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6. The other thing that I take to be common ground between the two positions is that the fact of convergence between science and reli­gion is not in question. My problem with the approach to settling the
alleged conflict between science and religion to which I feel the closest-­namelyclosest—namely, the one that takes them to be different in principleis principleis that it seems simply to deny that they could ever converge. So far as I can see, however, even if science and religion are as logically different as I take them to be, they nevertheless both have implications metaphysical and moral-where moral—where they in principle converge and, as I argued last year, also converge in fact, insofar as we take our bearings from the most ex­citing recent developments in both areas of concern. The issue as I see it, then, is not whether convergence, but how to understand and talk about the convergence that undoubtedly exists both in principle and in fact.

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8. Now my main reservation about such proposals of a "fusion" or "union" of science and religion as Roger Sperry put before us last year is that they simply surrender this radically monotheistic understanding of God in favor of some form or other of pantheism in which God is equated with the laws and forces of the world, however reconceived from the world of an earlier reductionistic, deterministic, materialistic kind of science. Please don't misunderstand me: I've been called a pantheist myself often enough to realize that it is usually simply a cuss word, whose lack of precise meaning makes it ideally suited to dismiss any religious or theo­logical view that is sufficiently different from one's own. The point, however, is not the words by which positions are identified. Whatever we call them-and them—and "pantheism" is the word that Roger Sperry himself used to identify his own position-there position—there are absolutely fundamental differences between a position for which God is the one universal individual, who alone exists necessarily as the primal source and final end of all contingent things and another position for which the word "God" refers to nothing other than cer­tain of these contingent things themselves, or certain of their more or less abstract properties. Of course, I can only welcome Sperry's antimaterial­istic, antidualistic "monistic mentalism," since, if I am correct, this kind of monism is necessarily implied by what I take to be a proper radically monotheistic concept of God. Likewise, I have no more interest than he does in giving aid and comfort to the kind of dualistic, supernaturalist, and otherworldly
religion which implicitly denies the ultimate significance of our life in this world and keeps us from taking proper responsibility for it by divert­ing our attention to some other life in some other world; for, once again, if I am correct, faith in GodJproperly conceived, precludes any such dualism and other:worldliness as seriously misguided. But as much as I thus find myself sharing many of Sperry's intentions and concerns, I frankly find the union of science and religion that he proposes to involve sacrificing the one thing in religion that I take to be of its essence--namelyessence—namely, the reality of God as infinitely other and more than anything that science as such may reasonably make the object of its concern. If such sacrifice is the price of science's and religion's being fused or united, then, so far as I am concerned, it's preferable that they should remain separated or divided.

9. But what is this, you may ask, if not to fall back on the same kind of dogmatic defense of religion that I have affected to reject? Surely, the fact that Sperry's proposal calls for abandoning a particular
form of religious belief does not mean that it calls for abandoning re­ligion altogether. And why shouldn't we abandon a prescientific form of religion, if we are really free to pursue religious inquiry whithersoever it may lead? My answer is that we have every reason to abandon any form of religion, provided we have some more adequate form of religion to re­place it with--just with—just as, contrariwise, we have no reason to cling to any form of religion unless it is more adequate than all of the other forms that we might possibly accept instead. The point, however, is that the relative adequacy of a form of religion has to be decided by reference to the reli­gious question and the human interest lying behind it, not by reference to the very different question of science and the correspondingly different human interest that lies behind it. Thus the fact, if it be a fact, that the kind of religious view that Sperry proposed is incompatible with the view implied by the radical monotheism of Christianity and Judaism is not what explains my reservation about it. I am sceptical about his view be­cause, like any other purely naturalistic or humanistic religion, it seems to me to be religiously shallow relative to the religious profund­ity of radical monotheism. This is particularly apparent, I believe, when one considers what he has to say about "after-life alternatives." Precisely if one accepts his conclusion from mind-brain science that "the conscious self, as we ordinarily experience it, does not survive brain death" (30), one can hardly escape the question, which I take to be one of the more important ways of formulating the religious question,
of the ultimate aim of a life that so inescapably ends in death. I fear that to this question the little that Sperry has to say about "ways in which the highest aspect or form of the conscious experiences of each in­dividual can realistically be extended... to exist beyond death of the neural substrate that originally sustained it" doesn't offer much of an answer. Perhaps it is true that "the essence of the very best of the con­scious self of Beethoven, of Shakespeare, Michelangelo, etc. are [sic] still with us." But I fail to see what it could mean to say this if the likes of minds like yours and mine are the only measure of the essence of those who have gone before us. Surely, if we alone are the measure of their essence, they are by and large not still with us, having long since slipped into the oblivion from which our poor mindsare powerless to redeem them. On the contrary, if among the lives for which we each live is the strictly universal and everlasting life of God, then whatever the forgetfulness of all the others who come after us, we can look to the never-fading memory of God as the adequate measure of all that we have ever been. But is it not clear that anything other or less than God so understood leaves the question that death raises unanswered--orunanswered—or, at best, merely implicitly answered by our continuing to liveJnotwithstanding live notwithstanding the fact that we have to die?

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