Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

If World War II-era warbler Kate Smith sang today, her anthem could be Gods Bless America. That's one of the key findings in newly released research that reveals America's drift from clearly defined religious denominations to faiths cut to fit personal preferences.

The folks who make up God as they go are side-by-side with self-proclaimed believers who claim the Christian label but shed their ties to traditional beliefs and practices. Religion statistics expert George Barna says, with a wry hint of exaggeration, America is headed for "310 million people with 310 million religions."

"We are a designer society. We want everything customized to our personal needs — our clothing, our food, our education," he says. Now it's our religion.

Barna's new book on U.S. Christians, Futurecast, tracks changes from 1991 to 2011, in annual national surveys of 1,000 to 1,600 U.S. adults. All the major trend lines of religious belief and behavior he measured ran downward — except two. More people claim they have accepted Jesus as their savior and expect to go to heaven.

And more say they haven't been to church in the past six months except for special occasions such as weddings or funerals. In 1991, 24% were "unchurched." Today, it's 37%. Barna blames pastors for those oddly contradictory findings. Everyone hears, "Jesus is the answer. Embrace him. Say this little Sinners Prayer and keep coming back. It doesn't work. People end up bored, burned out and empty," he says. "They look at church and wonder, 'Jesus died for this?'" The consequence, Barna says, is that, for every subgroup of religion, race, gender, age and region of the country, the important markers of religious connection are fracturing.

"Religion, at last, can no longer be ignored."

That was one of five "unintended, unforeseen" consequences of 9/11, according to historian R. Scott Appleby of University of Notre Dame.

Reporting on the spiritual impact of 9/11 has given me the chance to talk longer with Appleby and with theologian and psychologist Fraser Watts who raises the provocative idea that religion can be "healthy or unhealthy."

Both spoke this weekend at the Templeton-Cambridge seminars on Science and Religion sponsored by the Templeton Foundation (check tweets for more seminar insights at #TCJF).

Appleby, who co-chaired the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Task Force on Religion and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy, also directs "Contending Modernities," a program examining the interaction of Catholic, Muslim and secular forces in modern world.

His five points began with the tidal shift in views on religion in academia and politics. Following World War II the dominant view was that religion would inevitably give way to secularism, become privatized and be increasingly irrelevant in the public square. That "secular myopia" vanished "when 9/11 made it palpably clear that religion does matter in all these realms."

• Religion is now being treated with more depth and sophistication -- by media, government and academia. There's new recognition that believers are "not all pathological or irrational or crazy. We see more nuance now. And we see that people are making a conscious and reasoned choices to hold on to faith.
• "Islam has been put in the spotlight" with consequences to the good, such as the Common Word document by Muslim scholars addressed to the Catholic Church, and to the bad, such as the "new McCarthyism" of fear and anger toward Muslims. Appleby cites new initiatives around the world in serious interfaith, interreligious dialogue and collaboration.
• There's a new interest in examining the structural and substantive ways that "healthy" religion is working in the world for promoting peace and social justice and defeating poverty and disease. The world's challenges have to be met collectively and cannot be resolved with the faith communities.

The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, delivered an unfathomable religious jolt. Thousands were killed in a cruel, distorted vision of Islam, a religion that teaches peace. And for millions of Americans, the immediate response was to drop to their knees in prayer.

Sanctuaries filled for memorial services. Cardinal Edward Egan of New York remembers crowds overflowing St. Patrick's Cathedral.

A decade later, the soulful response seems fleeting. Statistically, the rush to the pews was a mere blip in a long-standing trend away from traditional religious practice, according to tracking studies by The Barna Group, a Christian research company. What's lingering is the spiritual impact revealed when 9/11 stories are recounted through individual recollections of faith reborn, revitalized or reshaped.

This is how people speak of an internal resetting of the compass, of journeys down pathways once unfamiliar, even unimagined. Pastor Mark Driscoll, who was 30 and just building his Seattle church a decade ago, says he discovered he was more fragile, more dependent on God, and more urgent about launching new churches than he'd known.

"Life is filled with opportunities to do good. We don't know how many we have, so you want to be there to invest, love and not take any day for granted," he says. His Mars Hill Church is now a multisite mega-church and he is a co-founder of Acts 29, a network that has launched 400 new congregations here and abroad.

Fatemeh Fakhraie, then a college freshman in Utah, was "just a white girl with a funny name" when the 9/11 attacks "found my identity for me before I was ready to find it for myself."

Within a few years, the U.S.-born daughter of Iranian parents began practicing Islam with fresh commitment. She founded and edits a website, Muslimah Media Watch, where 16 feminists of faith critique coverage of their issues in world culture. This month, as she says her prayers during Ramadan, Fakhraie, based in a Portland, Ore., suburb, observes, "Sept. 11 was 10 years ago and the media are still trying to explain Islam."

Others found themselves trying to explain Judaism and Christianity.

Muslims will be more than one-quarter of the Earth's population by 2030, according to a study released today.

The number of U.S. Muslims will more than double, so you are as likely to know a Muslim here in 20 years as you are to know someone Jewish or Episcopalian today.

Those are among key findings in The Future of the Global Muslim Population, the first comprehensive examination of Muslims, whose numbers have been growing at a faster rate than all other groups combined.

"We're not surprised. Our mosques and schools are already overflowing," says Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, outreach director of a mosque in Falls Church, Va.

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life analyzed statistics from United Nations data and census material from more than 200 countries and studies by 50 international demographers.

If immigration patterns and Muslims' comparatively higher birth rates continue, Pew projects:

• U.S. Muslims will go from a tiny minority now, less than 1% of the nation, to 1.7%. That's a jump from 2.6 million people in 2010 to 6.2 million.
• Muslim immigration to the USA and Muslims' share of all new legal permanent residents will continue to rise. Most of the immigrants will arrive from South Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
• Though 64.5% of U.S. Muslims today were born abroad, that percentage will fall to 55% as the number of native-born Muslims rises.
• Worldwide, Muslims will climb from 23.4% to 26.4% of the population, going from 1.6 billion people in 2010 to 2.2 billion in 2030, concentrated in Muslim-majority countries.

