HENRY NELSON WIEMAN: PHILOSOPHER OF NATURAL RELIGION 1884-1975
By Ralph Burhoe
Founding Editor of Zygon, The Journal of Religion and Science
Born in
Rich Hill, Missouri, on 19 August 1884, Wieman has often been cited,
along with the Jesuit paleontologist, P. Teilllard de Chardin, and
the mathematician-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, as one of
the three great pioneers during the first half of the twentieth
century who began to forge an interpretation of Western religion
that would constructively relate it to contemporary scientific views
of the nature of things. All three wrote some of their most creative
ideas in the twenties and thirties. Wieman was greatly influenced
by Whitehead and also by John Dewey, who
were a generation older. But, in his 1917 Ph.D. thesis at Harvard,
Wieman was also wrestling with how to interpret human values in
the light of contemporary descriptions of man by such scientists
as psychologist Edward L. Thorndike and biologist C. J. Herrick.
Wieman's pioneer book was Religious Experience and Scientific
Method (Macmillan, 1926), where he firmly held that man's assertions
about religious or God questions must and can be as objectively
grounded as are scientific assertions in general. In the Preface
he wrote: "The chief purpose of this book is to show that religious
experience is experience of an object, however undefined, which
is as truly external to the individual as is any tree or stone he
may experience." Wieman tenaciously continued to work out this
rationale for religion into his 91st year. Mrs. Wieman told me that
two days before his death he was at a meeting
Portrait
taken in Germany, circa 1912
presenting his views and
responding to critical questions with his usual carefully reasoned
enthusiasm. In his Preface to a 1971 reprinting of his first book
he wrote: "This book was my first attempt to solve the problem
which has engaged the last forty-five years of my life . . .: How
can we interpret what operates in human existence to create, sustain,
save and transform toward the greatest good, so that scientific
research and scientific technology can be applied to searching out
and providing the conditions—physical, biological, psychological
and social—which must be present for its most effective operation?
This operative presence in human existence can be called God ...."
Wieman was professor of philosophy at Occidental College from 1917
to 1927; he became professor of philosophy of religion at the University
of Chicago Divinity School in 1927, during the heyday of that school's
modernist prominence, and served until 1947, and he was professor
of philosophy at the University of Southern Illinois from 1956 to
1966. He was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in 1912, and
while teaching at the University of Oregon in 1949 was asked by
a Unitarian clergyman who had been his student why was he not a
Unitarian, whereupon Wieman became a member of the church in Eugene.
He was fellowshiped as a Unitarian minister in 1950 and was active
in the Unitarian fellowship at Carbondale, Illinois, during his
residence there from l956 to 1966. He was the author of many books
and journal articles on various aspects of his lifetime efforts
to interpret the reality of the "Source of Human Good"
in the light of modern knowledge. He was a visiting professor at
Meadville/Lombard Theological School in 1967 and the Starr King
School for the Ministry in 1968. He was one of the developers of
Zygon, Journal of Religion and Science, which grew out of
the Isles of Shoals conferences and began publication with the support
of Meadville/ Lombard Theological School in 1966.
Weiman
with daughter Kendra Smith and two granddaughters
Unlike Teilhard,
Wieman's creative work was not suppressed by his religious order.
But, in spite of his considerable impact on many Unitarian Universalist
and other liberal clergymen, Wieman's philosophical theology,
like Whitehead's, was overwhelmed in midcentury by two divergent
streams from early twentieth-century religious liberalism. The
first stream, stemming from the weakness of Protestant liberalism
felt after the First World War, was the rise of a new orthodoxy,
which unhitched God from the objective world and religion from
the natural sciences. The other stream from the earlier religious
liberalism was to abandon God, and even religion, altogether.
But two recent trends may augur well for a coming revival of
Wieman's significant contributions. First is the recent and
expanding recognition of spiritual needs, which accounts for
the rise of all kinds of religious and parareligious cults as
well as the wave of interest in Teilhard's posthumous publications
and the revival of Whiteheadian process theology. The second
trend is the further advance in our understanding and appreciation
of religion in the light of the sciences. These may rekindle
a religious faith in the power that in fact creates the good
and a new level of human commitment to it. Perhaps Wieman's
summary statement on the concluding page of his The Source
of Human Good will soon be recognized as valid: "There
is a creative power in history which is able to conquer and
to save, but it is not any power of man, even though it works
through man. In all times, both good and ill, man must live
under its control if history is to be fruitful." Perhaps,
also, some religious institution, "pointing directly to
the source of human good and directly to the duty of man to
meet its demands with assured promise of growing good when these
demands are met, can lead the march of humanity in this time
of danger."
-From the Unitarian Universalist Directory, Boston, 1976.
-Photos courtesy of Kendra Smith
