It may also be noted that the professional discipline of science functions on a parallel basis with the Ethical Movement: Both espouse an operational methodology that does not depend on any particular theory of the ultimate nature of the universe or of an "ultimate" reality. Science pursues its tasks with the same intellectual agnosticism about ultimates that Adler embraced. it is true that on the outreaching edges of modern science there are scientists who extrapolate from known data to conceptions of the origin of the universe, but these extrapolations prove congenial both to theistic and to non-theistic views. It is important to distinguish, therefore, the governing attitudes and the practical benefits of modern science, on the one hand, from the support that science may give, one way or another, to philosophies of the universe and of the place of humanity in that universe.

As a people for whom ethics is our way of life, we have a twofold relationship to modern science:

FIRST, as citizens of the modern world, we affirm and embrace the exploratory, open-ended, experimental, hypothetical, self-corrective, and verifiable methodology on which science operates; we fully accept the evolutionary scenario in which science has placed us; and we continue to learn, also in the area of ethics, from advances in biology, anthropology, and the neuroscience of the human mind. We recognize that science has so altered our concepts of reality that it is now imperative that we pursue philosophy in close connection with the unfolding findings of modern science, and that we pursue ethics with a strong focus on the problems created by the advance of modern science.

But, SECOND, as a community committed to a primary focus on ethics, we view science as a human enterprise subject to the distortions and misuse that are present in all human endeavors. We oppose the misuse of science to justify public policies that debase human dignity and worth, or damage the larger environment of the earth, and we seek to bring the technological advances of modern science to the bar of human good. In every advance made possible by science, we concern ourselves with the ethical implications, that is, the effect on persons, the good of the community, and the larger biosphere, both positive and negative. Not everything that is scientifically possible is appropriately ethical. What is good is a larger human, and not a narrowly scientific, decision. We, therefore, explore what other paradigms of human life-through art or philosophy-have to add to or correct in the paradigm of science as a way to truth in the contemporary world.