In times of crisis and natural disasters, many are eager to donate. But fundraising for chronic diseases and global troubles such as hunger or a lack of clean water can be more of a challenge. So faith-based groups have gotten creative.

They use ingenuity and strategies true to religious teachings to reel in first-time givers and conquer giving fatigue in regular donors by linking up to holy days and life cycle celebrations.

Here's a look at three groups that make giving easy, faithful — and joyful.

The Advent Conspiracy

Three evangelical pastors were fed up with Christmas because "its meaning, beauty and holiness had been sucked clean and dry," recalls Tony Biaggne, creative director for Windsor Crossing Community Church in Chesterfield, Mo.

Out of their shared complaints, the Advent Conspiracy was born in 2006 and became an annual worldwide effort to embody the spirit of Advent's four weeks of prayerful focus before Christmas.

Pastors Greg Holder of Windsor Crossing, Chris Seay of Ecclesia Church in Houston and Rick McKinley of Imago Dei Community in Portland, Ore., came up with the campaign's four themes: to worship fully, to spend less, to give "more gifts that matter" and to "love all," Biaggne says.

The Crossing donated "every dollar, dime and check" to Living Water, a Houston-based non-profit group that addresses water needs village by village worldwide, he says.

If you pray to God, to whom — or what — are you praying?

When you sing God Bless America, whose blessing are you seeking?

In the USA, God — or the idea of a God — permeates daily life. Our views of God have been fundamental to the nation's past, help explain many of the conflicts in our society and worldwide, and could offer a hint of what the future holds. Is God by our side, or beyond the stars? Wrathful or forgiving? Judging us every moment, someday or never?

Surveys say about nine out of 10 Americans believe in God, but the way we picture that God reveals our attitudes on economics, justice, social morality, war, natural disasters, science, politics, love and more, say Paul Froese and Christopher Bader, sociologists at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Their new book, America's Four Gods: What We Say About God — And What That Says About Us, examines our diverse visions of the Almighty and why they matter.

Based primarily on national telephone surveys of 1,648 U.S. adults in 2008 and 1,721 in 2006, the book also draws from more than 200 in-depth interviews that, among other things, asked people to respond to a dozen evocative images, such as a wrathful old man slamming the Earth, a loving father's embrace, an accusatory face or a starry universe.

Americans are clear on God but foggy on facts about faiths.

The new U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, released today by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, finds that although 86% of us believe in God or a higher power, we don't know our own traditions or those of neighbors across the street or across the globe.

Among 3,412 adults surveyed, only 2% correctly answered at least 29 of 32 questions on the Bible, major religious figures, beliefs and practices. The average score was 16 correct (50%).

Key findings:

•Doctrines don't grab us. Only 55% of Catholic respondents knew the core teaching that the bread and wine in the Mass become the body and blood of Christ, and are not merely symbols. Just 19% of Protestants knew the basic tenet that salvation is through faith alone, not actions as well.

•Basic Bible eludes us. Just 55% of all respondents knew the Golden Rule isn't one of the Ten Commandments; 45% could name all four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John).

•World religions are a struggle. Fewer than half (47%) knew that the Dalai Lama is a Buddhist; 27% knew most people in Indonesia are Muslims.

"People say, 'I have a personal connection with God and that's really all I need to know.' Who am I to argue?" says Pew's Alan Cooperman, a co-author of the report.

But religion, as a force in history and a motivator in present times, "has consequences in the world," he adds, so an intellectual baseline, whatever your faith or lack of faith, can "shape your role as a citizen in the public square."

The top scoring groups were atheists/agnostics, Jews and Mormons. These tiny groups, adding up to less than 7% of Americans, scored particularly well on world religion and U.S. constitutional questions. It's unclear why, although highly educated people overall did best on the quiz, researchers say.

Guilt gets a bad rap as a relentless joke: Catholic guilt. Jewish guilt. Mormon guilt. Even Lutherans have guilt, or, some say, guilt envy. We dub our trivial naughtiness "guilty pleasures" to put a little frosting on those thorns of conscience.

But as Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement nears (it begins at sunset Friday), experts say guilt is not passé, it's essential — and probably inescapable.

"Guilt has been with us as long as humans have psyches, "but we still don't know definitively how it works in the human psyche or the best way to deal with it," says Temple University psychology professor Frank Farley, former president of the American Psychological Association.

Even so, Farley, faith writers and clergy say the best response to guilt is to face up, embrace it — then let it go.

Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles offers a defense of guilt.

Facing up to the hurt we cause others with cruel speech or callous acts, and to our myriad failures to meet the marks God sets for living a true and good life, "makes forgiveness meaningful, not merely a catchphrase," Wolpe says.

"If you hurt someone, then the least you could do is feel bad. That's what moral responsibility looks like," adds evangelical writer Philip Yancey, author of a new book, What Good is God? Of course, you don't have to be religious to feel guilt.

Chelsea Clinton, a Methodist, and Marc Mezvinsky, a Conservative Jew, had their very private wedding on Saturday. But the public may not be done peering through the shrubbery at their lives.

Like it or not, the famous bride and groom will continue to be the focus of scrutiny for their religiously mixed marriage — a category that's

growing rapidly among U.S. couples.

Two decades ago, 25% of U.S. couples didn't share the same faith. That was up to 31% by 2006-08, according to the General Social Survey by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. The number was even higher, 37%, in the 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Both surveys included people who crossed major traditions, such as Jewish-Protestant, believers married to the unaffiliated, and Protestants of different denominations, such as former president Bill Clinton, a Baptist, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Methodist.

For those of nominal faith, this is no big deal. "Everybody party" is a popular way to avoid doctrinal conflicts, however thin on theology. But for those who hold deep but different faiths, life-cycle decisions will loom, from baptism (No? Yes? Whose church?) to burial (Can you rest in sacred ground of another faith?). Every rite of passage, sacred ritual and major holy day will require negotiation: First Communion? Bar or bat mitzvah? Passover Seder, Easter vigil or Eid Al-Fitr feast to break Islam's Ramadan fast?

Looking on: Parents and clergy who fear that distinctive beliefs, sacred rituals and centuries-old cultural traditions will be diluted or discarded.

