Science: An Attribute of God

Many people suspect that scientists, riding high in the modern world, are uninterested in man’s spiritual qualities, which cannot be subjected to test tube and microscopic analysis. One scientist who is deeply interested in analysis of the spirit is Biologist Edmund W. Sinnott, dean of Yale’s Graduate School. In his new book, The Biology of the Spirit (Viking; $3.50), Professor Sinnott tries to find some common foundation for the spiritual feelings of man and the facts about material life that have been discovered by biologists.

“Through all the centuries,” says Professor Sinnott, “one question more than any other has perplexed explorers of the realm of man—his strange double nature. The physical part of him, his body, is born, lives, grows and dies . . . But governing that body there seems to be an intangible something that can feel and think, a subtler part of him which is the essence of his being . . . Man seems to be two beings—a material one, and its immaterial counterpart . . . Are they both ‘real,’ or is one of them no more than an illusion?”

The Goal. To find a basis common to body and spirit, Professor Sinnott goes all the way back to protoplasm, the mysterious material in living cells which is much the same in all organisms from bacteria up to man. The biologists have learned a great deal about it … but so far they have not explained its most striking attribute: its purposefulness.

Even in the simplest organisms, the protoplasm seems to have a goal; it knows what it wants to do. Starting with the single small blob in a fertilized egg cell, it inexorably grows to a special form—frog, pine tree or man. Inert, unorganized matter flows into the growing organism and is at once transformed by the touch of its life. It becomes alive; it creeps or flies or sings or loves. When matter is touched by man’s protoplasm, the kind with the highest purpose, it becomes extremely complicated, with thoughts and aspirations that defy scientific pinpointing.

Opposing Streams. Nothing else like this touch of life, says Professor Sinnott, exists in the universe, and science so far has not explained it. “Attention has often been called to the curious contrast between organic evolution and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.* Through evolution has come a succession of living things that shows progressively higher levels of organization. The organic world has constantly moved upward. The Second Law, on the other hand, expresses the undoubted fact that lifeless matter tends to decrease in the degree of its organization, to grow more and more random in character that the universe tends to ‘run down.’

“There seem to be in nature two opposing streams—the tendency toward organization and goal-seeking, and the tendency toward chance and randomness. The upward purposeful thrust of life, which continually opposes the downward drag of matter, is evidence, I think, that in nature there is something that we may call—to name what can never be put into words—a Principle of Organization. Not only does lift man ever higher but it provides three great essentials for his religion—: brings order out of randomness, spirit out of matter, and personality out of neutral and impersonal stuff. This Principle of Organization, lifted far above its expression in matter and into the realm of spirit may without irreverence, I believe be thought of as an attribute of God.”

* The Second Law of Thermodynamics, generally credited to German Physicist Rudolf Julius Emmanuel Clausius (1822-88), teaches in its simplest form that heat of its own accord will always flow from higher to lower temperature.