Jesus With a Genius Grant

The woman behind the name tag nancey murphy looks marooned, albeit cheerfully. even in a swirling sea of misfits--a New York Academy of Sciences conference on Madison Avenue--she stands out. She has green eye shadow, dumpling features, eyes that hum on the edge of surprise. Eventually a scientist from Denmark wanders over to ask a collegial question, which she answers--but in a herky, Captain Kirk cadence, as if she's replying by satellite.

Then the lights flicker and it's time for Murphy's presentation--the first slot on the day's program, which says she is a professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. No wonder she looks marooned. Usually Christian academics don't address international bodies of the scientific elite. If they do, they fly in from a liberal school of religion such as Claremont in Southern California or Yale, not from one of history's bellwethers of the born-again, conservative, evangelical Christian world--a place founded by a fundamentalist radio preacher, a place chartered to train pastors and missionaries and supply scholarly defenses of the Bible.

Signing a Statement of Faith every year in the miracles of the New and Old Testaments does something to a scientist's social standing. Once at a San Diego event, Murphy plugged a book by the acclaimed neuroscientist Paul Churchland--half of a team with wife Patricia Churchland who assert that religious experience is all a pack of neurons. Murphy's support was an olive branch from religion to science, but with a thorn: She also insisted there were levels of the self greater than their parts, up to and including what Christianity calls the soul. To which one scientist, invoking the scientific martyrs of the Dark Ages, complained that he would "get nervous if she asked to borrow a match."

Still, if science wanted a token Christian ambassador it could wrap its brain around, Murphy was a pretty good choice. She was vaguely postmodern. Before coming to Fuller in 1989, she had studied at Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union, a school so broad-minded that she considered marketing a bumper sticker: I LOST MY FAITH AT GTU. Hard-core fundamentalists--those whose bible on science and history is the Bible--tended to despise her. New York University neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, a self-described atheist who organized the New York conference, first warmed to Murphy at a Vatican Observatory meeting in Poland. She had been known to argue that God and Darwin were compatible--just the sort of utterance that makes biblical watchdogs groan: What next? As if to answer, she later told Reason magazine that cloning was inevitable, and that Christians should start thinking about how to use it.