Remember that mini-media blitz of 2008 stories saying hard times prompt people to attend a church, synagogue or mosque more often? A few booming churches were shown to present a case that recession had a spiritual silver lining. Whoops! A Gallup Survey released today finds:

"... Instead of church attendance rising when economic times get bad, as some theorize, the opposite pattern may be occurring."

Americans' self-reported church attendance is up very slightly with 43.1% of Americans reporting weekly or almost weekly attendance at a church, synagogue or mosque while their sense of economic confidence is also on the rise, according to a Gallup Survey released today.

Gallup's Economic Confidence Index" for January-May 2010 was -26, a big jump up from the depths of the recession in 2008 when it was -50 and weekly or almost weekly church attendance was 42.1% that year. This suggests that, says Gallup:

" ... Such correlations do not prove causality, and it is possible that despite the more positive economic confidence, other economic realities such as unemployment could be related to the increase in church attendance.

Still, these particular population-level data do little to directly support the theory that people seek out the solace of religion, as measured in religious service participation, when economic times turn tough." Meanwhile, the biggest numbers on Gallup's charts are for those who seldom or never go to church -- holding almost rock-steady at 46% in 2008 and 45% in 2010. Of course, this speaks to public worship, not private prayer or private faith. We don't know from this survey if people are praying any more or less in tough times. And I would think if you're a praying person, there are always reasons to call on God, not just to petition for help with the mortgage.

The case of an abortion at a Catholic hospital in Phoenix prompted an angry bishop to rebuke the Sister of Mercy who allowed the surgery to save the mother's life.

But you don't have to be a pregnant woman with a rare heart condition to be affected by the questions raised at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center.

You don't even have to be Catholic.

If you are in a Catholic facility (where one-sixth of U.S. hospital beds are located), the Phoenix case could make you question who has final say in life-and-death decisions: You, or the local bishop?

What happens if your care choices, or your doctor's, clash with the ethical dictates Catholic hospitals must heed?

The Catholic bishops' Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services spells out a vision of life and the morality of care from conception to "natural death."

Catholic teachings are clearly opposed to abortion and artificial contraception; bishops likewise fought laws in Oregon and Washington state that allow doctors to write life-ending prescriptions for dying patients.

In the Phoenix case, Bishop Thomas Olmsted said the abortion could never have been justified, even if the mother would have died without it.

But moral theologians and ethicists say the bishops' directives are far more nuanced than many people realize.

"It all comes down to how you define 'care' — the most basic expectation any patient brings to a hospital. And Catholic hospitals are known for very competent, very personal care," says Kevin O'Rourke, a priest and professor of bioethics at the Loyola Medical School in Chicago.

'Principle of double-effect'

In the Phoenix case, physicians concluded that only removing the placenta could save the woman dying from pulmonary hypertension.

UPDATE: 3:45

Forget Judaism, think about the fun critics might have with Elena Kagan's upper West Side upbringing, says the local Westside Independent, noting their neighborhood reputation as "a haven for cheese-eating Socialists..."

And a look at the 1994 obituary for her late father, Robert Kagan, shows the kind of community activism roots that might have made her appealing to Obama.

"From 1971 to 1975 he was also the chairman of COMBO, a committee representing West Side community boards, which opposed the Westway highway project. In 1968 he was the president of the United Parents Association, a citywide parents' advocacy group. He was also a trustee of the West End Synagogue."

When her mother, Gloria, a teacher at Hunter College, died in 2008, the synagogue paid for a death notice honoring,

"... this small but mighty, highly principled, intelligent, idealistic lady."

And just in case anyone missed the religion issue, the headline on J.J. Goldberg's blog at The Jewish Daily Forward is 'How many Jews does it take to light up a high court firestorm?'

Reaction is coming from the predicted directions: Pro-life voices condemning Elena Kagan's nomination to the high court and liberal Democrats lauding it. But it didn't take long for religious voices to begin voicing the religious question.

Sister Carol Keehan, lauded Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as one of the heroes of the passage of health care reform, drew a rousing welcome today at a conference of social justice Catholics.

Yesterday, Pelosi with a standing ovation and shouts of gratitude from the nuns, priest, academics and activists gathered for a "Washington Briefing" on faith and public policy. Now they added sports event-worthy cheers for the sister who spoke out for the controversial legislation.

Keehan, president and CEO of Catholic Health Association and one of Time magazine's Top 100 most influential people this year, rolled her eyes when she was introduced by a long list of honors awarded by the Church and joked that she may have seen the last of those. That's because angry bishops say the legislation does not adequately block federal funding for abortion.

Keehan walked through years of working for the bill, recalling how even three years back she warned others any serious proposal would be "Swift-boated" with misinformation. In the end, she said, it was not a perfect bill but it was "a superb first step," because, "the poor and the working Americans won and they so rarely win. It's wonderful."

She reiterated every step she, and the sisters who joined CHA in providing critical support to the bill, followed to be certain there were no loopholes and no way to circumvent the intention to protect the unborn and prevent abortion.

They worked equally hard, she said on ethical issues such as treatment for immigrants, conscience protections for health workers, care for vulnerable pregnant women, adoption support for foster parents and increased care options for the elderly.

The Catholic Church -- the one in the hearts of its people and the dusty streets of the world, not the much-troubled, abuse-rocked Vatican hierarchy -- gets some proud and profound defense this week from two directions.

Columnist Nicholas Kristof, writing for the New York Times from the Sudan, finds priests and nuns living in the image of Jesus Christ that he says no person should dare scorn.

And Bishop Blase Cupich of Rapid City, S.D., chairman of the Committee for Child and Youth Protection for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has a noteworthy essay in the upcoming Jesuit weekly magazine America. He itemizes 12 lessons the U.S. bishops learned from their scathing experience with the abuse crisis -- lessons the world church could well follow.

I'll start with Kristof and two of the several people introduced in his column on finding "the great soul of the Catholic Church." He meets Michael Barton, a Catholic priest from Indianapolis, in a southern Sudan village 150 miles from any paved road where the Barton runs four schools that graduate top-scoring students.

