Books - (author:victor B Scheffer)

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--About 85 percent of the world's people adhere to one or another of the world's 5,000 religions.
--Nearly half of the members of the Unitarian Church are college graduates.
--Only 7 percent of the members of the National Academy of Sciences believe in a personal god.

These are some of the facts that Victor Scheffer, nearing the end of a career in wildlife biology, has gleaned from the literature of science, philosophy, and religion. In the present essay he reflects on the implications of religion for our wellbeing and wellfeeling.

He believes that the universe is infinite and timeless and that we can never know its fullness. In the meanwhile, we wonder about its architecture and dimensions--a preoccupation which nourishes our spiritual need for "meaning."

Scheffer sees commonalities in the ritualized methods of big-brained social wild animals and the ritualized methods of humans in religious systems. In both systems, the driving energy is fueled by a combination of emotion and reason (broadly defined). Christianity, a monotheistic religion, evolved from primitive ideas of a god-as-moralist and a god-as-creator. Ultimately the two merged into one humanoid Being--the One who was to play leading roles in the Holy Scriptures.

Religion has a bright side and a dark side--the former showing itself as good works and the latter as disputation and intolerance. Certain issues in public thought, such as church vs. state, special creation vs. Darwinian evolution, and science vs. religion, seem today as lively as ever. They quicken wherever public schools are poor and wherever public media (especially TV programs) emphasize entertainment over substance.

Christianity faces new challenges to its survival in a global environment reeling from the burden of too many people trying to subsist on too few life-giving resources. A recent cause known as the "greening of religion" is helping to protect such resources as remain on a degraded and contaminated planet.

Scheffer believes that religion will gradually lose its dependence on, and its reverence for, the supernatural and will increasingly turn to recognition of the natural. "The religion of the future," he writes (hopefully), "will celebrate the position of humanity as a singularity evolving far beyond all other forms of life. It is supremely worthwhile . . . Religion will encourage men and women to exercise the habits of social bonding and reciprocal altruism which gave the first people a quantum lead over contemporary primates."