-day event was run by Metanexus, which is based in Philadelphia, and the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, based at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Both are largely funded by the Templeton Foundation, the creation of financier-turned-philanthropist Sir John Templeton.
Templeton believes that faith and science can learn from each other. His goal is nothing less than the creation of a new, respected academic discipline that combines religion and science.
The largest group was there to discuss altruism -- what it is, how to measure it, how to encourage it, who has it and who doesn't. Speakers included Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, the world-famous Talmudic scholar; Arthur Caplan, the noted bioethicist from the University of Pennsylvania; and James Towney and John DiIulio, the current and former czars, respectively, of the Bush administration's faith-based initiative.
A second group represented leaders of the "Local Societies Initiative," an international, Templeton-funded group dedicated to getting people talking about science and religion.
A third group included researchers whose projects are funded by Metanexus. Their experiments all touch on the question of spiritual transformation. What is it? How can we identify it biologically or psychologically? How can we measure its effects on people and society?
New research
Some examples of the 24 new experiments whose funding was announced at the conference:
Nina Azari, a university researcher from the Netherlands, has done brain scans of Christians who report that they commune with God. They say they experience God, or Jesus, as a personality. And their brains light up, according to Dr. Azari, just like someone who is in a relationship with another human. She next plans to scan the brains of Buddhist monks, whose faith doesn't involve a relationship with a personal God, to see if different parts of their brains are active.
Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor at the University of Texas, is trying to determine which social pressures encourage spiritual development among teenagers and how that development affects their behavior.
Gail Ironson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Miami, is investigating how AIDS patients' spiritual outlook affects their ability to cope with their illness.
Sandra Lane at State University of New York's Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, will follow 176 new mothers to determine whether parenthood makes them -- and the babies' fathers -- more spiritual.