"To keep his schools alive, he persevered through civil war, imprisonment and beatings, and a smorgasbord of disease. "It's very normal to have malaria," he said. "Intestinal parasites -- that's just normal..."

Anybody scorn him? Anybody think he's a self-righteous hypocrite? On the contrary, he would make a great pope."

Kristof moves on to the city of Juba, where he finds Sister Cathy Arata, a nun from New Jersey now working for a " terrific Catholic project called Solidarity With Southern Sudan...

"Sister Cathy and the others in the project have trained 600 schoolteachers. They are fighting hunger not with handouts but with help for villagers to improve agricultural techniques. They are also establishing a school for health workers, with a special focus on midwifery to reduce deaths in childbirth.

Most young adults today don't pray, don't worship and don't read the Bible, a major survey by a Christian research firm shows. If the trends continue, "the Millennial generation will see churches closing as quickly as GM dealerships," says Thom Rainer, president of LifeWay Christian Resources. In the group's survey of 1,200 18- to 29-year-olds, 72% say they're "really more spiritual than religious." Among the 65% who call themselves Christian, "many are either mushy Christians or Christians in name only," Rainer says. "Most are just indifferent. The more precisely you try to measure their Christianity, the fewer you find committed to the faith." Key findings in the phone survey, conducted in August and released today: · 65% rarely or never pray with others, and 38% almost never pray by themselves either. · 65% rarely or never attend worship services. · 67% don't read the Bible or sacred texts. Many are unsure Jesus is the only path to heaven: Half say yes, half no.

"We have dumbed down what it means to be part of the church so much that it means almost nothing, even to people who already say they are part of the church," Rainer says.

The findings, which document a steady drift away from church life, dovetail with a LifeWay survey of teenagers in 2007 who drop out of church and a study in February by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, which compared the beliefs of Millennials with those of earlier generations of young people.

The new survey has a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points.

Even among those in the survey who "believe they will go to heaven because they have accepted Jesus Christ as savior":

· 68% did not mention faith, religion or spirituality when asked what was "really important in life."

· 50% do not attend church at least weekly.

· 36% rarely or never read the Bible.

Neither are these young Christians evangelical in the original meaning of the term — eager to share the Gospel. Just 40% say this is their responsibility.

Are we evolutionarily programmed to be selfish or to be cooperative? To care primarily for self, kin and survival or to sacrifice for the strength of survival of our "group?'' Can science be truly neutral in this discussion? Or are the findings of science fair game for political and social policy ammunition?

Such questions -- and contesting answers -- date to Charles Darwin, August Comte (who invented the term "altruism" in 1881) to Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) and on up to contemporary critics of both, says historian Thomas Dixon, a professor at the University of London and author of The Invention of Altruism.

Dixon gave one of the concluding lectures at this weekend's seminars on the brain and morality at the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion. He also highlighted authors who look at cooperation through the lens of a social or political agenda and conclude, as Joan Roughgarden does in The Genial Gene, that "cooperation is every bit as natural and obvious as competition."

Darwin did indeed give credence to the ruthless competition model of nature dictating organisms to "multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die."

And yet, he also concluded in The Descent of Man, that love and sympathy and cooperation also exist in the natural world, like the way pelicans might provide fish for a blind pelicanin their flock?

"Communities with the greatest number of sympathetic members would flourish best and produce more offspring" and, Darwin wrote, in an outburst of Victorian moral emotionalism, "virtue will be triumphant."

Dawkins flips this in his work to say that the visitors of evolution are the selfish ones and that altruism must be taught. If we serve each other it's a "blessed misfiring" of genetics.

Who killed John Lennon?

Mark David Chapman, a psychotic, pulled the trigger, assassinating the musician/peace activist in December 1980.

So who killed Lennon, the person or the brain?

That's the kind of question neuroscientists, lawyers and judges are wrestling with today, says Michael Gazzaniga professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and head of the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind.

He's leading a project examining brain studies and the law -- the norms of society that are the basis of our rules. Gazzaniga "What is the brain for? It's there to make decisions," he said at a seminar on neuroscience and morality, sponsored by Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science and Religion where I'm attending lectures and scooping up sources this weekend.

He mused about whether brain scans be accepted in court. What's the veracity of eyewitness testimony? Do we need to revisit the 166-year-old definition of the insanity defense, given what we're learning now about free will and culpability?

After all, most people with brain diseases and conditions, from schizophrenia to people afflicted with tumors and lesions, do not commit crimes and are able to grasp and follow social rules, he says.

However, the brain acquires information and makes decisions well before we are consciously forming choices. Gazzaniga says, "We're all on a little bit of taped delay between unconsciousness and awareness. But none of us believe it. We think we are in charge."

How do we know we evolved to be ethical when "morality doesn't leave any fossils? "

That question, from Martin Redfern of the BBC, was just one of many on the origins of ethics and morality at seminars this weekend. I've invited F&R readers to join me here at the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion where the ideas are flying among scientists, theologians, philosophers and the reporters who cover them.

Evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, traced humanity's evolutionary development and linked the capacity for ethics to advanced intelligence, the development of language and the unique-to-humans concept of self-awareness.

"If I know I exist, I know that I am going to die," said Ayala, professor of biology and philosophy at University of California, Irvine, who then linked this to the rise of religion. Humans are the only ones who practice ceremonial burial of the dead, he said,

"We develop anxiety over our life ending so we try to look for answers beyond our life. This is likely why religion emerges in every society -- as a way to relieve this anxiety."

He thinks ethics -- which can also exist apart from religion in his view -- evolved at the same time as aesthetics, the awareness of beauty. Art and aesthetics, like human altruism, require value judgments and the ability to compare.

Are we evolving away from belief in God? Why did thousands of intelligent people let themselves be deceived by investment fraud king Bernie Madoff? Is morality really in decline in the West and can it be reconstructed?

Such questions are in the air at a seminar on science, morality and the mind at the University of Cambridge, this weekend sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. I've participated in the Templeton-Cambridge Fellowships in Science & Religion since 2005. And for the next few days, I'd like to bring you along for a taste of the lectures and discussions.

