Deus ex Laboratorio

Do scientists believe in God? Most of them do, concludes Reporter Howard Whitman after a cross-country tour of the nation's laboratories.

There are skeptics, of course, Whitman concedes in an article in the current issue of Collier's. But the majority of scientists, like Newton, consider themselves children playing on the seashore while the ocean of truth lies undiscovered in the distance.

"What we know is just the tiniest fragment," said a Wayne University professor of physics. "For the whole, we depend upon faith." Even the "law of chance" presupposes a law, argued an anthropologist. "Whose law? For me, I prefer the belief in a creator, divine, supernatural. I cannot accept chaos."

At Brookhaven National Laboratory an engineer was sure that he could account for God scientifically. "Up in the pile we see mass disappearing and becoming energy, but nowhere can we add to or subtract from the total of mass and energy. Where did mass and energy come from? . . . We have found laws to prove we can't make it. Yet it must come from somewhere. There must be a Higher Power who can make it."

The older scientists, reported Whitman, have the deepest spiritual awareness. "Most of them had gone through the phase of agnosticism. They had moved on." Said one elderly geneticist: "When we think we know a lot, we're agnostic. When we learn how insignificant our knowledge is--we return to God." It is the cocksure youngster in the laboratory, Whitman found, who says, "How wonderful I am! Look what I've found in the atom!" The old man says, "Isn't God wonderful--look what He's put in the atom!"

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