When the news media cover issues like evolution and embryonic stem cell research, scientists and evangelical Christians often are portrayed as natural and implacable  opponents. But speakers at the AAAS Annual Meeting said there is another, quieter trend toward partnership between the two communities, one that offers hope of collaboration on important areas of science policy.

In their symposium, the scientists and ethicists suggested that there are practical reasons for working with the politically active evangelical community on issues such as stem cell research, where constructive engagement might temper conflict and allow research to move forward. For other issues such as environmental stewardship and climate change, shared values are often the reason for the new partnerships.

The ideal working relationship between the two groups, said University of Virginia Professor James Childress, would produce "policies that can address a range of ethical concerns but also be faithful to the science involved."

As many as 30% of Americans call themselves evangelical Christians, united mostly by a high regard for biblical authority but not monolithic in their beliefs. Their strong engagement with science ethics and policy, the speakers said, has convinced many scientists that they need to seek allies rather than adversaries in the religious community.

In cases such as the debate over the personhood of a human embryo, the distance between religious belief and scientific practice may make it impossible for the two groups to agree on the moral and ethical substance of an issue, said Childress, a professor of religious studies and medical education. When agreement is out of the question, he suggested, the best approach may be to craft public policy that emphasizes any points of consensus.

Childress was a member of the first National Bioethics Advisory Committee convened by President Bill Clinton in 1996, which released two reports on the ethical implications of human embryonic stem cell research and human cloning. Objections by evangelical and other religious groups to the two technologies, he recalled, raised questions about "the feasibillity and cost of implementing a policy...that would encounter a strong, vigorous moral religious opposition."

As a consequence, he said, the commission carefully crafted ethical guidelines for the research that would draw support from the widest possible community. "The fact that a position is religiously based is no reason for excluding it from the public policy arena...but there's also no reason to privilege it."

Stanford neurobiologist William Newsome said open dialogue between scientists and evangelicals can help each side reconsider its more extreme views. Newsome, an evangelical Christian himself, offered an example from his own discussions with colleagues on brain biology and the sense of the self.

Just as neuroscience has convinced some evangelicals to move away from the idea of a moral soul separate from the workings of the brain, he said, the idea of a morally culpable self has made some researchers think harder about whether reducing the brain to a collection of neural activity only would stifle some valuable lines of scientific inquiry about human behavior.

Former AAAS President James J. McCarthy recalled that, five years ago, he had to push past his own "ignorances as to what I would encounter" when he was asked to join a discussion with evangelicals on environmental science. "I thought, well, if the Earth is really only 4000 years old, I won't have much to say."

But his work with the Scientists and Evangelicals Initiative quickly changed his mind, as he discovered to his surprise--and to the surprise of the evangelicals he met--that they shared "a general reverence for life on this planet."

The partnership grew during a 2007 visit to Alaska, filmed for PBS Now, where scientists and religious leaders talked for long hours while riding a bus and sleeping on the floor of schools in small villages such as Shishmaref. There, the local impact of global climate change was evident "in every aspect of the culture and the landscape and daily life," said McCarthy, the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography at Harvard University and, for two decades, a co-chair, author, and reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Mutual respect between scientists and evangelicals has led to a number of collaborations, he noted, including joint testimony before the U.S. Congress on environmental issues and a prominent "Call to Action" on climate change released in 2007.

[Read more about the AAAS symposium in a story by Sara Reardon at Science News.]