It all starts with questions. Fraser Watts, a professor of theology and science, and Director of Studies, Queens' College set the program off with a wave of his own: What can science tell us about the origin and workings of morality? How did moral capacity arise? Is it all evolutionary? What's the role of neuroscience? What goes on in the brain when we're making moral judgments? Can we use this knowledge to reconstruct morality?

Michael Reiss, Professor of Science at the Institute of Education University of London, a specialist in evolutionary biology (and an ordained Anglican priest) walked us through the history of theories on altruism as an evolutionary phenomenon (like vampire bats who support each other by offering up blood if a mate didn't succeed in his own hunting) and the advantages of being good at deception (think Bernie Madoff).

Even so, just knowing something has an evolutionary origin "tells you nothing about whether it is valid or useful," Reiss says.

Montana has followed Oregon and Washington State as the third state to legalize "physician-assisted dying."

Or should I use, as the Christian Science Monitor does in covering the Montana story, the term favored by opponents of these laws -- "suicide" ?

The terminology is loaded, as one might expect when the topic is life and death and who decides when one is over.

In Brad Knickerbocker's story this weekend, he quotes the Montana State Supreme Court, which uses the phrasing preferred by supporters of this policy.

The majority justices wrote that they... :

"... find nothing in the plain language of Montana statutes indicating that physician aid in dying is against public policy. In physician aid in dying, the patient -- not the physician -- commits the final death-causing act by self-administering a lethal dose of medicine."

Opponents, calling it "suicide," pledged to head straight for the legislature to get new laws specifically prohibiting the practice.

Meanwhile the Monitor sticks with "suicide" to describe the act of choosing when to die if you are a mentally competent adult suffering with a terminal illness.

What's your call on this? Would you want this choice, however you called it, for yourself or a loved one?

President Obama, a mainline Protestant who currently has no home church, dominated much of the U.S. religion news. His inaugural address called the USA "a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and non-believers."

In his first months, Obama lifted a Bush administration ban on federal funding for groups that offer abortion information and services abroad and expanded the policy permitting federal funds for embryonic stem cell research.

Scores of Catholic bishops called it a travesty that Notre Dame, a flagship Catholic university, awarded Obama an honorary degree and invited him to deliver the commencement address in May.

In his address at Cairo University in June, Obama told the Muslim world the USA is not at war with Islam. He pledged to ease the way for U.S. Muslims to make charitable donations as their faith requires.

Obama used his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo to lay out the theology of a just war and the morality of standing for the good in a world where, he said, "evil exists."

U.S. Catholic bishops lobby

Church leaders revved up their fight on "life issues" on key battle fronts — with few clear victories, particularly on gay marriage.

Although it was defeated in New York and Maine, same-sex marriage was legalized in Vermont, New Hampshire and, pending a sign-off by Congress, Washington, D.C. Archbishop of Washington Donald Wuerl told the Washington city council that its approval of gay

Going to church this Sunday? Look around.

The chances are that one in five of the people there find "spiritual energy" in mountains or trees, and one in six believe in the "evil eye," that certain people can cast curses with a look — beliefs your Christian pastor doesn't preach.

In a Catholic church? Chances are that one in five members believe in reincarnation in a way never taught in catechism class — that you'll be reborn in this world again and again.

Elements of Eastern faiths and New Age thinking have been widely adopted by 65% of U.S. adults, including many who call themselves Protestants and Catholics, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released Wednesday.

Syncretism — mashing up contradictory beliefs like Catholic rocker Madonna's devotion to a Kabbalah-light version of Jewish mysticism — appears on the rise.

And, according to the survey's other major finding, devotion to one clear faith is fading.

Of the 72% of Americans who attend religious services at least once a year (excluding holidays, weddings and funerals), 35% say they attend in multiple places, often hop-scotching across denominations.

They are like President Obama, who currently has no home church. He has worshiped at a Baptist church, an Episcopal one, and the non-denominational chapel at Camp David.

"Mixing and matching practices and beliefs is as much the norm as it is the exception," Pew's Alan Cooperman says. "Are they grazing, sampling, just curious? We really don't know."

Even so, says Pew researcher Greg Smith, "these findings all point toward a spiritual and religious openness — not necessarily a lack of seriousness."

Much ado was made when evangelical Christian and leading geneticist Francis Collins was named by President Obama to head the National Institutes of Health.

Now, he's out front defending the news that the first embryonic stem cell lines have been approved for research with federal funding since restrictions under the Bush administration were lifted. The action dismays Catholics and conservative evangelicals who oppose all research on embryonic stem cells as destruction of human life.

Most articles indicate Collins calls this morally defensible -- without giving his moral argument. But here's where you can find it. Back last summer when he was first appointed, Her.meneutics, the women's blog at Christianity Today, did a fine round up of every public quote they could find from Collins on embryonic stem cells.

For example, In a 2007 interview with Ben Wattenberg of Think Tank, a PBS discussion show, Collins said,

"There are hundreds of thousands of those embryos currently frozen away in in vitro fertilization clinics. And it is absolutely unrealistic to imagine that anything will happen to those other than they're eventually getting discarded. So as much as I think human embryos deserve moral status, it is hard to see why it's more ethical to throw them away than to take some that are destined for discarding and do something that might help somebody."

Barbara Bradley Hagerty (Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality)

The religion reporter for National Public Radio is nearly naked in her new book. Spiritually naked, that is.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty's scientific exploration of spirituality research weaves in her faith history: a devout Christian Scientist who shifts to evangelical Christianity, then develops a gnawing desire to answer the question "Will science get the last word on God?"

She visits neuroscientists who scan the brains of people in prayer and meditation; interviews the "God spot" researcher who says there's no such spot; hears the tales of people transported by visions; and investigates the power of prayer, where her own faith began.

Fingerprints is also funny. Bradley Hagerty describes being trapped in a tent for an all-night peyote ceremony where she's observing, not indulging. A two-week meditation experiment just makes her cranky, "a poster child for meditative failure."

Ultimately, she circles back to an idea from her Christian Science youth: that prayer really does shape your brain, as some scientific research suggests. "You can find peace and calm and a sense of unity with the universe that other people cannot usually get to," she says.

Although no scientific experiment proves the existence of God, "that doesn't mean science won't come up with one."

Until then, "we have no facts about God. We only have beliefs about God," says Bradley Hagerty, who still believes.

Peter Manseau (Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead)

Peter Manseau has made — from teeth and whiskers, fingers and ribs — a globe-traveling tale of the one thing all humanity shares: the body.

In Rag and Bone, he takes a world tour of relics.

St. John the Baptist's finger. Mohammed's whisker. St. Francis Xavier's toe. Even Buddha's teeth are "politically active" as "tools of piety and power" in Myanmar.

"Every religion is a banquet of holy lives: These are the leftovers," Manseau writes after traveling from Jerusalem to Goa, Kashmir to Paris.

The findings were unnerving: We are not the favored creation of God. Species that have vanished forever are greater in number and possibly more important that those that live. Change may not be an uninterrupted progress toward perfection.

Small wonder that Charles Darwin was slow and frightened to finally publish his great work, The Origin of Species, and face "scandal" over his theories of "kinship, extinction and the great family," says Dame Gillian Beer, emeritus professor of English literature at Cambridge and author of Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth Century Fiction.

Beer set Darwin's extraordinary and revolutionary work in a social and literary context in today's lecture at the Templeton-Cambridge program I'm attending this week in England.

She talked about how a man who felt a "backbone shiver" of pleasure with music and poetry when he was young lost this as an older man, troubled by the antipathy to his ideas. He still found pleasure of novels, particularly those with a happy ending. This fits a man obsessed with the questions of the novels of his time, all about descent, inheritance and family.

"He thinks about where is the human. What is the scale of the human?" Beer says. And "he was going to show that human beings had a very brief part of the history of the world."

Darwin would also redefine the "great family" so that "great" no longer meant aristocratic, educated, landed and wealthy but "great" as in large and wide and old, part of organisms past and present, "not a very privileged place."

When it comes to religion, the USA is now land of the freelancers. The percentage. of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely. These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.

"More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, 'I'm everything. I'm nothing. I believe in myself,' " says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.

Among the key findings in the 2008 survey:

• So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990), that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists. In a nation that has long been mostly Christian, "the challenge to Christianity … does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion," the report concludes.
• Catholic strongholds in New England and the Midwest have faded as immigrants, retirees and young job-seekers have moved to the Sun Belt. While bishops from the Midwest to Massachusetts close down or consolidate historic parishes, those in the South are scrambling to serve increasing numbers of worshipers.
• Baptists, 15.8% of those surveyed, are down from 19.3% in 1990. Mainline Protestant denominations, once socially dominant, have seen sharp declines: The percentage of Methodists, for example, dropped from 8% to 5%.
• The percentage of those who choose a generic label, calling themselves simply Christian, Protestant, non-denominational, evangelical or "born again," was 14.2%, about the same as in 1990.
• Jewish numbers showed a steady decline, from 1.8% in 1990 to 1.2% today. The percentage of Muslims, while still slim, has doubled, from 0.3% to 0.6%. Analysts within both groups suggest those

Tough question, right? The Templeton Foundation, best known for massively funding research and programming in the realms of science and religion, took this on as one of its topics in a series of publications and forums on the "Big Questions" in modern times.

Three leading economic and philosophical intellectuals held a seminar today in London (I watched on webcast) to address, "Does the free market corrode moral character?"'

Gary Rosen of the Templeton Foundation began by reminding the audience that the foundation founder, the late Sir John Templeton, once said, "Through risk and challenge we grow both in worldly wisdom and spiritual strength."

Unfortunately, I'm not so far grown in wisdom yet. Much of the discussion went over my head. Even so, it was clear that there are rousing arguments among the global intelligentsia over markets and morality.

"All humanly acceptable economic systems are morally corrosive to some extent," said John Gray, an emeritus professor at the London School of Economics and author of False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism.

Gray argued that the modern version of the American free market died "from hubris and greed that promoted snatching wealth from pyramids of debt."

Jagdish Bhagwati, a professor of economics and law at Columbia University, added "ignorance" to black marks on the free market. He said the new financial instruments, such as derivatives packaging "toxic" mortgages, went beyond the knowledge of the central bankers. They took the brakes off regulation without ever understanding that this might become "a dagger at our throat," he said.

God either causes or allows "major tragedies to occur as a warning to sinners," say 20% of U.S. adults.

While 43% say most evil is caused by the devil, 47% disagree–a statistical tie.

But most (68%) would not say human nature is basically evil.

So where does evil dwell–in the devil or in mankind? The Baylor survey allows for overlapping views; it finds 36% strongly agree with both statements.

"Those who believe God causes or allows bad things to happen did not speak in terms of tragedies being God's fault," says Baylor sociologist Christopher Bader.

Bader says people told him that "tragedies are our fault. We have sinned as a nation and God has stood aside and allowed terrible things to happen."

HARTFORD, Conn. — Ingrid Mattson knows the media drill well.

She has done the "We condemn … (fill in the terrorism incident)" speeches — as if, she says, that's all anyone needs to hear from the president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).

She has done the profiles of her as first woman/first convert/first North American-born head of the continent's largest Muslim group.

She has done the talk shows retelling how 20 years ago, she left the Catholicism of her Canadian childhood and her college focus on philosophy and fine arts to find her spiritual home in Islam.

"It's time now to move the focus back off me and back on the issues," says Mattson, a professor at Hartford Seminary, where she directs the first U.S.-accredited Muslim chaplaincy program at the Macdonald Center.

Mattson begins the second half of her two-year term at the society's Labor Day weekend national conference outside Chicago. The annual event draws 40,000 Muslims of every sect, culture, age, race and ethnicity for scores of sessions on faith, family and society and a massive multicultural bazaar.

But two weeks before the conference, sitting with two women in her tiny, book-stuffed office, Mattson has a moment to kick off her shoes. She sheds the long brown jacket stifling her tailored blue blouse, leans back and talks about her vision of American Muslim life

Sometimes dumb sounds cute: Sixty percent of Americans can’t name five of the Ten Commandments, and 50% of high school seniors think Sodom and Gomorrah were married.

Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, isn’t laughing. Americans’ deep ignorance of world religions—their own, their neighbors’ or the combatants in Iraq, Darfur or Kashmir—is dangerous, he says.

His new book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t, argues that everyone needs to grasp Bible basics, as well as the core beliefs, stories, symbols and heroes of other faiths.

Belief is not his business, says Prothero, who grew up Episcopalian and now says he’s a spiritually "confused Christian." He says his argument is for empowered citizenship.

"More and more of our national and international questions are religiously inflected," he says, citing President Bush’s speeches laden with biblical references and the furor when the first Muslim member of Congress chose to be sworn in with his right hand on Thomas Jefferson’s Quran.

"If you think Sunni and Shia are the same because they’re both Muslim, and you’ve been told Islam is about peace, you won’t understand what’s happening in Iraq. If you get into an argument about gay rights or capital punishment and someone claims to quote

(article co-written by Dan Vergano)

Lost for centuries and bound for controversy, the so-called gospel of Judas was unveiled by scholars Thursday.

With a plot twist worthy of The Da Vinci Code, the gospel — 13 papyrus sheets bound in leather and found in a cave in Egypt — purports to relate the last days of Jesus' life, from the viewpoint of Judas, one of Jesus' first followers. Christians teach that Judas betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, but in this gospel, he is the hero, Jesus' most senior and trusted disciple and the only one who knows Jesus' true identity as the son of God.

"We're confident this is genuine ancient Christian literature," said religious scholar Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He and others on the translation team spoke at a National Geographic Society briefing, where they released a translation.

The manuscript claims that Jesus revealed "secret knowledge" to Judas and instructed him to turn Jesus over to Roman authorities, said Coptic studies scholar Stephen Emmel of Germany's University of Munster, one of the restoration team members. In the gospel text, Judas is given private instruction by Jesus and is granted a vision of the divine that is denied to other disciples, who do not know that Jesus has requested his own betrayal. Rather than acting out of greed or malice, Judas is following orders when he leads soldiers to Jesus, the gospel says.

Other theologians, biblical scholars and pastors say this contrary text is not truly "good news" (the meaning of "gospel") and will make no difference to believers as Easter approaches. The Bible, they say, is a closed book, nearly universally accepted as the official church teachings since the fourth century.

"Just because you can date a document to early Christian times doesn't make it theologically true," said Pastor Rod Loy of the First Assembly of God in North Little Rock "Do you decide everything you read on the Internet is true because it was written on April 6, 2006? Fiction has been around for as long as man."

Found by a farmer

Radioactive-carbon-dating tests and experts in ancient languages establish that the document was written between A.D. 300 and 400, the team said. Written in Coptic, an old Egyptian language, the gospel was unearthed by a farmer in a "tomb-like box" in 1978, said Terry Garcia of the National Geographic Society. It is part of a codex, or collection of devotional texts, found in a cave near El Minya, Egypt.

The farmer sold the codex to an antiquities dealer in Cairo, without alerting Egyptian antiquities officials. In a secret showing in 1983, the antiquities dealer, unaware of the content of the codex, offered the gospel for sale to Emmel and another scholar in a Geneva, Switzerland hotel room.

Given a hurried half-hour to examine the codex, Emmel first suspected the papyrus sheets discussed Judas, he said, based on a hasty glimpse of the text, which was littered with references to the disciple in Coptic. But the asking price was too exorbitant, as high as $3 million, Garcia said.

For the next 16 years, the document moldered in a Hicksville, N.Y., bank safe-deposit box, deteriorating until Zurich-based antiquities dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos purchased it in 2000, alarmed at its fragmentation, Garcia said. National Geographic said it did not know the purchase price.

In 2001, the codex was acquired by the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art in Switzerland, Garcia said. The foundation invited National Geographic to help with the restoration in 2004 and also reached an agreement with the Egyptian government to return it after its restoration.

Restoration of the thousands of papyrus fragments has made 80% of the gospel legible. The National Geographic Society learned of the find 2½ years ago, Garcia said. The society recruited the scholarly restoration team and got a $1 million grant from the Waitt Foundation for Historical Studies.

The gospel "is an intriguing alternative view of the relationship between Jesus and Judas," Emmel said. It also has Jesus relating a new creation myth and account of humankind's origins to Judas, which suggest God didn't create the world, contrary to conventional Christian belief.

The key passage has Jesus telling Judas "'you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me,'" Emmel said. The

Embryonic stem cell researchers are worried about the future of international cooperation in their field after a prominent scientist's surprise resignation from a fledgling stem-cell-sharing effort.

On Thanksgiving, South Korean scientist Woo-suk Hwang of Seoul National University resigned as head of the World Stem Cell Hub, a nascent international embryonic stem cell research effort he started. In 2004, Hwang's team was the first to clone human embryonic stem cells, master cells from which specific kinds of tissue arise.

Since then, Hwang's team has become the world's leader in stem cell research. This year, it unveiled 11 more cloned stem cell lines, and it cloned a dog.

But a team member, the University of Pittsburgh's Gerald Schatten, resigned this month. He warned of ethical breaches involving junior lab members inappropriately donating eggs for research.

Donor eggs are combined with skin cells in the cloning process. Hwang's 2004 paper said all eggs had been freely given by anonymous donors. But he acknowledged that a team doctor paid 20 women about $1,400 each to donate eggs. Hwang also confirmed Schatten's charges. Hwang acknowledged that he did not disclose these breaches upon learning of them.

"No question that people are taking a step back from interacting with the Hub," says Leonard Zon, former president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. "It remains for Dr. Hwang's colleagues to prove the future of the Hub can be maintained."

The organization will outline new ethics guidelines this week.

Paul Root Wolpe of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania points out that Hwang did not resign because he used eggs from his researchers but because he lied about it and brought shame "in a country where public shame is so powerful."

He is not the only one to note that Hwang's findings have not been compromised. "While ethical issues about (egg) donation should be debated and the process regulated, the scientific conclusions of Dr. Hwang's research remain intact," Schatten said in a statement.

The South Korean government says it will still pay for Hwang's work, and thousands of women have since offered their eggs, according to news reports.

"Korean bioscientists have opened a new era with cutting-edge technology, but I don't think there is any bioethics relevant to that at this moment here," says theologian Heup Young Kim of South Korea's Kangnam University. "We have our different social and cultural context, so we have to formulate our own bioethics."

One irony of Hwang's resignation is that South Korea's egg donation standards, and those of Hwang's lab, are now stricter than U.S. standards, says bioethicist Insoo Hyun of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. The lab requires consent forms and psychological evaluations for donors. And earlier this year, South Korea outlawed paying for eggs, which is legal in the USA.

Stem cell researchers hope to create replacement tissues to treat diseases such as diabetes and Parkinson's. Opponents assail the destruction of embryos involved in gathering the cells. President Bush has restricted research money.

"I would hate to see the United States get on an ethics high horse as if we are moral and other countries such as Korea are not," says the Rev. Ronald Cole-Turner of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

"Which society is the more ethical?" he asks. "The one that at least has a standard or the one that can't find a reasonable degree of compromise to create a standard?"

The battle between secular defenders of evolution and those who believe in a divine Creator is more than a century old, yet there’s no lessening in its emotional and intellectual intensity. The latest wrinkle is intelligent design, a boundary-crossing belief that is the focus of a federal court trial on whether it should be taught in schools. A new USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll sheds light on where Americans stand (53% of respondents say the Bible had it right). And USA TODAY religion writer Cathy Lynn Grossman and science reporter Dan Vergano look at the opposing sides to learn why each believes it cannot be wrong.

1. Creationists
2. Scientists
3. Middle ground

In the past half-century, death has been transformed by scientific, technological and social changes. Today, about 80% of Americans die in a health care facility. Some milestones:

1950s

Respiratory support, particularly by ventilators, gains widespread use to sustain polio patients.

1960s

1963: Kidney dialysis invented in Seattle.

1965: Medicare increases access to medical care for millions of Americans, raising new ethical questions: How much to spend? How far to go?

1966: National Academy of Sciences recommends training physicians in the new lifesaving technique of cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

1965-68: National Institutes of Health revolutionizes research and treatment ethics, calling for informed consent for tests, surgeries and procedures.

1967: The first successful heart transplant prompts Harvard anesthesiologist Henry Beecher to seek a new criteria for death to allow transplants of vital organs while the heart is still beating.

1968: Harvard Ad Hoc Committee to Examine the Definition of Death adds brain-death criteria — irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain — to the traditional heart-death definition.

Oregon's law allowing a dying person to seek a doctor's prescription for a lethal dose of medication breaks with traditional religious doctrines:

The vocabulary of death and dying is elusive. Words raise questions about end-of-life decisions not just for patients and families but also for clergy, doctors, legal experts, ethicists and academicians.

Advance directives

The two best-known advance directives — an umbrella term for written or verbal instructions for medical care if someone is incapacitated and cannot make decisions — are the health care proxy, also called power of attorney, and the living will.

A living will can be a general indication of someone's wishes or a specific listing of types of care, such as a feeding tube, the patient might wish to reject under certain circumstances.

The proxy designates someone who knows the patient's wishes as the surrogate decision-maker.

But even though hospitals are required to ask patients whether they have these documents, health care researchers have found that living wills frequently fail because they are too often vague, confusing, expensive and not always enforced. A report last week by the President's Council on Bioethics called living wills "of limited value."

Autonomy

Bioethics experts who operate from primarily secular principles say a person's right to determine his or her own course should be the most important factor in making medical decisions. "In our pluralistic society, we go by the patient's values, religious or secular, and not necessarily our own," says Timothy Quill, professor of medicine, psychiatry and medical humanities at the University of Rochester

Americans talk endlessly about death.

We want a "good death," a "natural death," a "death with dignity," researchers say.

We'd like to say all farewells, repent all sins — or accept our karmic consequences — and then blink out like a candle.

We just can't agree on what that looks like, how it happens, even the very definition of "death."

Our society is splintered on when — or whether — to begin or end a bewildering array of life-support technologies that didn't exist 50 years ago. When the end is near, must we leave the timing to God or nature?

Today the U.S. Supreme Court hears a challenge to the Oregon law that allows doctors to prescribe a lethal overdose for a dying patient. Advocates for the law call it "physician-assisted dying." Opponents call it suicide — or murder.

The Bush administration will argue that Oregon's Death with Dignity Act violates federal drug laws; the case of Gonzales v. Oregon probably will turn on the fine point of state vs. federal authority.

But public debate has not been so confined. Opinion polls since 1973 suggest that most Americans have supported allowing someone with "an incurable disease" to end his or her life "by some painless means." In a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll in 2004, 69% supported that view. But that could apply to people who refuse or stop medical treatment they consider futile. (Related link: 50 years of change)

When Americans were asked in a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll in September whether a doctor should be allowed to prescribe an overdose to help someone "end his or her life," 54% said yes. When the question used the words "help the patient commit suicide," 46% said yes.

High-profile voices from five bioethics centers across the country comment on the field of bioethics.

Any given Sunday morning, a bioethicist somewhere in America suits up for a TV appearance on the hot issue of the day or stands by a hospital bed to consult on a wrenching dilemma.

Should doctors prolong the life of a baby born without a brain? Should they be allowed to help the terminally ill kill themselves by prescribing a lethal drug dose? Should there be limits on embryonic stem cell research?

But who are these people opining on what we should do?

"Anyone who wants to," says Arthur Derse, chairman of Veterans' Health Administration's National Ethics Committee.

He's president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, which draws most of its 1,600 members from medical schools and academics in ethics and philosophy. Lawyers, theologians, clergy members, sociologists and others staff scores of bioethics centers and work in the pharmaceutical industry as well.

There are no standards or certification procedures, says Derse, an emergency medicine physician. And rarely are bioethicists questioned about the basis for their views or who pays for their work.

It's hard for the average person to sort out the political activists with an agenda or ethicists with a vested interest, such as those employed, directly or indirectly, by drug companies seeking an ethical halo for their products.